Berry-Painting and a little bit of Yoga

We had two activities through which the kids were able to channel their talents today! Both were intimately tied to the nature we are a part of and cannot do without and served as a reminder as to how important it is for us to be conscious of this relation!

Firstly, some art, and for a change, instead of using another chemical-based tube-stored paint, we opted to create our own - using berries!

Mushing together some raspberries, we were able to obtain a nice bright red, while a little more counter-intuitively, blueberries gave us a deeper red with a heavier tone. A modest palette but enough to splatter around the page to interesting effect. The 'paint' also had a nice consistency to it which allowed us to stick pieces of bark and other plant material to our page to create a nice collage of sorts.

Naturally, as often happens in any great artistic endeavor, the journey can get a little messy, and there was definitely a little bit of running back and forth to the tap to wash our hands but in the end, a common theme in the sharing circle was that the kids definitely enjoyed their little moment of expressing themselves through the medium of fruit-mush-on-paper!

My personal favorite  of the day though was a little bit of improvisational yoga in the garden! In the absence of a proper yoga-teacher, we decided to use a little gem of a book called the yoga game to see if we could solve a riddle given to us and then interpreting the response in a yoga pose! We had the tree (vrksasana), the cat (svanasana, marjariasana, bitilasana... all combined into the one animal!), and also the cobra (bhujangasana)! A little revelation for me was that I could pull off the headstand after-all (at our Silver Springs location with a little help from a friend :) ). Again, a great day to be out among the green with the only unexpected weather outcome being a little grass-shower from all the kids at the end of the Sunnyside session - awesome!

"The Cobra" - could you tell?

Crouching tiger...resetting before another star jump!