Nature colors, shapes & sizes
Nature provides a different multitude of colors, shapes and patterns, with some of them that change over the seasons. These are found for example in plants (leaves, flowers, seeds, branches, etc), animal constructions (spider webs, bee hives, bird nests, etc), on invertebrates bodies (butterflies wings, wasps threatening pattern, ladybird spots, etc), on stones and so on.
What do children learn:
The workshop helps children to learn vocabulary for describing the world around them and helps them to identify and organize visual information. Children learn the meaning of colors, shapes and patterns in nature (e.g. why animals construct homes using specific shapes, what is the meaning of ‘aposematism’ or the warning color signals in the invertebrate world, why seeds are made of a certain shape, why leaves change color over the seasons, etc).
Outdoor nature walkS:
During our nature walk, we will collect and examine many interesting items from plants (leaves, flowers, sticks, barks, seeds) and from animals (snail shells, feathers, their construction, footprints, etc). The workshop will then focus on the meaning and importance in nature of shapes, sizes, and colors. The workshop will provide magnifiers and digital microscopes for detailed analyses.
Indoor station:
We will observe live samples (e.g. leaves, sticks, barks, seeds, flowers, animal constructions, etc), and we will focus on their categorization according to their shape, size, and color, their similarities and differences, and their meaning and importance in nature. The workshop will provide magnifiers and a light table, and digital microscopes for detailed analyses.
Science activities:
4-10 years old: e.g. match collected leaves with control cards of their shapes; discover leaf structure with leaf marking; match flowers and leaves color with rainbow color cards; …
1-3 years old: e.g. sorting shape and color sensory box; sensory bottles with natural elements of different colors, shapes and sizes; color matching with live samples; …
