The Rock Collection

Do any of your children collect rocks?

Aiden is always picking up rocks {and other cool nature objects like pinecones and acorns},
but mostly he picks up rocks.

Here in Florida, the rocks aren’t very good {maybe few and far between is a better way to put it}.
Are you surprised – with Florida essentially being a sand bar and all?
I mean we don’t really have dirt here; we have very sandy soil.

Even still, my son finds the decorative rocks that wash down from people’s yards.
His favorite place to gather rocks is our front yard.
There is a lot of leftover white rocks from what was probably a nice flower bed.
Now there’s just a bunch of random white rocks scattered through the yard.

My husband has a rock collection – well most of his are really fossils, but fossils are still rocks – they just have more personality.
We were digging through boxes the other day and pulled out some rocks for Aiden to see.

He had tons of fun carrying them around, moving them from place to place.

We talked to him about the different plants and animals he was seeing.

We explored the textures of the different rocks.
We observed the various shapes and colors.

Today, Aiden asked to play with his rocks.
He has a bucket of rocks in a closet.
I like to keep them in one place and only let him have the rocks under adult supervision.

I got out the rocks for him.
He then asked to paint the rocks.
We have painted a few acorns and rocks before.

This time, he wanted to paint the entire collection of white rocks.

So I broke out the paint and let him go to town.

He decided to use every paint brush I had in the room.

I liked how he had to be precise with his painting to get the paint on the small rocks.
He was working on his fine motor skills.

We also created a new home for his rock collection. {I helped, but it was his idea.}
I’ll tell you more about that on Monday.

What do your little ones like to collect?

Linking up here and here.