Page 10 - eBook

Week Four:
What’s in the Bag?

The fourth week’s activity is about tactile recog-
nition. This activity may be geared towards older
children, although it is still rather easy to adapt it to
your child’s age and development level. The concept
is simple: put all kinds of natural items in a bag. You
could first go on a nature walk and pick up a few
items with your child, and once you have collected ten
to fifteen items, you can start.

For this activity, you can use anything from twigs to
leaves to pebbles and other natural items. However,
you should also consider using items which aren’t
found in nature, such as plastic bottles, plastic caps,
straws, and so on. This can quickly turn into an activ-
ity which encourages your child to recognize items
from nature and to understand what belongs in nature
and what does not.

You should ideally blindfold your child to benefit
from this activity more– this way, they can focus
on the tactile feelings they have and not try to peek
through the bag or their closed-ish eyes. You should
ask your child more complex questions, such as “how
does it feel against your hand?”, “what shape does it
have?”, “where do you think it came from?”, “do you
think it has always been there, or did it fall from a tree
perhaps?”, or “do you know which kind of tree/plant/
etc this is from?”. These questions bring your child
to question their findings and to question how they
came to this conclusion.

This activity engages certain areas of learning,
including their communication and language (as you
may have noticed, most of these do!), and their under-
standing of the world.

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