Our first activity for forest day was to go on a little nature walk. We got some buckets and went to collect leaves, sticks, stones, fallen flowers, and other odds and ends from our neighborhood as we walked. I picked up a few things as well and added to their buckets, trying to make sure we had a variety and enough resources to use for our next activity.

When we returned, I rolled out a big sheet of paper. We took turns drawing the name of a forest animal from a jar, and creating their home on our paper using our nature walk collection, and markers for anything we couldn’t make with these materials. Some of my favourites are the seed pod hanging off a tree to be a beehive, and the cave built from a rock that was made for our mountain lion’s home. We ended up with a whole forest of critters!

That morning, I had made some large, sturdy dice out of cardboard. I asked each of them to name a forest animal and added those to the sides of one die, and then for the other, we came up with actions. Then, we rolled the dice and tried (valiantly but often unsuccessfully!) to act out what we’d rolled. “Swimming owl” was a fast favourite, and I was particularly fond of “otter riding a scooter.” It ended up being quite a lot of fun!

Each morning of camp I give them a little checklist of what to bring with them or have done: Sunscreen, sunhat, waterbottle, shoes, and snack. This morning, I told them that they didn’t need a snack because I had one as part of camp - this is super unusual, so they were very intrigued! I sat them down at the table with a plate in front of each of them, and announced that we were going to be building beaver dams. They were pretty excited when I produced the sticks - pretzel rods - and the mud - peanut butter! It was cool to see all their different methods. B7 figured out pretty quickly to “paint” up and down the sides of the sticks and push them together, then started covering the outside with PB. G5 used dots to connect them in strategic locations, keeping them all parallel but building up a nice shape. G2 was going for structural integrity, and used a dot of PB in the center to make hers criss-cross over each other!

My two girls have been really into raccoons lately, so I was searching and searching for a raccoon activity. I decided to walk them through making little raccoon puppets from a fortune teller/cootie catcher pattern. It was a bit challenging, but everyone was happy with their result in the end.