Last month I saw a post on the fabulous Mud Puddles to Meteors blog about hosting a nature exchange. How exciting. We sent of our details and waited to hear.
At the end of the month we found out our exchange family live in Maine in the US. We googled their town and looked at photos and worked out where it was on the map. Jakob was excited, thinking they live near 'American Grandad and American Nanny' - but we used the map to show that actually, Maine isn't all that near Texas! Lol.
Anyway, last week we recieved our nature exchange egg carton!
We were very excited to see the stamps, but unfortunately the post office decided to cover them with white labels :(
Turns out we had sent some similar things in our box to them as well! We sent seashells - but a completely different type. Acorns - but the one recieved was lovely and chunky in comparison - just like the acorns you see in books and drawings. It even had the little cap, Jakob loved taking it apart and putting it back again. We also got rocks, but again completely different to the ones we sent.
Nothing in the package we received was labelled, which was fun because first Jakob took all the ones he 'knew' and told me what they were. Then we were left with a few bits he wasn't sure of (see the black thing above). When I told him to think about it he played with the items for a bit before declaring that the black thing was seaweed. A quick check with our friend Mr Google and we found out that Jakob was right, it was indeed seaweed! No idea how he worked that one out, we live nowhere near a beach the ones we've been to haven't had seaweed that looks anything like this! But impressed nonetheless.
Our nature box
Before we sent ours I took a couple of quick snaps with my phone. I didn't want to post before in case whoever was receiving it saw and knew what they were getting! As you can see above they were pretty similar. We used an egg carton and wrapped the bits in tissue paper.
I also put a sticker on each one saying what the item was and where we found it. We included items from around London, Surrey and different places along the south coast.
Some of the items we weren't actually sure what they were so we put '??? (London, UK)' and hopefully the family who got our box had fun googling what items were, as we did.
We included things that were the same but from different places - such as shells from different beaches... and also some of the same objects that were collected at different times, to hopefully engage some more exciting learning from the child who recieves it - for example we included an old shrivelled up conker, and a new shiny one in it's spikey shell. That's what the red labels are - a couple of the items were spikey or sticky!
To finish off there is one unwrapped item. We made a wood medallion from a branch in our garden, drilling a hole and tying some string. This is something we first did at Just So Festival a couple of years back and Jakob loved making it and keeping it as a souvenir - we've been waiting for an excuse to make another one and this was the perfect opportunity!
We had a great idea to cover the carton in different coloured autumn leaves. We got as far as one. We didn't flatten or press it first so it was the biggest pain ever to stick down and ended up with globs of modge podge everywhere... but hey it was still prettier than a plain egg carton!
And then before we sent it off we included a postcard. I can't remember what I wrote now - probably something like 'we hope you guys enjoy these nature bits and pieces. We left some unlabelled for you to explore!' - who knows.
All in all it was a super fun experience. Very hard trying to find objects that will not cause the parcel to be ripped open by the post police due to so many natural items being on the restricted list to send to the US. We did our best!
I'm hoping mud puddles does another nature exchange next year, the boys loved receiving a parcel and were so excited to see all the bits of nature from somewhere else in the world :)
At the end of the month we found out our exchange family live in Maine in the US. We googled their town and looked at photos and worked out where it was on the map. Jakob was excited, thinking they live near 'American Grandad and American Nanny' - but we used the map to show that actually, Maine isn't all that near Texas! Lol.
Anyway, last week we recieved our nature exchange egg carton!
We were very excited to see the stamps, but unfortunately the post office decided to cover them with white labels :(
Turns out we had sent some similar things in our box to them as well! We sent seashells - but a completely different type. Acorns - but the one recieved was lovely and chunky in comparison - just like the acorns you see in books and drawings. It even had the little cap, Jakob loved taking it apart and putting it back again. We also got rocks, but again completely different to the ones we sent.
Nothing in the package we received was labelled, which was fun because first Jakob took all the ones he 'knew' and told me what they were. Then we were left with a few bits he wasn't sure of (see the black thing above). When I told him to think about it he played with the items for a bit before declaring that the black thing was seaweed. A quick check with our friend Mr Google and we found out that Jakob was right, it was indeed seaweed! No idea how he worked that one out, we live nowhere near a beach the ones we've been to haven't had seaweed that looks anything like this! But impressed nonetheless.
Our nature box
Before we sent ours I took a couple of quick snaps with my phone. I didn't want to post before in case whoever was receiving it saw and knew what they were getting! As you can see above they were pretty similar. We used an egg carton and wrapped the bits in tissue paper.
I also put a sticker on each one saying what the item was and where we found it. We included items from around London, Surrey and different places along the south coast.
Some of the items we weren't actually sure what they were so we put '??? (London, UK)' and hopefully the family who got our box had fun googling what items were, as we did.
We included things that were the same but from different places - such as shells from different beaches... and also some of the same objects that were collected at different times, to hopefully engage some more exciting learning from the child who recieves it - for example we included an old shrivelled up conker, and a new shiny one in it's spikey shell. That's what the red labels are - a couple of the items were spikey or sticky!
To finish off there is one unwrapped item. We made a wood medallion from a branch in our garden, drilling a hole and tying some string. This is something we first did at Just So Festival a couple of years back and Jakob loved making it and keeping it as a souvenir - we've been waiting for an excuse to make another one and this was the perfect opportunity!
We had a great idea to cover the carton in different coloured autumn leaves. We got as far as one. We didn't flatten or press it first so it was the biggest pain ever to stick down and ended up with globs of modge podge everywhere... but hey it was still prettier than a plain egg carton!
And then before we sent it off we included a postcard. I can't remember what I wrote now - probably something like 'we hope you guys enjoy these nature bits and pieces. We left some unlabelled for you to explore!' - who knows.
All in all it was a super fun experience. Very hard trying to find objects that will not cause the parcel to be ripped open by the post police due to so many natural items being on the restricted list to send to the US. We did our best!
I'm hoping mud puddles does another nature exchange next year, the boys loved receiving a parcel and were so excited to see all the bits of nature from somewhere else in the world :)