Animal Camp Day 4: Jungle
Thursday was Jungle day! We started off with a bit of an adventure through the jungle. I told the story of our jungle trek as we used yoga poses and other motions to demonstrate the animals and other sights we encountered. It’s not something I’ll plan again - the kids needed some prodding to get into it and weren’t overly enthused - but once they gave it a chance, you could see some glimmers of enjoyment that they were trying (unsuccessfully) to hide. I’d mostly done this for G2, as she is always making shapes with her body and asking what it looks like, or showing off her downward dog pose.
Next up, I started showing them how to make pony bead lizards - is that a throwback to 1998 or what? B7 got the hang of it pretty quickly. It was a lot of focus on more advanced fine motor for G5; she did a few rows at a time and then I’d do 1 or 2 to get her going again. G2 made a lovely necklace (I gave her the lizard I made alongside them so she wasn’t left out of having one at the end).
Next up was a sloth race. Whoever got to the finish last wins! The catch is that you always do need to be moving forward. It ended up not working very well to race next to each other, and instead, we used a timer and raced the clock and the leaderboard.
While G2 was at her swimming lesson, the older two and I did another more focus-driven craft: origami jumping frogs. First, I showed them pictures of poison dart frogs, and they chose which sort of frog they wanted to make. We chose our colours of paper, folded the frogs, and then used markers to add the right markings and other colours.
Would you believe that some rainforest animals came to visit our local park the night before our camp? They even left us some footprints to find as we explored! I gave the kids booklets to draw the footprints they found, and when they finished, we looked at pictures of the animals and matched them to the prints.