When we moved to Singapore we were concerned that the kids might lose time outside in nature.

With all the beautiful weather in Singapore, we get outside a lot. My personal goal is to have the kids outside at least 3 hours a day - Every day! That's often on walking paths and amid beautiful gardens, or on playgrounds or in the swimming pool. We go to the Zoo and the Botanic Garden too, but it's not often in truly natural spaces. We do try to get to Nature Reserves ourselves and into Nature Parks, but lately that's more like a couple times a month at most.

That's why I was so happy to get MsE in a Nature Class which meets weekly in a Nature Reserve. In 5 months, MsI will be old enough to attend too. I was pretty thrilled with the Nature Class' activity last week:

Fire Building.

The kids start each week with their Treasure Buckets collecting anything that strikes their fancy, which they then share in a Show and Tell with the other kids.

But this week the kids were directed to only gathered firewood in their Treasure Buckets. They collected big and little pieces, sticks and leaves, and grasses too. They sorted their finds by size as a group. They talked about what is needed to make a fire burn and what makes good firewood. They practiced their fire safety skills.

The instructors then helped each child start a fire using a flint. The kids cooked Marshmallows and made Smores and drank Milo (Hot Chocolate).

The fire starting is pretty exciting, because we won't be doing any camping in Singapore. It's available. You can get campsites in a number of parks, and there's camping in the surrounding countries too of course, but I'm not going camping where there are actual deadly snakes and scorpions that can crawl into my kids sleeping bags. No thanks, I'll wait till we're back in Canada where we'll all just be cold camping.

Actually I would consider an RV roadtrip somewhere like Australia, so maybe MsE's fire skills will be put to use.

As usual, we spotted lots of birds on way out of the park, including the resident Peacock and all the Jungle Fowl. The Jungle Fowl had babies with them again too.