Exploring Nature: A Guest Post From Mum of Twins, a Toddler, and a Teenager

I am so very excited to have one of my favorite Aussie bloggers, Amie from Mum of Twins, a Toddler, and a Teenager (or Triple T Mum), guest posting for me today.  As you can tell from her blog title, this Mom is busy!  She does some really cool stuff with her kids and …you must go check out how she does it all.

Hi! I am Amie and in the blogosphere I blog in a little place called Mum of Twins, a Toddler and a Teenager. Here you’ll find me musing about day-to-day life with 14 month old twins, Strawberry and Ooffa. A 31 month old toddler, Chook and a 13 year old teenager, Gamer. Dirt and Boogers is one of my favourite blogs, I mean how cool is that name! I love that Amanda shares the play successes and the play failures.

March, April and May are the months of Autumn in Australia. As part of our seasonal celebrations we to do some seed collecting from our garden. Chook loved rubbing the flower heads between his fingers and letting the seeds fall into the bucket. This activity could take place in your garden or on a walk around your neighbourhood, through a park or a nature reserve.

On your marks…

Envelopes for storing your seeds
A bucket to collect the flower heads
Scissors (optional but handy for those tough stalks)

Get set…

Invite your toddler to come on a seed hunt.

Go…

Talk about the plants you see on your hunt.
 

Talk about what seeds are and where you find them. We found seeds in our Sunflowers and we found seeds on some of our dahlias. But some flowers didn’t have seeds. So we had a chance to talk about stages of growth and the word ‘different’. We also collected pumpkin seeds from our harvested pumpkins.

We discovered that the dried dahlia flower heads were the best for seed harvesting. Picking a nice warm, sunny day gives the best results. They were easy to grab in your fist and place in the bucket or just sprinkle them, there and then (a choice often made by Chook!)

The sunflowers were a little more challenging and required scissors to cut the flower from the stalk. I showed Chook how you strum your thumb over the seeds and they fall into the bucket below.

I had pre-prepared envelopes with the name of the flower written on the front and we spent some time picking seeds from the base of the bucket and putting them into the envelope. Chook’s attention span soon wandered and he spent the rest of the time running from one end of the garden to the other!

We also harvested seeds from our pumpkins by scrapping the seeds out of the pumpkin. We placed the mushy seed mess into a container of water and gently rubbed the mush away from the seeds.
 

Ooffa decided to join us in finding and cleaning the seeds.

We placed the clean seeds onto paper towels and allowed them to dry. Once dry we placed them into an envelope.

I have no idea if our seeds will grow but we had fun collecting them. Come Spring time we’ll sow our seeds and wait and watch to see what happens.