Weekend Project: Celebrate National Parks (without visiting one)

April 16–24 is National Park Week. As stated on the National Park Service’s website: “It’s about making great connections, exploring amazing places, discovering open spaces, enjoying affordable vacations, and enhancing America’s best idea — the national parks! It’s all happening in your national parks.”

If you have a chance to visit a national park, admission is free during this celebration week. You can use this link to locate nearby parks, which don’t necessarily mean a park in the sense of a natural area to explore but can also include museums and cultural experiences.

I won’t be able to take my daughter to a national park this weekend, but I can still explore them and aspects of their mission with her in other ways, like:

• Friday, April 22 is Earth Day! Discuss what Earth Day is over dinner together and go outside afterwards to look at the trees and things in our own yard.
• Watch part of Planet Earth (available via Netflix). I’ve watched part of this with my daughter before, and she loved it. It’s visually stunning, and the scenes keep even a toddler’s attention. What a beautiful way to explore parts of the world she can’t visit on her own just yet.

• When we walk the dogs this weekend, we can pause to look at flowers, bees (and discuss why we may not see as many bees), and talk about how we have sidewalks as a public good in the same way that we have roads to travel and national parks to visit.
• When we go to our local park where my daughter uses the playground, I can talk with her again about the concept of a public good, something we share like she shares toys at daycare. I think it’s important for her to understand that groups of people can come together to provide something wonderful that a single person may not be able to make happen individually.

Other ideas:

• Download and print Happy 100th Birthday, National Parks! This activity book is probably best for 3+)
• Watch The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (free via PBS.org). This “is a six-episode series produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan and written by Dayton Duncan. Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — The National Parks: America’s Best Idea is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.”
• Find a volunteer opportunity as a way to celebrate Earth Day.
• Download and print the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species coloring book. Though it’s from 2013, the content is still relevant, and it’s a way to start discussions about the animals noted inside.
• There are a lot of short YouTube videos about the national parks. There is a series of short videos linked to here, of which the video below is just one. This video is 4 min 46 seconds long, which for me is short enough to keep my daughter’s attention span but long enough to give her a sense of what the video is trying to communicate about the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.