Activities that cultivate mindfulness, sharpen attention to detail, and build a deep awareness of surroundings. Includes nature journaling, safety walks, memory games, identifying patterns, and tracking changes in the environment.
- Focus & Memory: Activities that treat observation as a mental muscle to be strengthened through practice. Includes Kim’s Game, spot-the-difference, “shake up the room” challenges, memory tests, and daily observation drills.
- Nature Journaling: Activities focused on recording the world through art and writing. Includes sketching, field notes, sensory observation, data collection, and documenting discoveries.
- Patterns in Nature: Activities focused on finding order and mathematics in the wild. Includes fractals, symmetry, tessellations, spirals, and identifying geometric shapes in plants and landscapes.
- Safety Awareness: Activities that build alertness and personal safety. Includes safety walks, recognizing hazards, finding landmarks, and learning to carefully read an environment.
- Seasons: Activities that track how nature changes over time. Includes weather watching, seasonal wheels, shadow tracking, and understanding the rhythm of the year.
- Sensory Awareness: Activities focused on isolating, sharpening, and trusting the five senses to gather information and ground oneself in the present moment. Includes exploring the world through sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and holistic mindfulness.
- Sight (Visual): Activities that test visual acuity and discrimination. Includes color hunts, optical illusions, finding hidden objects, perspective, and noticing light and shadow.
- Sound (Auditory): Activities focused on listening skills and interpreting noise. Includes sound maps, identifying bird calls, listening walks, pitch and volume experiments, and finding silence.
- Smell (Olfactory): Activities that explore scents and the memories they trigger. Includes scent jars, scratch-and-sniff guessing games, identifying herbs and spices, and tracking smells in the wind.
- Taste (Gustatory): Activities focused on flavor profiles and the science of eating. Includes blind taste tests, identifying sweet, sour, salty, and bitter notes, and exploring food textures.
- Touch (Tactile): Activities that explore texture, temperature, and weight. Includes mystery boxes, fabric identification, feeling the difference between surfaces, and texture scavenger hunts.
- Mindfulness: Activities that integrate the senses to create calm and focus. Includes grounding techniques (like the 5-4-3-2-1 method), body scans, deep breathing, and practicing being fully present in the moment.
