Plants
Games/Activities:
Ideas on how to incorporate theme:
- Familiarize yourself with ethical harvesting and safety around teaching plants, especially edible plants
- Focus on a different plant every day. You could introduce the new daily plants as a mystery and have your flock look for it while they travel to their basecamp
- Go on plant walks using field guides
- Make cordage using dogbane or basswood
- Cook with different wild edibles (tea, pesto, soup, pizza, etc.)
- Discussing the age/life cycle of different plants can be a really fun thing to do with campers
- Find a tree stump and see if you can count the rings
- Plant Prints
- Give each camper a piece of light colored cloth
- Collect different plants to use
- Find a hard surface and place fabric on it
- Arrange collected plants on half of the cloth and fold the other half over to cover them up
- Use a rock to gently hit the cloth and open it up to see what it looks like
- Compass Walk activity
- split the flock into 3 to 4 groups and have each go in a different direction (North, South, East, West) for about 10 mins
- After 10 mins they stop where they are and find plants unique to their area and come back to the center to share/compare with the other groups
- Meet a Tree activity
- Have your flock partner up. One partner will be blindfolded and the other will guide them
- The person guiding brings their blindfolded partner to a tree, who has to use their senses to familiarize themselves with this tree
- Then the blindfolded partner is guided away from that tree and told they can take their blindfold off and try to find the tree they just met
- Partners should switch
- Plant Matching Game
- Collect several different plants
- Show them to your flock on a bandana and after a set amount of time, cover them up with another bandana
- Ask your flock to go and find the same plants that you showed them
- Leaf Puzzles
- Take a large leaf (sycamore leaves are great for this!) and break it into pieces
- Ask your flock to try and put it back together
- Some questions you could ask:
- What do plants need to survive?
- Do you see similar plants at home? What about in other places you’ve been?
- Songs: Humble Yourself (nettle song link), The Plants Grow, Grow
- Other camps to connect with: Primitive Cafe