6 Activities You Can Do Outdoors with Little Ones
How Parents and Educators Can Support Child-Led Learning From the Outdoors.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to spend more time outdoors this year. Luckily for me, having a toddler makes this pretty easy. My daughter loves going outside.
It’s become part of our morning routine where after we have breakfast, she immediately brings me my shoes, puts on her own shoes, gets my mask and keys and is ready to head out the door! (sometimes even when I am still in my pajamas!).
Due to the limitations of the Shelter-in-place order implemented during the holidays, we have been staying close to home and our walks consist mostly of going around the neighborhood.
Recently, a friend shared with me the “1000 hours outside” journey and it piqued my curiosity. 1000 hours a year comes to about 3 hours a day that you spend outside. Now that my toddler is walking, she’s been asking to go outside every day and this seems like a fun goal to try to achieve this year.
My daughter’s eagerness has motivated me to go outside every day. When I see the joy and curiosity in her eyes as we venture into the sunlight, my heart smiles.
Similar to what I would do with my students, I would teach or have them engage in an activity that promotes learning across different developmental domains. I see how that can be applied with nature just from my experience bringing the outdoors to learning at home.
As an educator with almost 10 years of experience teaching, I have seen firsthand the positive effect being outdoors with physical play has on children. Recess time, being the main allotted time they spend outside, is so sacred for most children.
This is the time for them to be wild and free, play with others and get a break from sitting in a classroom. It is also a time for them to apply and practice skills they learned when it comes to social-emotional skills such as problem-solving and relationship skills.
Furthermore, I’ve also had the opportunity to experience how the outdoors can become a third teacher to children and can be combined with other developmental domains. A few years ago, I attended a professional development trip to China to visit schools that have adopted the “Anji play” philosophy.
I was in the first international group who visited these Kindergarten schools in Anji, China. It was an incredible experience — I got to meet like-minded educators from all over the world who shared a passion for early childhood education.
The Anji Play philosophy is grounded on the idea of leaving children room to explore outdoors while teachers facilitate their learning. Children created their own “learning stories” inside and then went outside to put their creations into practice. The learning stories supported connections between their cognitive, language and gross motor domains.
Now with the pandemic, schools and parents at home have resorted to virtual learning. With indoor places still closed or with limited capacity, the outdoors have become the go-to for play-dates and excursions as well as a sanctuary from being indoors.
Engaging in outdoor learning activities supports integrative, or interdisciplinary, learning as it promotes learning in multiple disciplines at once. Interdisciplinary learning refers to the “interdisciplinary teaching as an approach that integrates different aspects of more than one academic discipline to examine a theme, issue, question, or topic”. In turn, children are making cross-curricular connections and it supports making learning meaningful.
When I was distance teaching, I made sure to include activities that were interdisciplinary, especially connecting nature with their academic learning. It’s essential for children to engage in real world hands-on experiences just as much as it is learning from a virtual screen.
Here are 6 activities parents/educators can do outside with little ones:
- Going on a Nature Hunt:
I would give students a “nature hunt” every week. I would share a paper of things that they would look for on their walk outside. Some examples included birds, butterflies, ants, as well as flowers and plants. This is great for supporting language development, as well as 1:1 correspondence which is a mathematical and cognitive concept that supports learning about numeracy.
I do a modified version with my toddler by engaging in a similar game to “I spy” but instead I call it “what do you see?” and since she is still working on her verbal language skills, I follow her cues. I direct this activity and say “I see a….(insert word).”
This is also great for multilingual learners (such as my toddler). Here is a photo of her pointing at the tree after I said “Arbre” (french for tree). Reciting what you see outdoors is also great for supporting language and cognitive development as it forms connections in children’s brains with vocabulary words and what they see outside.
2. Creating a Nature Collage:
This is a great way to incorporate nature with art that supports fine motor skills. I would ask students to collect items (usually revolving around the topic or concept we were learning) and create something with it on a piece of paper with any type of material. The opportunities were endless: some children painted, others used markers and colored pencils while others chose to simply glue their items and leave it blank.
