86: Fun Nature-Base d Therapy Activities for Fall
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Therapy in the Great Outdoors, the podcast where we explore the business and practice of nature based pediatric therapy of all kinds. If you're an outdoor loving pediatric practitioner in the fields of occupational, physical, or speech therapy, social work, or mental health, this podcast will help you start and grow a successful nature based practice or program.
I am the ever honest, always a hundred percent real. You'll hear it all on this podcast. Dr. Laura Park Figueroa. I'm a pediatric OT with over 20 years of experience and I run a thriving nature based practice with profitable locations in two different states and multi six figures in revenue. I also host the free online community at therapyinthegreatoutdoors.
com to help you pursue your nature based therapy dreams too. Are you ready to take action on those dreams? Let's jump [00:01:00] in.
Hello friends in this episode, I want to talk with you about fun things you can do in nature-based therapy sessions during the season of fall, because all of the trees are changing right now where I live. It is beautiful. October is. Probably my absolute favorite month besides June and Madison, June is my birthday month.
And it's the start of summer. And October becomes kind of crisp. Morning's and the, the air gets a little bit cooler and the trees are all changing and is just. Jaw droppingly. Beautiful. Everywhere you go. So I thought I would do a little episode on some of my favorite fall activities to do in nature-based therapy sessions with kids. So I'm just going to describe them.
They're all really simple and easy. They just take a few supplies, really minimal prep. And I think these are like really fun go-to activities that anyone can do in a session [00:02:00] to achieve almost any. Therapy goal with kids. The first one, which I have shared before I confess is a rainbow leaf hunt.
So this is the easiest thing that you can do. It requires no supplies at all. It's great for an arrival activity that you can have kids do, right as they're arriving and they're waiting for other kids to come. If you're doing group sessions. So basically you're just looking for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple leaves.
And then to take it a little step further, you could do some sort of art project with them, or some sort of display. You could make a mobile of the leaves by hanging them with string from a stick or something like that. There's so much you could do at this, but it's just beautiful to see the rainbow of colors together. And it's a really easy activity.
So that's the first one rainbow leaf hunt. The second one is to make leaf confetti with hole punchers or shape punchers. So if you've ever gotten in, I don't know when I [00:03:00] was like a teenager, probably in. The early nineties, scrapbooking was like this huge thing where people would take photos and put like cute little paper frames around them with like little cutout shapes and stuff.
So still, I guess maybe people still do this. I don't, but if you go to a craft store, you can find they're basically like hole punchers, but they punch shapes out. So you can do hearts or stars or. I don't know what else there would be shaped different shapes, maybe geometric shapes. So those are kind of fun for kids.
You can often find these at thrift stores too, in the craft section where there might be other craft supplies because. Let's be real. A lot of people think they're going to get into scrapbooking and then they try it and they. Give it up. And so they get rid of all their supplies.
And when you make leaf confetti, you take those shape punchers and you have the kids. With a little basket, maybe punch the [00:04:00] leaves, use the leaf, like a piece of paper and punch the holes or the shapes into a basket. And then I usually would frame this as like it's for. A big party. Like we're going to make confetti for our party today. And we're not gonna, we're not gonna do it until the very end.
And when we get a ton of the confetti, then we get to throw it in the air. Okay. So you're, you're teaching the kids a little bit of, of, um, Inhibition like inhibiting their impulse impulse control. That's what the word I was trying to think of. To, to let the confetti kind of buildup in the basket or the container before you get to pick it up and then throw it in the air.
And this is a really, really great opportunity for photos too, for your practice, because it looks really fun. The kids are laughing and they're throwing this confetti everywhere. And it's no damage to the environment you're using. Leaves that have already fallen to the ground and you are returning them back to [00:05:00] their natural habitat on the ground to. Compost.
And maybe if you live in a snowy climate, be snowed over and turn back into earth. So. I love that activity. It's super fun and easy to do as well. And all you need is a hole puncher or a shape puncher. I would probably tell you to have one for each kid. So they could all go at this together at the same time. All right.
The third activity is leaf sowing with yarn and needles. So you can add a craft store, get a. They're usually called, Like, oh, what are they? What are they like a yarn needle? That's what it's called. So it's a plastic needle. That's kind of dull on the end. You don't have to get, you could use metal ones with an actual point.
