Cubs, Wildflowers, and The List

I volunteered to do a sunset wildflower walk with around 50 cubs on Monday - my daughter joined our local group about a year ago.  First I went and checked out the site, it's a great year for wildflowers, and they were in abundance.  Then I started wondering how I was going to point things out, and engage 50 kids and their accompanying volunteers. The bush is a big space and kids like to roam and wander - a worthwhile activity in itself but not exactly the evenings objective.

Then I had the small genius of giving them a little list, and telling them to be bush detectives. There were no accompanying pictures.

The list

Bracken

Trigger Plant

Moss

Mushrooms

Yam Daisy

Sundews

Milk Maids

Purple Flax Lily

Happy Wanderer

Blue Bells

Gum nuts

Spider web

Chocolate Lily

Wattle Mat Rush

Wallaby Grass

Cherry Ballart

Those little bits of paper worked! The kids really got into marking everything off and wanted to know what everything was. So they were asking questions of me rather than me trying to convey information to a moving crowd. They had no pencils but were folding or punching a hole by the name with a stick. I had no idea how determined they would become - Wallaby Grass of all things proved evasive until we found some right outside the scout Hall. They really tested my plant identification skills! On the list were a few easy things to make the task achievable, a few things kids might know, and then some things most children wouldn't recognise.  By the end the kids were pointing at things and telling me the names, and the adults seemed to really enjoy the flower hunt too.  It really stopped the group from surging forward in a hurry. The only thing I would change, would be to add a few more things to the list, as some kids were a bit disappointed when they found something new and it wasn't there to tick off.  By the end of the day I felt like I'd achieved the Scout motto -

For more great ideas of things to do with kids visit