Nature Play Ideas: Treasure Hunt

Welcome back for some more Nature Play Ideas – our little nature play mini series that we are sharing with you after our family holiday. Where the kids got busy collecting nature items and then playing with them LOTS! I captured some of our activity and thought I would share them with you. The idea is to use our nature play ideas and adapt them to the “nature” available near you. So. Onto todays play idea!!

Nature Play Idea: Treasure Hunt

Ok, I have to say we ADORED this Nature Play idea – creating a treasure hunt. And I found, that once we set it up for the kids ONCE, they went off and recreated their own. This works for me on so many levels – you learn about following instructions. You learn about directions, you have to count and it helps if you work in a team. I also love it, as it appeals to broad age group. With younger kids, keep it simple and maybe a stone reprents a step. For older kids a stone can represent a 100 steps or yards.

But a brief explanatio – use nature items to create a trail. In this instance the sticks indicate the direction and the stones the number of steps. You can use sticks only (and create little lines for steps), pinecones, acorns, chestnuts, sticks – whatever you can find. You can also vary it and provide a list of meanings – e.g. stones mean 10 steps, pinecones mean a 100 etc.

We kept it really simple and created a trail around the house, with a cupcake at the end to celebrate!