What do you experience and learn when you visit the ocean?

Over the last month we spent as many days as we could by a waters edge. In this season of new beginnings we meet shifting edges - where water meets the land.

Here were our prompts and reflections to explore the SHORE over the month.

🌊KIDS: Make a map. Paint or draw a magical journey from ocean to land, including some hidden treasures along the way.

🧭MAPPING - We drew mazes and labyrinths on the sand setting up traps and a clear pathways. Out of natural pieces in the environment we mapped the land we are getting to know, playing hide and seek with objects on the map. We developed it further on with honey sticks and watercolour.

🐚 FAMILY: Go rockpool hopping. Or find a shore near you (pond, creek, puddle). Follow curiosity and you will be SURE to find treasure.

🪸ROCKPOOL HOPPING - We explored red jelly sea anemones, different sea snail shapes, different coloured seaweed, mermaids tears (beach glass), fishing most unsuccessfully with a net, a kind fisherman offering us a whole Australian salmon and a friend dove for abalone. Treasure hunting without needing to set up anything.

🪨 SELF: Stretch edges gently. Sense newness, discomfort or limits - yours or your children’s. Where might a small stretch build confidence and growth?

🙆‍♀️EDGES - We went intentionally went beyond our edges with some gentle stretches. For example, she started kindy two days a week and we went to a salsa social for date night.

📘BOOKS - A library visit and a home book rotation provided invaluable resources for deepening imagination with fictional books on mermaids and sea creatures, non fictional creative explorations and stories of ancient water myths.

Cherishing time on the shore with my kids helped me to look down, watch, observe and discover the treasures that are right here at our feet. To slowly walk the path of appreciating beauty and enough even when I feel insignificant. To enjoy looking out at the but without getting caught up in the immensity of the future. To feel wonder come alive. To see tidal changes as opportunities of when to stretch and when we are bound. May the SHORE show us where we are UNSURE.

There’s still a few more days of the month to really land on the shore or dive into the deep.

What did you learn at the shore this month?

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