twolittleajs: Journey sticks!

After a busy morning playing in a giant cardboard box, whilst I baked some goodies for lunches in the kitchen, I decided a little walk was in order, to make the most of the beautiful weather. Spring is definitely on it's way by the looks of the blue skies and warm sun today, and it was wonderful getting out to enjoy it!

We went to a local trail and I thought we would stop of at the centre there to see what they offered, and they suggested we make journey sticks, which is one of their activity ideas and supplied us with some strands of lovely coloured wool to make them with. so off we went on our journey through the woods, our first task was finding our sticks, which they both found basically at the entrance!

All we had to do now was find things to tie to them, twigs, leaves, feathers, even just the wool itself to remind us of what we saw/heard on our journey. Within minutes Arthur got very excited about having found a very tiny feather on the floor, so on that went on his stick, then Alyssa wanted something too, so looking around and seeing no more feathers of any leaves, suddenly I noticed the warm of the sun shining through the trees onto the exact spot we were standing. I told Alyssa that I would tie the yellow wool around the stick to remind us about the warmth of the sun on our faces, which she loved as she loves the colour yellow. We then found a leaf for them both, and listened to the sounds of birds in the trees as we walked, before noticing a couple of red berries on the ground by a holly tree, so we tied red wool and a holly leaf to the stick. Just after we started to notice the sound of water flowing, so we looked through the forest and in the distance we could see as small river and and a little waterfall, so we set off to try and find it. We were very dissapointed that the path that would lead to the water had a 'no entry' sign on it, but on the plus side Arthur has started to learn and recognise this sign as it was on a number of paths.

Our walk ended up being a little longer than anticipated, mainly due to Arthur decided to follow the path instead of turning around and going back!! Our adventure took us to a little stone building, that they explored and led us to accidently find a Geocache whilst I took advantage of a photo opportunity. So we looked inside, and we left a little note to be found in future by others that find it, before carrying on in search of Gruffalo's and various other things. Alyssa was tired by now as we had been walking for about an hour, so was hoisted onto my bag for the journey back, as our sticks were finished, Arthur to was begining to get a little antsy and grumbly, but kept walking all the same. Then we passed a fiel full of inquisitive cows on on side and sheep on the other which brightened the pair up again for the last stretch back.

Once we got back Arthur insisted on giving the journey sticks to the lady in the centre, unfortunately she wasn't there, but some one else took them on her behalf. I was a bit of a shame as I would have liked to have brought them home and sat and talked about what all the wools represented and things we saw, so I will definitely be doing this again, it really helped the children slow down and notice more and talk about what they saw more, rather than just racing off at full speed, it reminded me of my favourite poem Leisure.