Hi, Y’all! I’m so excited to share this post with you today! A nature scavenger hunt is such a fun, easy activity for you and your kids to do together. Aside from it being fun and easy, it helps your kids with their color recognition and helps them to gain a better appreciation for all the beauty around them. I love that you can break this up into a couple days by gathering paint chips one day and then doing all your exploring and adventuring on another day.

We chose to break it up, and it made all my kids anticipate the actual hunt. The first day we went to good old Home Depot and I let the kids choose their own color swatches. It was so fun to see all of their choices. I may or may not have picked up a few of my favorites as well, because….colors! After we felt like we had a good variety we took them home and planned out where we would go to collect beautiful and interesting nature treasures.

I feel pretty blessed to have purchased a home that was previously owned by an avid gardener. We were able to collect a lot of fun plants and flowers in our own yard, but to make things more exciting, we took a little basket to a nearby park and had so much fun exploring all the previously unnoticed nooks and crannies of the park. The kids were noticing and more aware of their surroundings than normal and it was so fun for me to see them get so excited over every bug, leaf, bird, flower, and little animal mud trail.

Growing up, I spent so much time playing outdoors with friends and cousins. Summers were filled up with building forts of every kind, sitting in the shade and looking for butterflies, picking beautiful flowers, and creating fairy gardens every place I could. We spent a lot of time camping and adventuring in the mountains, which developed a great love for nature and all its wonderful, magical gifts. I have really wanted to instill this love of nature in my children, which is why these kinds of activities are such joy for me.

      

After the kids felt like they had collected enough variety of colorful treasures, we headed home and got busy. We laid out all of the paint swatches, and emptied their basket and went to town. It’s a pretty straightforward process from here. The kids take their collectibles from their hunt and try to match them up with the paint swatches closet to their color. They seriously had the best time matching them up. It initiated a great conversation about color theory and textures. We talked about whether or not they had a flower or weed and talked about how some weeds are really beautiful.

When the kids were sick of playing with plants and colors, we decided to save all our pretty things and do some good ol’ fashioned book flower pressing (one of my favorite things to do when I was little). We saved these flowers for future projects. The paint swatches were also saved for some fun future projects.

I definitely recommend doing this activity with your kids. For such little effort and no cost, we all had so much fun and got to learn about and appreciate so many new things.