Nature Games 1

A friend asked for new ideas for her environmental education program. As I was reminiscing about a few projects and games I've done in the past, I realized I had never mentioned them on here. Considering what this blog was made for, that's a little bit of a major oversight on my part. Sometimes you don't think of your old stand-bys because, well, they're not news to you. So, a little time-travel magic and we'll talk about some of the games I pulled out at camp to fill in some time

I had a game that I adapted from a book of wildlife games. It was a big hit with the kids! It was sort of like "Sharks and Minnows", but with a twist. One child would be selected to be "it", this was the predator. The rest of the children were "prey". I had suggestions of everything from fox and rabbits to komodo dragon and water buffalo! The prey then had to run across the playing field, avoiding being caught (tagged) by the predator, to gather the food that was on the other side (we used balls to represent food.) They then had to return the food to their families waiting at home (the starting line.) There were a few safeties, hula hoops that represented bushes the prey could hide in. At the end of a round, any prey that was caught enabled the predator population to increase (a tagged "prey" child was an additional "predator" in the next round.) I found this worked best when each predator was only allowed one prey per round. Any predator that was not able to catch a prey in a round was returned to the "prey" side (representing a predator who died, and a subsequent increase in the prey population since they were able to get home safely with food and thus reproduce.)

After a few rounds this very neatly displayed the relationship between predator and prey population sizes. As the predator population rose, the prey population declined, forcing a decline in predator population, which allowed for a rise in the prey population and so on. By the end of the game, any of the children could describe this relationship to you, based solely on their observations. Plus they kept begging me for more rounds after I said time was up :)