Daily STREAM Activity: Nature Maze

Design a maze and find your way out!

Activity best for children age 2 and up

Puzzles are fun and challenging games that come in all types of forms. There are jigsaw puzzles, word search puzzles, treasure hunts, and mazes. You can complete a maze with a pen on paper or go on a walk in a big outdoor maze, like a corn maze.  Doing a maze helps develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills as you encounter road-blocks and dead-ends. You learn to look and think ahead, and plan your steps as you navigate the maze from start to finish. Today, you’re going to build your own maze!  It can be big for you and your friends to walk through or it can be smaller for your toys to navigate. When you build your own maze, you get to be an engineer and come up with creative ways to make the maze curve, design some cool dead-ends and use unusual materials to build with. For today’s maze, you will use materials that you find in nature like rocks, sticks and pinecones. 

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Materials you’ll need:

Pine cones

Rocks

Sticks

Leaves 

Toy car, toy animals, toy people

Guiding Questions:

How big or small do you want the maze to be?

Do you want to walk the maze or use your toys in the maze?

What shape do you want the maze to be  – more straight with angels or more round with curves?

Will the start also be the exit or should the exit be somewhere else?

Do you want lots of tricky dead-ends or nice and simple to go through?

Would you like to add bridges or tunnels to the maze?

Directions

STEP 1
Have a grown up help you to go on a nature walk to collect the objects. Remember to only get things that have fallen off the trees or bushes and that your grown up says is safe to use .

STEP 2
Take a few minutes to design the maze you want. Is it going to be for you to walk in or for your toys? What shape will it be? Will it have bridges or tunnels?

STEP 3
Build your maze.

STEP 4
Test out your maze with either yourself or your toys. Have fun!

Grown ups, are you looking for more ways to extend your child’s learning? Check out these extension activities to build upon today’s STREAM activity!

Math Extension
Activities that require sequencing, measuring and patterning are great ways to introduce math to young children. Having the children line up their toys by size or make a repeatable pattern from colored socks are fun and easy activities to do at home.

Real World Connections
Play board games at home. Games like Monopoly, Chess or Checker are games that encourage critical thinking and enhance logical thinking. Jigsaw puzzles are also a great way to introduce these skills.