Summer’s almost here, and with will come opportunities to take the kids to the beach, the creek, the lake, or the pond. Shorelines are a great place for unstructured activity: kids need very little prompting to splash around or build sand castles! That’s why these beach activities are little more than guided extensions of normal beach play: digging, picking up fun natural items, and finding adventures at the water’s edge.

In my first column two weeks ago, I described several observation activities that I used in my job as a naturalist prior to becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad. Those activities will work well at the shoreline, too, but I’ve picked the four activities below because I’ve found them particularly suited to a typical sandy or pebbly shoreline.

Before I “jump right in,” though, I encourage you to take a look at the general tips I posted in my first article. To those, I’ll add two safety tips specific to shorelines:

• Know the Water. Most kids love playing in the water, but they may not yet know what dangers it can hide. Please take care to learn the idiosyncrasies of your particular beach. Are there riptides or strong currents? Are there waves or even “sneaker” waves? Drop-offs underwater? Rocks? Beaches are fun but they take a little extra vigilance on our part as caregivers. Whether or not there are lifeguards at your shoreline, every kid should be under the watchful eye of at least one adult at all times when in or near the water.
• Rules for Touching. Water brings many interesting things on to the shoreline. Sometimes these are fun, like driftwood and shells, but sometimes they can be dangerous pieces of garbage or other flotsam. I always remind children not to touch anything that is “sharp, gross, or dangerous.”

Beach Activities

Human Camera

This is a fun game that ties into the observation activities I wrote about in the first column of this series. Explain to your child that you’re both going to pretend that you’re human cameras: your head is the camera, your eyes are the lens, and your ear is the shutter button.

1. Have your child close her eyes and guide her some distance down the beach. Make sure you’ve turned her at least 90 degrees from your original position, too, so the view will be completely different.
2. Press the shutter! That is to say, give your child’s ear a gentle squeeze. She should open her eyes while you’re pressing, and close them again when you let go. You should let her see the scene for about 30 seconds or so.
3. Repeat this until you’ve taken three “pictures.” (With younger kids, just one picture at a time is fine.) Try to give the pictures some variety: you might point your child at a wide landscape, then lean her over for a closeup of a shell, and finally approach a tree. Be creative! Turn that camera on its side for a portrait shot!
4. Finally, sit down with your child and encourage her to remember everything she can about each “picture.” What objects were in view? What colors? Was it bright or dark? Was anything moving?
5. As an optional closure, your child can pick one picture and draw it as she remembers it.

Many kids also enjoy a good role-reversal here: let your child guide you around as the human camera for a while! Interestingly, some kids will pay even more attention to their surroundings as the photographer than as the camera.

Color Count

This is one of many activities that can be done to take a closer look at the sand or rocks that make up the beach.

1. When you first arrive at the beach, before even setting foot on it, ask your child to tell you what color the sand is. (This works just fine on pebbly beaches as well, and in fact even better than on beaches with very fine-grained sand.) Depending on your shoreline, he will probably answer somewhere in the brown range, or maybe gray.
2. Some time later, when you’re on the beach, ask your child to remind you what color she said the sand was. Then, take a close look. (If you’ve got a hand lens, all the better, but it’s not necessary.)
3. How many colors can you count? Looking at the sand closely, you will find that there are many colors to be found among the grains. Older children may be able to start sorting the sand grains by color. You may want to bring an egg carton along just for this purpose, although again, it’s not necessary.
4. Back at step 1, your child looked at the beach and told you what color he saw. How many of the pieces of sand match that color, and how many are completely different?
5. Observe more about the sand. Does every piece of sand resemble rock, or are there other materials mixed in with the sand: bits of shell, perhaps, or twigs, or leaves?

Additionally for older children, you can guide them to observe the rocks surrounding the beach, or even in the water (especially if your shoreline is at a creek or river). Pretty soon, kids will start to notice that the colors of the rocks around a beach resemble the colors they can find within the sand.

