Top wild activities for park play
Recently, we held our Woodland Trust ‘Invite A Tree to Tea’ party in Coalville Park and we had a blast! Leaf-shaped shortbread and savoury muffins in hand, we popped along with our money box and carefully prepared props and raised some money for the charity. Did you know that it costs £10 for The Woodland Trust to maintain just 3m of woodland path?
To try and engage the kids with as much as possible I wanted to do a few nature-based activities in between the cake-scoffing. So we got busy in the days before and it was so worth it — they really got involved with everything I had planned. It was awesome to see children so excited about nature! Here are a few of the things we got up to.
Collecting with nature nets
We collected some sticks the weekend before the party whilst visiting friends in Glasgow. This was fun in itself and little M loved running around trying to find the perfect sticks with the ‘prongs’ we needed. Ideally you need sticks with two or three prongs.
Then all you need is some wool. Any colour will do! Tie one end onto one twig, wind it around and around until you have little sections that things can be slotted in to. Tie off again at the end and voila, you have yourself a nature net!
On the day of the tree party, the kids loved collecting things for their nets — they worked perfectly! We collected interesting leaves, acorns, feathers and even pine cones and they were a lovely souvenir for our guests to take home with them.
Spotting with nature ID sheets
Woodland Trust were kind enough to send us some sheets in the Tree Party pack we were sent but you can grab similar ones online. Try these leaf ID or minibeast spotter sheets which you can download and print.
We managed to find about half of the leaves and items on our nature spotter sheet in our little corner of the park which we were super happy with. The kids really got into it — with the happy squeals of delight in their voices you’d have thought we were on a treasure hunt! The leaves especially really got them thinking about different shapes and features such as the serrated edges on some.
Wild art with bark rubbings
Another homemade activity we tried was bark rubbings on the trunk of our tree of honour. I cut some leaf shapes out of paper and took some crayons along with us and this proved a very popular activity, especially with the younger guests. Definitely one for all ages!
Playing Cake Dash
The Woodland Trust box of goodies handily unfolded into a mini board game. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to convince a group of under 5s to sit still for more than two minutes to play but sit still they did and it was great!
We did cheat slightly and I snuck a dice into the bag (the game features a little ‘throw a stone across some numbers’ instruction as a natural alternative but I thought I’d be chancing it a little if I expected a group of little ones to do this without the game taking five hours or more to complete!). We did use a twig, an acorn and a pebble for counters though and the girls loved the game.
Something like this could easily be devised at home. Think of a few challenges to add to some of the squares too as this was the fun part. Find a minibeast and jump ahead two squares was our favourite!
What are your favourite nature-based games or activities? Let me know in the comments below.
To find out more about The Woodland Trust’s work, visit their website here. Invite A Tree To Tea has come to an end for this year but give our activities a try and visit the charity’s Nature Detectives page for some equally awesome outdoor fun and games.
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