Not all classrooms have four walls and especially if you have a pre-schooler; you should take them to those classrooms without four walls! Once school starts, kids get busy in the school routine. Of course, you can always find a school that gives more attention to holistic learning than just the following curriculum. But before your child starts school, this is your chance to give him or her exposure to different things in life and let them learn through experiences. This is also a great way of creating the most cherishable memories with your kids, bonding with them, and kind of re-learn the things through your kids’ eyes.

You might even find this ‘natural learning’ more of eye-opening education for you than your kids! When we grow up, somehow we lose this connection with nature. For example, we create some concepts like ‘dirty’ around the clay and soil, where our kids see all the fun naturally. When you take some effort and engage your child in natural play; you get mesmerized by their creativity and their ease at connecting with Nature.

This is also a time when kids demand more engaging playtime, they are learning fast at this stage. Their brain is developing at a fast rate, so better to feed their brain with some quality, hands-on learning than some digital junk.

I am sharing some of my son’s favorite ‘natural fun learning’ activities, which not only helped him learn regular things like colors, numbers but also made him eco-aware!

Firstly when we used to go outdoors, even if it is just the outdoor landscape area around our community, I used to let my boy explore the Nature surrounding him. Let him pick up leaves, collect stones, run behind birds. His clothes used to get dirty sometimes, but I let him select his natural toy instead of carrying his own toys when we went outdoors. He learned to sing ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ by watching stars on most of the evenings. It was so beautiful one day to watch him when he was mindful of ants queuing in the park. He even talked a few things with them and said bye to them! One of the most important advantages of child lead learning is kids don’t lose interest in the activity too quickly. Kids also develop more confidence and creativity this way.

1. Colouring

All kids love to play with colors. But instead of giving kids drawings to fill up colors all the time, I preferred giving him blank papers and letting his imagination fly freely. Coloring with fingers is messy but fun and they get to explore the texture as well. I always select toxic-free colors and then we use vegetables like okra, potato, carrot, onion for stamping. Click here to read about child-safe natural paints. If you want to take the coloring activity to the next level, I will highly recommend you to try DIY watercolor out of vegetables, we made our own non-toxic colors from food scraps and it was great fun not just for Ruhaan but even for me, watch here DIY Vegan Colors video tutorial.

2. Learning numbers

My son used to love to collect stones and dry sticks from outdoors. We always let him play with it. When he brought those stones and sticks and other natural toys I stored them and let him play with them even at home. He loved to learn to count numbers with stones especially so I give him these fridge magnets to recognize the numbers.

3. Music

We create music out of anything, though it can get noisy sometimes it develops creativity in kids. Ruhaan loves making music out of his green toys like stones and using dry sticks on a drum. Whenever outdoors I always used to draw his attention to the surrounding sounds like the chirping of birds, flowing water basically the music of nature. It helps them to develop their attention and mindfulness.

Watch this video, where my son is playing Bamboo Xylophone in the rainforest of Bali when he was just 1.5 years old. Click here to read about our Family Eco-travel to Bali with a young child.

4. Learning colors and shapes

The best way to learn colors and shapes is to go outdoors. From my experience, kids learn fast the colors of trees, sky, flowers, etc than what they see in books. It’s better to give those tiny eyes the whole world around them to observe and learn than to keep them in just four walls. They even understand and memorize the shapes better when they touch them so next time your child is lifting a round stone, let your child do that.

5. Arts & Crafts

All children love sticking activities. To create art, first, we visit the outdoors, park, beach, and collect natural collectibles like feathers of birds, dried leaves, and flowers, twigs, seedpods, etc. Then all I used to do is give him a glue stick, blank paper, and all his collectibles. He used to stick them on paper and created art from his imagination.

Collage out of natural collectibles

You can make many art and craft projects from natural materials. Here is another one by us, easy kids room ornaments, which were originally made for Christmas.

I am sure most of the readers must have remembered their childhood after reading this post. We were exposed to nature and the outdoors far more than our kids in this digital era. So it is more important now that we take efforts and motivate our children to play outdoors more, or let them play with natural items than just dumping them with iPads, don’t you think?

Here is a bonus activity not just for the preschoolers but their elder siblings and parents or even for the whole family. The nature scavenger hunt is a fun, exciting game at the same time it educates and stimulates all senses as well as helps build values like kindness. When you take your kids outdoors, get a copy of our UAE Outdoors Scavenger Hunt E-book. This unique book covers all eco-systems found in the UAE including desert, coast, mountains, and wadies as well as an urban ecosystem like a park, etc. This book will add some fun games to your outdoor trip and will help you get to know UAE’s biodiversity and nature even better.

If you like this post, subscribe here to get more such green parenting posts in your inbox.  Let’s not forget when we are making our children aware of their surrounding nature, they develop their senses much better. I totally believe Eco-awareness in children leads to self-awareness!

Here is another article about Top picked Eco-activities for Younger Kids and if you have kids going to primary school, here are some ideas to keep them busy at home with some age-appropriate eco-activities.