The nature table is a lovely and simple way to connect children to nature.
In our home, each child has a special garden, a little box filled with sand and gravel. If we discover any treasures or gifts of nature during our outdoor adventures, we bring them home and add them to the garden. It could be a pretty pebble, shell, casuarina cone, twig or flower, anything really. Sometimes we include leaf crafts, beeswax or other figures or we have made.
The children love to do landscaping on their own gardens and sometimes I see them hard at work re-positioning the treasures or creating stories about the creatures in the garden.
We have a few garden rules:
1. We pick up treasures, not pluck them.
2. After a certain number of items, for every new treasure that enters the garden, one old one must return to Mother Nature. So the garden doesn't end up looking like a rubbish dump!
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