What you’ll need

From nature:

  • Natural objects, such as leaves, berries, feathers, pebbles, twigs, flowers and snail shells

From home:

  • Paper
  • Crayons or colored pencils
  • Blanket or tablecloth

How to do it

1. Go outdoors to collect different natural objects and place them on the floor or table when you get home.

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2. Take a close look, memorize the items, then cover them with a cloth.

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3. Accurately draw as many objects as you can from memory on a sheet of paper, trying to capture every detail.

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4. When you can’t remember any more, remove the cloth and compare what you’ve drawn with your collection. Did you copy all the items? Did you remember them all?

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Topsy’s tip

  • Play this game with other kids and see who remembers more items. Whoever has copied the most gets to collect the items for the next round.
  • Instead of drawing the objects, you could also just count them off and describe them from memory.
  • Or look in the garden for things that all have the same color (for example, look only for green things).
  • Take the items you’ve found and combine them into a “mandala” – a picture from nature.
  • Put your objects in a tote bag and ask your friends and family to guess what they are only by touching.

Learn with Topsy

  • Well, could you remember them all? By the way, animals also can’t always remember exactly where they have hidden their stores of food.
  • In winter, when everything is covered by a thick blanket of snow and the sun doesn’t come out for long, animals may have a tough time finding fresh food. Many animals, such as squirrels, mice, bears and birds, anticipate the shortage and store up an extra supply in autumn. They collect nuts, pinecones, seeds and mushrooms, and hide or bury them under rocks, in tree hollows, under roots or in empty bird nests. But they later have to remember where they hid them!
  • Squirrels are highly organized in this regard. They hide different kinds of nuts in different places: hazelnuts here, acorns there, and walnuts somewhere else again. This way they don’t have to remember where they buried every single nut, but only where they have stored each kind of nut. They also hide much more than they can actually eat. But that’s a good thing because they can’t always remember all their hiding places. Sometimes some other animal finds the hiding place and raids the contents. It’s no bad thing that so much hidden food is forgotten, because new plants can grow from the seeds that stay in the ground until the return of spring. This keeps the forest forever young, and everyone benefits: trees give animals fruit and animals plant new trees.