If the kids are ready for that. But the children can select a leaf that they really like. And then they sew with a piece of yarn on the leaf, making a design or making an outline of the leaf or decorating it. And then the same thing, you can kind [00:06:00] of hang that up as an art project at the end. send it home with them, to display in their house, whatever, they want to do with it.
But it's really fun to let kids kind of have open-ended. Creativity with these activities. So leaf sewing. That is the third one. And then finally the fourth one is one haven't looked at the metrics lately, but for a while, the post that our social media manager did on this activity was. The most viewed post I ever put on my practice account on social media. So basically. What one of my therapists did was he took a piece of cardboard. And he drew a picture on it. And the directions were find whatever color.
So there might be a picture of a tree with a cut out of the cardboard. On the actual tree, so that you're matching the color of the tree to something [00:07:00] that you find naturally in the environment. So it would be, I feel like I'm not explaining this well, I hope you guys understand what I mean. So the piece of cardboard that he wrote originally on for this activity. Would say at the bottom find green.
And then there's a picture on the card of a tree that is colored green, maybe with a brown trunk, but there is a hole cut out of the cardboard. So you can actually see a hole in the cardboard. And the child can then take that. Piece of cardboard and move it around the nature environment to find green and match the color, to show through the hole, to complete the picture of the tree, essentially on the front of the card. So you can do this with a variety of different items.
I don't think when my employee did it, he did nature items, but I think it would be really cool to like use different natural items on the actual cards that you make. Like find green and draw a picture of a leaf or find, red and have a picture of a flower with the whole [00:08:00] cutout where the red.
If you did a flower one. You would do the flower red, then you'd cut the hole out of the center of it. And then they're going to move it around the environment in order to match the red color to kind of complete the picture on the front of the card. So this one was really hard to explain. I'm realizing that I hope you guys can understand what I mean by this activity. I was really surprised how the kids loved it and got really, really involved.
And it's kind of like a scavenger hunt that is very easy for young children to complete because they have that visual and they're looking for something. Very very visual in the environment to kind of match the color too. So. There's a variety of different things you could do, right? So you could do like a red heart and orange sun. A yellow banana, a green frog. Blue water.
Purple flower brown tree trunk. Black beetle or something like that. So you could do a variety of different colors and have each kid kind of trip. They [00:09:00] could trade as they find them and find other things. So there's lots of ways that you could structure that activity for the kids to really have fun with it. Okay.
So that's it. This was a quick, short little episode, just to share with you a couple of very, very simple treatment ideas for fall. Hope you enjoy these. And if you do. Please weigh in inside of the therapy and the great outdoors community. So. I want to say something here. A lot of people reach out to me with individual questions.
So they send me an email and say, Laura in your work, have you met anyone who does this kind of nature-based therapy or do you know any PTs who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always, always, always, my reply is posted inside of the therapy and a great outdoors community because you can search the entire community.
There's 750 people there now I think. And so not all of them are probably doing nature-based practice, but this is a group of people that are very interested in nature based practice. And it is [00:10:00] a. Wonderful place to connect and to look for people. Who you can collaborate with or who are doing certain types of work that you may be interested in, or to find a job, if you want to work for a nature based practice, those kinds of things.
So that community is there to serve you. So please use it. And if you try any of these treatment activities, or if you have other activities that are really, really fun, Post them there and share them with people because I really want that space to be a space where people can connect over our shared love of nature based therapy for kids.
So. I will talk to you guys next week see you soon. Bye.
Wait a second. Don't go yet. Do you want 120 ways that you can take your pediatric therapy work outdoors into nature? I wrote the free, big, huge list of nature based therapy activities just for you. The Big Huge List will give you quick ideas for nature based sessions. [00:11:00] In the Big Huge List, there are activities for gross motor, fine motor, visual perceptual, executive function, balance, group collaboration, and team building, social, emotional, and self regulation skills, as well as speech and language, and a whole section just for swing activities.
So go on and get your free Big Huge List so you can get started taking kids outdoors or have some new ideas if you've been doing this a while. You can download your free copy at therapyinthegreatoutdoors. com slash list. So until next time, get outside, connect, reflect, and enjoy therapy in the great outdoors.
