It's pretty silly to get bored with life when there's a sky to watch. The movie keeps on playing, with no intermissions. Mother Nature runs the reel, and She expects us to be paying attention.
Kids nowadays are growing up so different than we did. Most little heads are looking downward, reading text messages from their little friends. We didn't have these gadgets to keep us occupied, so we looked at the world around us and played with it. We did things like watch the clouds, skip rocks on water, slide into first base, and climb trees. All those things got us up nice close and personal with Nature.
A way to show little kids how to have fun with the clouds is to...
- buy them an unlined sketch book and pencil.
- have them write MY CLOUDS on the front cover
- sit outdoors with them and have them look up at the clouds
- have them sketch the clouds as they see them
- have them record the date, the time of the day, and describe the appearance of the clouds
- boost their confidence by saying there is no wrong way to sketch what they see
- size of cloud? color? happy clouds, swirling clouds, gloomy, beautiful, threatening? fluffy, puffy, wispy? like a pillow, or whipped cream?
- sketching the clouds encourages kids to reach inside themselves and pull out their powers of observation
- this game can graduate to finding the fun formations, like this Loaf of French Bread Cloud.
We all see a different world. Even though we have eyes that appear to be the same, they are as individual as our fingerprints when it comes to what we see. Our brain and our eyes talk to each other, and the two of them decide what they want to show us. Isn't that another one of the Creator's stunners?
"Look at your feet.
You are standing in the sky.
When we think of the sky,
we tend to look up,
but the sky actually begins at the earth."
~Diane Ackerman