Go Outside for a Walk with Your Children

As an adult, do you associate the outdoors with chores such as mowing the lawn and gardening; sports (as a spectator and as a participant); or with outdoor recreation such as canoeing/kayaking, mountain biking, or hiking up mountains?

You know your kids should spend more time – more free time – outside, but they do sports and have recess at school, so is that enough? However, look at spending time outdoors not just as a “kid” and not even as a “family” thing, but as something that everyone can enjoy in their own special way. The outdoors doesn’t have to be about chores, sports, and organized activities. Spending time outside can be as simple as taking a walk.

Think of a walk as exercise for your body, mind, and spirit. Your heart will pump a little more, your thoughts may seem a little clearer, and your heart may lift a bit higher as you watch the changes of the seasons. A walk is simple. You can direct your child with a few Hiking Games to Get You Moving Outdoors, or just allow your children to explore as they will. If your children like to meander and look at things, then plan to walk a shorter distance so you can stay within your time expectations.

Where to go? Go beyond your backyard and walk through your neighborhood. Explore wooded areas around schoolyards and recreations fields as long as they aren’t posted as private property (they may be an extension of the school or town’s property). Ask other families if they walk in nature and where they go. Look on your town’s website for walking trails.

Do an Internet search of your state and find out what conservation and recreation organizations have locations in your area. Although many charge an annual membership fee, that can work out cheaper than paying one-time trail fees. Before you join, make certain that there are sites within an hour of your house. Closer than that is better because then it won’t feel like an ordeal to drive the distance to take a short walk and then have to drive home. The closer the locations to your home, the more likely you’ll go walking when your child has a half day at school or plans fall through on Saturday morning and you’re wonder what to do for a few hours.

Be creative in getting yourself and your children outdoors for a walk. I love walking the paths of a local cemetery. I’ve found wooded walking paths around a couple of museums. Make a list; keep a file of trail maps the way you keep a file of pizza places. Know where you can get to in less than twenty minutes; jot down notes about what you and your kids liked and didn’t like at different locations. Put on your sneakers and go outside.

Imagination Connections in Nature

How often do you look up at the clouds and imagine seeing dancing elephants and mice chasing tigers? If you don’t envision representations of reality in the clouds, do your children?

I have always loved looking for and finding pictures and patterns in seemingly random things. I have tried to play my cloud game with other adults while we drive along the highway and I tend to hit a resistance that I’ve never encountered with kids and young teens. After a few suggestions, adults sometimes grudgingly tell me that they can’t see what I’m seeing but then they tell me what they see in the pattern of clouds.

Try this with your kids: Look for figures within the pattern of things around you. I have seen faces in the wood grain of doors. The other day, I saw a stick that had a distinct bear-ness to its stance in spite of its skinny stick-ness. It was like an armature waiting to be fleshed out with clay.

It isn’t necessary for clouds, leaves, sticks, rock formation, shrubs, and all that stuff to look like an exact sculpture of what we imagine. In a world where we are accustomed to uniform manufactured items, a three-legged cloud dog may bother children with its imperfection (“That doesn’t look like a real dog.”) but it opens children, and the adults playing along, to curiosity and creativity.

Creativity is not black-and-white. Creativity is gray and fuzzy. It is a starting point. Even a “finished” creative piece can be a jumping off point for future endeavors. (“Next time, I’ll use pink and green together.” “Next time, I’ll add more onions to the soup.”)

This simple creative activity can help children develop problem-solving skills. They realize that they don’t have to accept something as is and that they can look for other options. Kids can learn that it is fun to look for options instead of to wipe the sweat from their brow with relief that they can find one way of doing something, even if that choice is lackluster. Children can learn to recognize patterns as their brains fill in details.

The simple and silly action of looking for faces and figures in the natural (and manmade) world doesn’t take any time, you can do it while driving (watch the road, though), walking, or doing anything else during which time you pause to look around at your surroundings with the fuzzy view that while things are what they are they can also look like other things.

If you don’t normally look for images within other objects, it may take you a while to develop this habit. As I said, this doesn’t have to be a formal activity, you and the kids can just call out the faces and figures you see when you see them. Forcing things for the sake of a game diminishes inspired observations. When someone takes an inventive view of an object, pause for a few seconds to admire their connection. It isn’t necessary to agree, disagree, or offer another point of view. Creativity isn’t about right or wrong; it is about options.

Puddle Science for Kids

If there’s a puddle, most kids will gravitate toward it. A few kids will hold back but oftentimes that is because of fear of mom or dad’s wrath with wet or muddy clothes. Pull out some old, stained, or never-quite-right clothing from your child’s wardrobe and designate them outdoor play clothes if, as mom or dad (or the adult who hands kids off to mom and dad) you are concerned with seeing grass stains and mud across the knees of a pair of jeans.

Spring and summer are great times of year to explore puddles because the weather is warmer and there is less chance of getting chilled. Rain boots are perfect for splashing around; although, an old pair of sneakers is fine as well. Raincoats can be hot and some kids are happier without a coat – if they can go inside and change into dry clothing after time outside, then kids don’t have to deal with the restriction of not getting wet.

Some kids will go outside and feel right at home exploring and playing in puddles. If your child is weather-wary, join them outdoors and guide them through a few simple activities.

Water Activities
If it is raining, watch the way the drops interact with the surface. Children will learn to look outside on a rainy day and predict how hard it is rainy by watching droplets hit the puddles.

Try floating leaves on puddles. Children will see how the depth of water affects the way the leaf boats can move.

Gather a collection of dry twigs (or use craft sticks) and measure the depth of a few puddles. Can the children hypothesize why some puddles are deeper than others?

Splash! Toss different objects into puddles of different depths. What reaction can kids get from a leaf, an acorn, a pebble, or even themselves! Watch for splash patterns. Kids may even want to measure the depth of water in a puddle after they’ve jumped into it.

Encourage children to come up with their own experiments and games – perhaps they will trace the edge of a puddle and measure by the day or hour how quickly it takes to evaporate. If kids haven’t spent a lot of time outdoors in the rain, they may range from timid to wild; try the experience a few times so they can get used to exploring the rainy world.

A Teeny Tiny Nature Hunt

This hike requires kids to look for small items in nature and therefore forces them to walk more slowly. I find that one of the hardest challenges with taking kids into nature – convincing them that they can only really see things in nature if they move slow, giving them the opportunity to look around at their surroundings. If they are dawdling it’s either because they are deep in conversation or they are tired from charging along earlier.

For this nature hunt, give each child a penny. As they walk along, they try to look for things that fit, whole, on the penny. Rocks, seeds, nuts, evergreen needles, buds, grass heads, clover, moss, flowers, ants, millipedes, etc. can all fit on this small surface. If you feel a penny is too small for a child, you could use a yogurt lid, a poker chip, or any other flat surface (it doesn’t have to be round).

Children can do this activity in their backyard as well as any other location in nature. You can play this while walking along a trail or when you stop for a break and the kids want to wander around and explore the area where you’ve paused.

Because the items are so small, you can tell children that they can pluck a bud from a tree branch or a needle from a spruce tree; although, if you’d rather they not damage living plants you can ask kids to hold their penny up to an object in order to confirm the size.

Kids may want to play this game for five minutes or thirty minutes. If the children aren’t inclined to continue moving slowly after finding one or two tiny items, you can randomly call out, “Penny Hunt” while walking and give the children thirty seconds to find as many small objects as they can within that time.

However you play the game, it encourages everyone to notice things that they may have missed while walking along at top speed.