I did this activity with my toddler too, although with a bit more guidance from me. I made this project into a week-long activity and made it multifaceted to incorporate her interests. First, I had her decorate the paper with colored pencils, then we decorated it with stickers the next day (she loves stickers right now!), collected nature items on our walk and glued them on for the final touch.
3. From Farm to Table: Gardening/Cooking Activity:
At my school we had a small community garden where we would grow fruits and vegetables. The children would learn to water the plants, as well as taste the fruit of their labor for a special snack. I loved cooking and baking with my students, and it was a huge perk if it came from our very own garden!
This is a great way for children to learn where the food they eat comes from, as well as getting them involved in the kitchen. Some example activities you could do is cook or bake a meal together (either from the garden/grocery store) and watering and documenting different plants and seeds. I planted beans before with my class and watched them grow!
You can also have a picnic outside. I love to bake with my toddler and have her participate in the process with me. The other day we made sourdough bread and brought it with us on our morning hike! However, you don’t need to make something to have a picnic. Some fresh fruit will suffice too :)
4. Mark-making with Nature Items:
Another early literacy skill is mark-making, which supports fine motor skills of holding a tool to make marks with. When I was teaching in the classroom, I would take my students outside and collect items that they found that they can try to write with on a piece of paper. We would experiment and see — which one works and which one doesn’t? We became scientists and hypothesized.
With my toddler, I simplified this activity by finding simple nature items like sticks and rocks, and modeled to show her how to use them. Behavior modeling is a wonderful way to teach children something new.
5. “This is Not a Box”:
One of my favorite books to read to my students (and now my toddler) is the book “ Not a box” by Antoinette Portis. After reading this book with my class, I’d have my students draw a box and create something new from a simple drawn rectangle. I did this often with my students, for example taking the letter of the week (eg. A) and drawing something with the letter A. I loved seeing all their different creations!
We also did a similar “this is not a box” activity with my toddler. With the expertise of my husband, we created a camera out of a box! After we painted the box together, I followed her lead with her preference of paint she wanted to decorate it with. We brought it outside to use during our morning walk and we had so much fun using it outside and trying to see the sun!
Some other ideas you can use to make a box to use outside: a car ramp, a sled, a house…the possibilities are endless! And the best part, you do not need too much, just a box and some art materials and your imagination!
6. Storytelling Outside:
The outdoors can provide children with tools that can unleash their creativity. You can apply a melange of books and outdoor time to create something beautiful. One way to do this is to bring books outside and read them together. Then you can ask children to reenact the story with materials that they find outside (bringing art materials like markers and pens works too). This is great for language development, comprehension skills and sorting and numeracy (what comes first, second, third) but also for pretend play and social skills. This activity supports verbal and non-verbal learners and can be used with picture and wordless books.
“You look at the child, and there’s your curriculum.”
Prior to teaching Kindergarten, I worked at the Google Children’s Center. One of the things I learned working at Google as an educator was, “you look at the child, and there’s your curriculum.” This means that you try to follow a child’s lead in their learning.
Similar to the Anji play philosophy, we created ‘learning stories’ from observing the children and then sharing them with the parents during conferences, as well as providing learning experiences that involved their interests. As a kindergarten teacher, I tried to include the interests of my students in my lessons as well.
I follow a similar belief with my toddler. For example, earlier this week I went on a walk with my toddler. We were about to go back home when she noticed a puddle and wanted to jump in it. I let her explore and sat back to observe in order to see what her big idea was. She started to pick up rocks and put them inside the puddle! I followed her lead in learning. I did not plan for her to throw rocks in the puddle, she did that all on her own.
So in a sense, you don’t need to have much to entertain children. If provided room to explore, they will end up surprising you with their own big ideas.
Nature is a tool to get children to experience not just the wider world, but themselves. -Stephen Moss
I strongly encourage my students, as well as my toddler, to engage in uninterrupted free time outside. I believe that giving children room to play and explore by themselves, without any plan or agenda is also so important. They learn so much from their own exploration- as exploring outside supports the development of the whole child.
Similar to my students, I see the light in my child’s eyes when we go outside. I am drawn to her curiosity in seeing the world from her perspective and each time she always surprises me. It may seem insignificant, but in reality, having children explore without any limitations allows children to develop a strong metacognitive practice that fosters growth, curiosity and critical thinking.
