Tuesday of animal camp was dedicated to animals from Australia.

First, we made wombat poop. We made play dough using 2 parts cornflour to 1 part hair conditioner, then I gave them some creative control over what food coloring drops to add to try and get it to turn brown. We all ended up with some variation on green, interestingly enough! Then I told them the more interesting part about wombat poop: that it is cube-shaped. We spent some time shaping our playdough into cubes. I let them know that there was one more interesting fact about wombats, but we’d come back to this activity at the end of camp, and I would tell them then.

Next up was a little game with kangaroo pouches. I had some scrap “tshirt” type fabric that was long enough to tie around each kiddo’s belly to make a pouch. I scattered some of their stuffies around the yard, and asked them how many joeys they thought they could fit in their pouch, then we all hopped around while they tried to collect them all. It was only a quick game before it got too repetative, but pretty fun for those few minutes!

Next, we sat down to do an art project. I showed them examples of the dot painting done by aboriginal people of Australia, and gave them stencils I’d made of some common Aussie animals to make their own. They ended up really getting into this one, which was pretty cool. B7 made two different ones that were more simple, and G5 really took her time filling up an entire paper on the snake design that she chose.

Next up, we talked about flying foxes a bit. I could’ve fit bats in most of the days this week, but when I needed another movement activity for my Australian theme, I decided it could land here! I showed them some pictures of flying foxes so they could get a sense of how big they are, then we played an echolocation game. They were blindfolded, and bounced a ball against a wall. They then decided how close they were: they could choose to either take a step forward, or decide that they were close enough to the wall to touch it and remove the blindfold to check. Then, someone would bring the ball back to them, and they’d repeat until they were happy with their distance!

Following our exploration of echolocation, we revisited the wombat poop, which had dried up a little. I shared my last wombat poop fun fact with them: wombats not only poop in cubes, but they also stack it up! We spent the rest of camp time stacking our wombat poop and seeing how high we could get our piles built.

I’d had one more craft activity planned for the day, but as a pretty basic cut-and-paste “product art” activity I wasn’t chomping at the bit to include it. It was just so dang cute! We ended up doing these platypus bookmarks later in the week as a chill afternoon activity.