Exploring the seaside through the sense of hearing

On Friday, the Girl received her first piece of weekend homework: we were invited to explore the world through the sense of hearing. In order to make the task fun and to record our experiences, we bought her a notebook with blank pages (I love that its title is the Happy book).
In this, I will write down what we have done, and she can draw an illustration to go with each entry (since drawing is her favourite activity). And, as we spent the weekend in Southend with Grandma, we decided to take a walk to the seafront, on a sound hunt inspired by a great blog post I read online.

On the way, the Girl listed the things she thought we might hear (and I recorded it all, although some of her ideas were not entirely appropriate):

cars
people eating [hmm… they wouldn’t be very polite, would they?], talking, driving, laughing
friends [yes, I thought this one was a bit … ahem… interesting]
birds – bluebirds [really?…], seagulls
the wind
the waves
digging in the sand [another interesting idea…]

Here is what we did hear:

cars [yes, unfortunately you can’t get away from them]
‘The wind blowing through my hair, which makes a whoosh sound’ [I loved the poetry in this idea, however fanciful]
the wheels on the Boy’s pram, going round
motorbikes
‘Myself yawning’ [this one made us both laugh]
loud music coming from a big motorbike
dogs barking
the clicking sound of the pebbles on the beach
the tweeting of the seagulls
the squeaking of the swings in the park on the way home
the flapping of a crow’s wings

We had a lovely time exploring all of these [and I both tried to encourage, and was impressed by, the Girl’s creativity and colourful use of descriptive language]… and the one thing we did not hear was… SILENCE!!!

And this is what the Girl drew to illustrate her experience (I rather like it – as many times before, her drawings just come to life on the page):