Tina’s Treasurehouse
We are excited to be a Nature Explore Certified Classroom since 2020. Since we began with Nature Explore, my husband, “Papa Craig” has continued to help build new things and make the repairs needed to keep our environment safe.
We love our gathering area with logs to sit, climb, and walk on. We use it to read our books from the book library, which have many different nature books to read, and we will do circle time there on nice days, weather permitting. The children love to walk on the logs and jump off them. It helps develop coordination, balance, spatial awareness and self-regulation.
Our sand area with our mud tables has had improvements too, with a new table built by Papa Craig and logs for sitting. We have a sand box on our patio with the building area, consisting of real bricks, wood blocks, bamboo blocks, wood cars, and doll house with accessories. We also have puzzles made with tree cookies and a table to work on when we play on the patio during inclement weather.
Our messy material area is next to our sorting table (consisting of bug and animal fossils, bugs, seeds, shells, etc.) and consists of logs, sticks, rocks, material, clips, and tree cookies, used for building forts and fires. The crawling and climbing area have two hollow logs for crawling and a small wood climber built by Papa Craig. The children love to crawl in the logs and hide. We also have kept the red fire truck for climbing and crawling on and playing “fire fighters.”
Children love to play with the xylophone, chimes, and other “instruments” in the music area. They use spoons and music sticks to bang on the pans we use for “drums” and materials to dance with the different music we play outdoors. Our dirt box is another fun place for the children with the different materials we add during the seasons and different themes we do for our lessons. We have bugs, flowers, little shovels, trucks, and other materials we add. We added new bikes and signs in our riding area, along with new balls, kids horseshoe games, and bug viewers, magnify glasses, and binoculars for our open area. Our art area is the same with our large chalk board for writing and drawing and the art easel and table for painting and creating art with nature.
Finally, we have our garden area to sit and smell the flowers. The children love to point out the new flowers that bloom in the spring and summer. Our vegetable garden has grown with the children helping Papa Craig plant and water the vegetables and enjoying them at meals. This year we enjoyed our first apples on our apple tree. We also added a new herb garden for smelling, touching, and tasting to help promote their sensory exploration, that helps stimulate their brain development and strengthen their neural pathways. It is also one of our favorite areas of our Nature Explorer Classroom.
