Camping-themed Activities
Whether you are planning a family camping trip with your little one or maybe just planning some indoor camping-themed fun, these fun projects will put the kiddies in an outdoor frame of mind!
Handprint Campfire:
This activity is perfect for your youngest campers. I saw this on Pinterest and knew it was a perfect project for my one year old who has come to LOVE creating with finger paints.
To set up, I cut out the logs and glued them to a separate piece of construction paper. I prepped the red, orange and yellow paints. Once I was ready to begin, I actually painted Little Sister's hand using red and orange on the palm of her hand and then yellow on her fingers.
Once I showed her where to put her hand, she went right to work slapping her hand on the paper. She LOVES to do this so there wasn't much effort in getting her to do it. However, if your little one is unfamiliar with finger painting, nothing wrong with helping them press their hand in the right spot on the page.
Once she was finished and Little SIster promptly got her hand washed, I showed her the picture she created. I excitedly talked about the campfire and about it being hot and bright. I would like to think she was pretty proud of her art.
Painting a Forest:
The night before I painted the outlines of all the trees and the tree trunks. I do this so that the project doesn't take really long. However for children 4 and up, I would just create the outline.
The day of the project I gathered pieces of a cut-up egg cartons, tempera paint for the olders and finger paint for the youngest in our mob.
The olders dipped the pieces of egg cartons into the paint and stamped the trees to color them in.
The baby used finger paints.
They used a little teamwork to finish things up. :)
The finished products are really neat. They take up almost the entire space of our staircase landing. They are serving as beautiful backdrops to many other camping projects the kids have created.
Nature Painting
My kiddies LOVE to paint. Who doesn't? Here I am hoping they can recreate a scene from their natural world on paper.
To begin, we looked through a few books to talk about what the setting in the forest
looks like (grass, leaves, trees, bushes, etc) and what animals live there.
(Yes, you are correct. The title of that book is, indeed, "Who Pooped in the Park?")
I mixed a few shades of the more common colors we decided we would need, green and brown. The kiddies also had black, blue, yellow, red but in smaller cups in order to encourage the use of the green and browns in the larger cups. You might not decide to do this. I did it in order to sway the children's paintings to be more realistic.
I then let the olders have at the paint. Here Big SIster is working on what looks like a Weeping Willow.
Brother made this one. It is a picture of our orange tent (how accurate!), a tree and 3 animals: a squirrel, a blue jay and a rattle snake, complete with rattle.
Big SIster created this work of art. It is a bear who is "thinking about eating the berries in these trees." Awesome!
Make Your Own Trail Map
The olders have seen their fair share of trail maps. They are starting to become familiar with symbols, the legend and directions. These "make your own" versions are a great way to re-enforce some of the things they already know about trail maps. I found these awesome stickers of trail signs and symbols to go with this project.
Very hard at work! They used different colors to indicate different trails on their maps.
The final products, complete with mountain ranges, forests, bike trails and camp sites.
These are some of the projects I have done with my children as a way to excite and motivate them about an upcoming camping trip, but, like I mentioned before, you could use these activities to have an indoor camping adventure right in your own home, complete with sleeping bags and oven-baked s'mores. How ever you use any of these projects, I truly hope you enjoy. And very importantly, thank you so much for reading!
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