Preschool Backpacking

When I looked outside this morning, I saw that it was a beautiful day. Consequently, I was trying to think of an idea for a preschool activity that would get us out of doors.

A week or so previous, my son had been having a few conversations with my mother about a backpacking trip we had planned as a family when I was young. Since then, he has been very interested in all the particulars of backpacking. As he asked me, yet again, when OUR family would be embarking on our first backpacking trip, a brilliant idea popped in my head. "Let's go right now," I informed him. Truly, hiking is one of my very most, top favorite things to do in life, so I was thrilled at the prospect of pretend backpacking right outside our door.

I had the kids find their preschool backpacks, suit up in tennis shoes, and told them they could bring along any gear they thought they would need. One son packed swimming goggles, mittens and a retractable claw sort of toy thing. The other picked out all his favorite action figures to keep him company on our trek. We concocted some "trail mix" by throwing together a variety of whatever snacks I had on hand. Today, it turned out that we had fruit snack, pretzel, fishy cracker, raisin, conversation heart, chocolate chip trail mix. We added our snacks to our backpacks, slung then on our backs and headed out the door. I told the kids that while we were trekking they had to find 5 new things for us to discover and put them in the brown paper bags I had brought for each of them.

The rest of this kind of activity is pretty easy and very rewarding. We walked around and looked at things we had never noticed before like mosses and the veins in leaves and buds on the ends of stems etc. Each child put 5 or more things into his bag. When we were tired of walking around, we backpacked back to the house and dumped out all our treasures for discussion. Here are the treasures we discovered:

It was fun to mention a few facts about each item and have the kids point out things they liked or were interested in. We had a good talk about lichen and how pinecones differ. Mostly, we talked about how much we want to go on a real backpacking trip sometime in the near future. Either way, we'll for sure be going on another preschool backpacking trip on the next nice day we find.