Enjoy Summer While It's Still Here

The commercials for back-to-school clothing and supplies have already been playing on television for a couple of weeks. It seems too soon, but schedules will only get busier with school and extracurricular activities on the horizon. Create some memorable outdoor experiences with your kids.

• Have the kids eat breakfast outside. Outside can be the front stoop, a porch, a patch of grass beneath a tree. Breakfast can be simple – muffins and juice, Canadian bacon between a couple of waffles. Bring a thermos of coffee for yourself.
• Take a walk around the neighborhood … when it is raining.
• Collect leaves or flowers and press them between the pages of a dictionary.
• Go to a farmer’s market. Give each child one dollar to make a purchase of something for dinner.
• Count the number of birds that visits your feeder over five or ten minutes.
• Have a picnic lunch or supper in the backyard, at the park, at the beach, at the local forest.
• Read a bedtime story outside by flashlight as the day’s light fades.
• Lie on blankets and watch the stars come out.

Outdoor time doesn’t have to involve elaborate experiences but simple moments when everyone is present in the activity.

Backyard Nature Fun

Whether your child loves collecting rocks or looking at insects, you don't have to travel far to encourage their interest in nature. By looking at the nature in their backyard, kids learn that nature is all around them and that it isn't limited to rainforests and polar bears that they can watch on television.

Below are links to explorations, games, and craft projects that kids can do in their own backyard, some on their own and other activities with at least one other child (or adult).

Play This Magic Square Nature Collection Game
Go Bug Collecting for Outdoor Fun
Make a Stone Cairn
Nature Memory Games
Backyard Games that Get Kids Playing in Nature
Activities for Kids Who Collect Rocks
How to Discover What Worms Need to Survive

Backyard Summer Fun

Although summer brings family vacations and camp experiences for some children, kids may best enjoy the simplicity of spending time in their own backyard. Whether kids are getting together with siblings, neighbors, or friends and relatives who are over the house for a play date or a party, there are an endless number of ways kids can have fun right at home.

Cool Summer Fun with Icy Kids' Activities

Backyard Games for Active Kids

Games Played with Sticks for Indoor and Outdoor Fun

How Kids Can Invent Fun Games to Play Outdoors

How to Make Bubble Blowers

Water Balloon Games

Backyard Camping for Kids and Families

Weather or Not to Send Kids Outside

Originally published 4/06/2011 at explorelongtheway.com

Many adults remember playing outdoors as kids no matter what the weather was; in fact, the way they tell it, their parents insisted on it. Drizzle or downpour, sun or snow, kids played outdoors. The ironic thing is that the topic of playing outside as kids comes up when people start commenting on how today’s kids stay indoors because their parents insist on it.

Now, theoretically, some of those outdoor-playing children of the past are the present-day parents with the deer-in-the-headlights look when they hear that their child will be walking through more than an inch of snow or going outside during a light rain.

So, what happened to the outdoor-playing children of the past to turn them into weather-wary parents of the present? In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv cites evidence to the benefits of being outdoors along with data supporting the increasing unlikelihood of finding children enjoying the outdoors. Yet, if children have a place to go outside – whether it is the schoolyard or the backyard – why do many adults use weather to stop them at the door? Current outdoor clothing seems more apt for the weather than what I wore thirty-plus years ago as a kid. Still, as a child, I was entrenched in a variety of weather-appropriate outerwear.

However, I have seen kids come to outdoor field trips without hats, gloves, and no more than a sweatshirt when there was two feet of snow on the ground. During rainy days at summer camp – a nature camp, mind you, numerous children wouldn’t arrive with a raincoat and they would insist that they didn’t even own such a garment.

I’m thinking that some kids don’t have things to wear outdoors so they don’t go outside and their parents don’t buy them outerwear because their kids don’t go outdoors. Will the child who runs from vehicle to building when it is raining ever become an adult who does more than move from one climate-controlled environment to the next? Will watching the nature channel on a rainy day replace laughing at bedraggled squirrels trying to twitch their tails dry and fluffy or pulling earthworms out of puddles and moving them to the drier soil beneath the shrubs. Can you love nature when you don’t even know it?