Activities
Consider these intergenerational activities that can be done with elders and schools, pre-schools, community groups, or your grandfather, grandmother or grandchild. Check back here as we add text and pictures, resources and lessons over the next months.
- Step outside and take a walk together, simple but rich with opportunity
- Take a younger or elder friend to a Nature Centre
- Plant bulbs together in pots or raised beds so elders can reach easily
- Check out our bread and jam recipe (Resources and Ideas) Happy Harvest!
- Make dandelion chains for elders and children to wear
- Make care home table centres with dried seed pods, twigs and garden found foliage
- Build an IG terrarium inside large jars bought from the second hand store
- Invite Sierra Club to do a presentation for elders and youth combined
- Use the seeds from the pumpkins carved together to create mosaics
- Find elder wisdom in Naturalist Clubs and invite them for a walk with children
- Make a leaf collage or leaf rubbing, identify the leaves together
- Share stories of gatherings that were made special by sharing food
- Talk about resourcefulness, harvest, hunting, fishing
- Have an old fashioned track and field afternoon with wheelbarrow races, etc.
- Share songs of the land, Jimmy Crack Corn, Mockingbird Hill, and so on
- Play bocce or crochet
- Talk about life cycles
- Bring tools such as cherry pitters, butter churns, cookie presses, share stories
- Make butter
- Share bubble blowing outdoors
- Have animals visit
- Invite a fisher to tell stories of the salmon, the lobster, the cod
- Ask Let’s Talk Science for a scientist to address children and elders
- Trace immigration across the continent
- Have an Earth Day Scavenger Hunt… a fir cone, a piece of granite, a bird feather
- Share information about synthetics and natural fibres, test to identify
- Bake something ‘from scratch’
- Invite elders to share their favourite recipes, make a recipe book of favourites
- Borrow the school or church kitchen. Invite elders to contribute the recipes, while parents of children make the meals under elder supervision. Serve the meal to everyone involved. Charge to just cover the food.
- Share cultural and religious celebrations with generations
- Nature’s band: whistle on a blade of grass, tap sticks, drum on a pumpkin, and make a bass fiddle from a broomstick, some string and an overturned empty, gallon paint can.
- Have a wheelie day where elders watch while youth show off their skills on skateboards, roller blades, bicycles, and maybe even borrowed wheelchairs.
- Have celebrations out of doors
- Go on an Intergenerational Mystery Bus Tour, with stops at the Apiary, lake look-out, apple pressing shed, local outdoor market, and be sure to include an eating spot stop
- Chase rainbows, share snowflakes, pick flowers, and rake leaves together!
Under Current Project Up-dates, check out Assiniboine Park Conservatory in Winnipeg, Manitoba for text and photos of their Intergenerational Project.
Go to LINKS and click on the UBC Intergenerational Landed Learning Project.