Environmental Art

Every sand castle is a work of art, of course, but you don’t need to be limited to regal architecture! Inspired by Andy Goldsworthy and other environmental artists, kids are learning that they can make sand butterflies, driftwood sculptures, and rock towers.

1. You can prepare for this activity a day or two beforehand by looking at a few pictures of environmental art with your child. These aren’t hard to find on the ‘net: there’s a flickr.com pool and a search for “environmental art” will turn up many examples of this sort of work that can serve as inspiration to your budding artists.
2. When you’re on the beach and the time seems right for a slightly structured activity, announce to your child that you’re each going to make a masterpiece for the other to see. (Each artist can work alone, or, if it seems appropriate, you can pair off family members.) The twist is that you’ll be making your artwork completely with things found in nature! You can use driftwood, stones, seaweed, shells, mud, leaves: anything you can find on your shoreline.
3. You may find this activity works best if you set some parameters. Try a time limit of about 20 minutes for most kids, a bit less for younger ones, and more for tweens and teens. A topic “prompt” can also be helpful: “Make a circle” is popular, or “a rainbow,” or “an animal.” Feel free to drop your restrictions entirely to fit the day, though.
4. Once the time limit is up, each artist in your family will present his or her work to the rest in an “art show.” While your child describes his work and how he made it, you can really be silly with this: drink pretend cups of tea with your pinky sticking out, talk in the most refined art-critic-intellectual voice you can imagine, ask about “the symbolism of the use of sand” — that sort of thing.

A photo shoot isn’t a bad idea, either!

Beach Scavenger Hunt

There are many ways to do a scavenger hunt on the beach; here are two of my favorites. With either hunt, you will find the most variety of objects at the high-water or high-tide line of your particular waterway or ocean. If you are at an open beach, please keep a close watch on the waves, since your child will probably be paying attention to the ground.

Both versions of this hunt also include a search for bits of trash: bring a trash bag along, and you will have made the shoreline a little cleaner for the next people who visit!

• Find Three Tracks

1. Explain that you’re going to look for tracks or signs from living things. A track isn’t just a footprint: a track is any sign that something was there that’s not there anymore.
2. Each child (and you) will look for three examples of things that came from plants, three things from animals, and three things from people. Whenever it’s safe, pick the thing up and bring it along with you. Plant items might include seaweed, pine cones, driftwood, or any other plant part that’s not still alive — no picking live plants! Animal parts can be feathers, scat (which you’ll not pick up, of course!), shells, or footprints. “Human” signs are usually trash, and picking those up will help clean the beach!
3. When everyone has found their three plant, three animal, and three human signs, pile them up together and see what you’ve found!
4. If you’re especially motivated, try another round, but this time you’ll need to find three plant, three animal, and three human signs that you didn’t find the first time.

• The Traditional “Prepared List” Hunt

This game can also be played with a prepared list of objects to find. This works best for older kids who might need more of a challenge to keep them interested, and also groups of kids who will play in teams. You will, of course, need to prepare a list ahead of time. Here’s my basic list which you can adapt as appropriate to your own area.

• 3 plant parts (no picking live plants!)
• something with 3 or more colors on it
• a seed
• 3 feathers
• 5 pieces of trash
• burned wood
• 3 shell pieces
• something sticky
• something blue

For some reason, the nature of a scavenger hunt seems to lend itself to prize-giving. It’s a nice idea to have some sort of reward for your child when they successfully find everything from your list.

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And there you have it: four of my favorite beach activities! Please try them out — I’d love to hear from you about what worked and how you adapted them to your own beaches and shorelines.In future installments of this series, I will cover:

• Nature Journaling: Taking a notebook out into nature like John Muir.
• Nature Party! Things to do when you do have a group of kids outside — a birthday party picnic, scout retreat, or a family reunion.
• The Art of the Night Hike. All that’s fun under the… moon!

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[tags]parenting, kids, outdoors, water, beach, lake, stream, nature, environment, education, preparation[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by BURИBLUE, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved