Walking is a wonderful activity to do together as a family all year round. Everyone gets fresh air and exercise, along with valuable time together. However, I know from experience children can sometimes find it boring, but it really doesn’t take much to turn a walk into something fun and magical. Here are my suggestions for things to do on a walk with your children.
- How many different things can you find coloured green (or yellow, or brown etc…)?
- How many things can you find that begin with the letter ‘S’ or ‘T’ or ‘L’ etc…?
- How many different creatures/bugs can you find?
- How many different leaves can you find?
- Can you find something of every colour (of the rainbow)?
- How many different sounds can you hear?
- Walk and balance on a log.
- Climb a tree.
- Jump in muddy puddles.
- Play with leaves (in autumn).
- Collect different types of leaves to take home to do leaf rubbings or art projects.
- Take a camera for kids to take photos.
- Make a scavenger hunt of things for kids to find eg feather, leaves, stick, pinecone, something rough, smooth, round, pretty, noisy etc.
- Go on a bear hunt.
- How many different birds can you see?
- Build a den.
- Hunt for fairies.
- Hunt for dinosaurs.
- Play with a stick…make a stickman, a walking stick or anything a child thinks of.
- Imagination…give your child a theme such as trolls, giants, monsters, space, bugs, animals and watch their imaginary play grow.
To be honest, the list of ways to make a walk enjoyable is endless, nature has a fantastic way of enticing children into having fun and using their imaginations. We have had so many walks that started off as a plain old boring walk, but turned into something completely magical. For example our rocket find and our fairy walk. All you need is a spark of inspiration, some fresh air and hey presto magic can be found anywhere!
Some great ideas. Always good to have some things to do along a walk, it’s always fun and every walk is always different. They’re also good to distract kids when they’re getting weary etc!
Love this list – lots of great ways to make walks fun. Scavenger hunts are always fun and I like the idea of hunting for fairies. Will have to try some of these with the girls 🙂
You’ve got some great tips on how to make a walk with kids more exciting, sometimes they just need that little boost don’t they? Kids really do love den building, even when they’re tweens, my lot still go out exploring the farm building dens. I love the idea of a colour hunt, I might have to do one of those during activity hour!
Great tips although I need some that relate to getting teenagers out on a walk 🙂 Hunting for geocaches is another good tip, particularly at this time of year when they’re not covered in stinging nettles!
We do many of those things too, but our favourite is mushroom spotting
Amazing ideas! I particularly like the thought of looking for fairies and dinosaurs. We go bear hunts quite a lot on our walks xx
Lovely list of ideas 🙂 we walk everywhere because we don’t drive and sometimes it’s easy to forget to find the joy in the walk and only see it as a means from point A to point B!
Such a great list! We try to make our walks enjoyable using some of these ideas too, but O is always insisting on biking at the moment, which isn’t quite the same. I may use the idea of taking his camera out on a walk as a new thing. Then we might be able to walk rather than bike all the time!
I love this list! It’s definitely kick started my imagination. Our walks lately are getting very stale and I’ve been thinking of researching more exciting places to explore. I hadn’t even thought of just making the walks more interesting by introducing things like this.