Our garden has come to life again. The birdfeeder is full of songbirds, our golden chain bush stated to bloom. Our daffodils’ buds are starting to open. The sun is shining bright. The best time to be amazed by the awakening of nature. So I printed and cut and set our muffin tray in motion.

This is not a new activity as we did it with E. and our British nanny, A. 5 (!!! OMG) years ago. You can find the Tray Nature Hunt among the posts (or by clicking on the link)

I grabbed our 12-hole muffin tray and looked around the garden. I put together a 12-image sheet with things the kids can find in our garden. I cut the pictures out and placed them in the holes of the muffin tray.

We had a look at the pictures together with the kids and identified what they needed to collect. E. could read the words under the pics and she helped Little L. (we do not own a colour printer unfortunately, so I tried to make the pictures more understandable with a little colouring).

At the beginning we discussed what to collect. (watch a video of it on the link) You can hear that I warned them not to pick the daffodils, but 2 or 3 of the golden chain’s tiny flowers.

Then they ran away. They were collecting soil from the front garden, stones from behind the shed. Little L. found some fluffy dove feathers and E. was crawling on all her fours to find a bug.

Finally, she managed to get an ant, which I accepted as a “bug”.

L. slid under the bush and pine tree to get the cone; E. took a rake from the shed to pull it out.

They were running around for 20 minutes or so to gather everything.

Afterwards we came together again and checked the treasures of nature.

To finish with, they joined the cat in his legless pose. 🙂