"Nature is a tool to get children to experience not just the outer world but themselves." - Stephen Moss
Nature is one of the biggest inspirations to create art, especially when children are becoming more sedentary and gadgets oriented.
We have listed down a few of the nature-based art ideas that you can do with your children.
1. Nature hunt in your backyard or balcony:
- Collect different natural elements with different textures from your green or open spaces and make a collage of funny faces with it. Create a tiara, or a garland with twigs, leaves and, flowers.
- Artwork with leaves, flowers and barks: Ask your children to collect different types (size, Colour, patterns) of leaves. These leaves can be traced or colored and stamped on their art books.
- Similarly, you can ask them to collect different flowers and dry them in their books. Once the flowers are dried, they can be pasted to create a beautiful art piece.
This activity can be used to teach them about different trees and flowers too. Children can create different patterns by placing white paper on the barks of different trees and rub crayons on them. These patterns can also help them identify the tree.
2. Make Sculptures Using Natural Materials: Children can use their creativity and imagination to create forests, animals, people, or different structures or shapes or sculptures by using natural materials like pebbles, sticks, grass, twigs, seeds, dry or fallen down leaves, petals, stones, shells, etc.
Different shapes and sizes of wooden blocks or marbles or granite pieces or even small rocks or stones can be used as building blocks to create anything inspired by nature or simply to stack them. This activity improves focus and concentration.
3. Cooking Delicious Pretend Food with soil and water: Dig up some soil from our gardens, balcony or from your indoor plant’s pots and let your children make some delicious pretend food with soil and other ingredients like leaves, flowers, twigs, stones, etc. for their dolls and puppets. Spare some old bowls and spoons to help them with this task.
4. Stamp painting with different vegetables to create different patterns that we see around us, can be an engaging activity. Children can color and stamp their own hands and feet to create different animals or birds or a tree.
5. Decorate one of the walls of your house with Nature: We along with our children can decorate one of the walls of our house with Nature. We can collect different pictures and stick them, draw on them, color on them, pictures of the sun, moon, stars, trees, flowers, birds, waterfalls, animals, forests, anything and everything that you and your children admire about nature.
"Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.”- Thomas Berry.