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As you know from our Rewildong Wanderlust Child Nature Study Programmewe love supporting children's play through nature and the outdoors. Here are 10 nature play ideas for celebrating Valentine’s Day. 

Head outside and look for heart shaped leaves. Find other nature to decorate these with and then take a photo. This can then be turned into a card. 

Set up a natural maths provocation around the story of Clara Button and the Wedding Day Surprise. 

Create a natural batch of Playdough by leaving out the food colouring. Pop on a board along with some flower petals, cake tins and cutters. 

Set up an invitation to explore loose parts

Use magnetic tiles and nature to create hearts

Create a Valentines Day Shelfie like  @_little.thinkers_

Make some Forest love potions

Make the words Love and decorate them with nature

Make a heart shaped nature wand 

Make Woodland Love Tea

Set up a flower shop and practice the gentle art of flower arranging

Set up a senso...

I have created a list of over 50 wonderful nature based children's books to support our Rewilding your Wanderlust Child Nature Study.

Do let me know your favourite nature books.

Slow Down: Bring Calm to a Busy World with 50 Nature Stories

Seasons

Watch six breathtaking landscapes transform in front of your eyes in this beautifully illustrated book.

Once Upon a Raindrop: The Story of Water

Footprint

Hooray for Hoppy: A First Book of Senses

The Rhythm of the Rain

Wind (Whatever the Weather)

Snow (Whatever the Weather)

Tree: Seasons Come, Seasons Go

Explore the beauty of the changing seasons in this timeless peek-through book with gorgeous artwork.

The Big Book of Nature Art

From bestselling author Yuval Zommer, The Big Book of Nature Art is packed with twenty-two easy art activities inspired by nature. 

Nature's Treasures: Tales Of More Than 100 Extraordinary Objects From Nature

Nature's Treasures is a stunning nature encyclopedia for young readers ...

I love maps and have got quite a collection now at home! As a child my grandparents would also have their maps and travel guides out and I used to be fascinated in looking at them. I would love going on long car journeys and following our route on the AA road map (before the time of Sat navs) and they would always give me such a sense of excitement. These days I love using maps for planning road trips around new places or finding a new Wainwright to walk in the Lake District.

Maps are a great way of creating that sense of Wanderlust in young children and there are many ways we can support this in our homes and learning environment. Perhaps having a world map on the wall with places pinned off that have been visited by someone we know, when visiting a local park with children encourage them to use a map to discover where they would like to go, a collection of maps in a basket in a book corner along with some travel guides and postcards, a globe to explore and lastly going on an adven...

Easter in Scandinavia is a big celebration involving get togethers and marking the start of Spring. Enjoying family time and feasts. With the warmer weather it's also a good time to take a sunrise hike up a mountain and enjoy the fantastic views. 

The egg is a symbol of Easter in Norway and the traditional decorated chicken eggs have now been replaced with those filled with sweet treats. A big Easter Sunday breakfast is usually followed by an egg hunt outside. 

I managed to pick up these beautiful Scandinavian metal painted eggs by Maileg. I love that these are re-fillable and also add a whimsical storytelling twist for the celebration. They can be filled with sweet treats for a fun easter egg hunt. 

We also like to set up Easter Egg hunts with less sugary treats inside too! I thought you might like to see my list of ideas for the Wanderlust Child;

19 non-sugar ideas for filling an Easter Egg:

• Rubber Stampers
• Stickers
• Magnifying Glass
• Finger Paints
• Shells
• Rocks
• Little no
...

The latest research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) shows that children living in areas with access to increased greenspaces can set them up for greater success in life and help them meet their early years developmental milestones.

Researchers at the UBC faculty of forestry and faculty of medicine analyzed the developmental scores of 27,372 children in Metro Vancouver who attended kindergarten between 2005 and 2011.They looked at the amount of greenspace around each child's home from ages birth to five and also assessed traffic levels, community noise and air pollution. 

“Most of the children were doing well in their development, in terms of language skills, cognitive capacity, socialization and other outcomes,” says study author Ingrid JarvisI, a PhD candidate in the department of forest and conservation sciences at UBC. “But what’s interesting is that those children living in a residential location with more vegetation and richer natural environments showed better o...

How could you use natural numbers in learning and play?

1. Add your natural Aster numbers to your woodland kitchen (available here)

2. Make a number line and add them to a washing line. Take a number away and ask the children which number is missing how they know that's the missing number? Can they put the numbers in order 1-10?

3. Can children correctly match numeral to quantity? Set this up as an invitation to explore with loose parts in a wooden tray. 

4. Give each child a natural number card and see if they can collect that number of natural treasures. 

5. Can they use the cards to make natural number statements to show their understanding of the number bonds to 10?

For more ideas for teaching early maths see my short course available here.

The days are starting to get longer and brighter and new shoots are poking through the soil. It feels so good that Spring is on it's way!

Now feels like a good time to share some of my favourite spring resources and books (as i get asked this question a lot!) to support your nature based play. All of the resources I share on here are my personal recommendations and are not advertisements.  It is also worth noting that it has taken a few years to collect the bought resources I show in the photos and nature based play can be done so effectively without any of these too! Just get outside and use the nature around you like we did when creating our Very Hungry Caterpillars out of twigs and leaves. 

I often get asked on my training around nature based play if this is something that can be done if you're in an urban area and the answer is yes! We can do nature study by opening up the curtains and watching the birds from our window, setting up a provocation on the northern lights inside...

‘Put your coat on Joe’
‘Jumper on Evie!’

The weather creates a brilliant way for us to learn key life skills but if we find ourselves just telling children what to do they won’t always understand the why.

Instead we can use experiences as a learning tool. Sometimes we need to let children go outside for a few minutes without a coat in winter but make sure our adult interactions support a learning opportunity here. Talking to the children about the weather, the way the coldness feels on the skin, wondering with the child what they could do to stay warmer. Linking back moments and other experiences. ‘Remember when we went to the farm last week and the wind was blowing and we were so cold. We wished we had our hats on to keep our ears warm!’

I also like to talk about the weather with the children as part of our morning meeting. Checking the weather forecast together and opening up discussions about what to wear, or to predict what might have happened to our puddles outside.

How do you like...

Have you ever spent ages setting up a play and they either ignore it, “destroy it” or play for a few moments then walk off? Yes, me too! Imagine being placed in a room with just the books a friend owns, you read a few pages and realise they are not to your taste and so you quickly get bored. Well for a child, that’s likely what they must feel in a room full of adult driven themed set ups for them to explore. Up until about a year ago I was very “theme” driven and planned the themes for every term, and often recycled them the following year.  But do you really know whether those children in your setting will be interested in People Who Help Us for an entire half term in Summer 2?

When children have a fascination, it’s vital we use that as a vessel to fuel their curiosity and motivation to learn through play. How do we know what they are interested in? We watch, observe and respectfully question. Now I’m not saying if a few children pretend to play doctors you completely strip your h...