Monday, March 23, 2015

Fun game for hiking kids: Rock Pictures

Photo courtesy of kevindooley/Bigstock.
Generally, exploring and discovery is enough for kids, but sometimes even they can grow bored. Remember that they naturally have shorter attention spans than adults.

Fortunately, there are lots of tried and true activities you can do on the trail that’ll keep kids from getting restless. Among them is Rock Pictures.

If taking a rest stop at a place with a lot of small rocks – such as a Great Lakes or Pacific Northwest beach – have the children make “pictures” using small stones they find. For example, a child might collect rocks and in a clear, sandy area “draw” a face with them. Other possible pictures they can create include a truck, shapes, or an animal.

The older the child, the more sophisticated the picture can become. In fact, it even can take several hikes to complete. For example, your child might keep an eye out for rocks shaped like the various states and use them to create a mosiac of the United States. The stones then would be taken home and kept as part of an ongoing project.

The mosaic can be made permanent by using a strong adhesive, such as Gorilla Glue, to adhere the small stones to a piece of wood. Besides being fun to construct, this project yers from noe can spark memories of the many hikes undertaken to find the various stones (You may even want to keep a log of where each stone was found!).

Materials: Stones, pebbles found on trail

Ages: 3 and up

Learn about more than a hundred other hiking diversions for kids in Hikes with Tykes: Games and Activities.