Ideas for Families: Exploring Nearby Nature Together

Looking for more creative things to do outdoors? Below is a LONG list of outdoor activities.

Courtesy of the Four Winds Nature Institute in nearby Chittenden, VT!


  1. Pull out the picnic blanket and do some cloudspotting.
    Bring out your watercolors and paint the sky.
  2. Tag a tree and photograph a branch daily as the buds burst. Hold a white piece of cardboard behind the twig to get a close-up photograph.
    Use a key to identify your tree:
  3. Write haiku on slips of paper and hang on a favorite tree in celebration of the Spring Equinox!
    Some help:
  4. Fingerpaint with mud! Hang the artwork up outside using clothesline and clothes pins.
  5. Create a musical sound station in your yard with sap buckets, metal spoons, varying lengths and diameters of sticks, and more!
  6. Build a stick fort big enough for the whole family to fit in! (Or maybe just for a teddy bear.)
  7. Put on your mud boots and follow a nearby riverbank upstream as far as you can. Watch your footing as the water is cold!
  8. Bring out the measuring tape, compass, clipboards and pencils and create a map of your yard or nearby park.
  9. On a sunny day, mark a spot to stand, and draw your shadows in chalk on the sidewalk every hour and watch them move.
  10. Put on your puddle boots and wade into a nearby stream to see what critters are living under the rocks!
  11. Gather some rocks and sticks and make sundials.
  12. On April 1st, bring in some freshly cut twigs with buds at the ends, put them in water and watch which ones open first.
  13. Stir up some craft dough and collect winter weeds to make miniature bouquets.
    (You can find a craft dough recipe here:
  14. Go on a walk in the coniferous woods specifically to collect a variety of cones. Later you can use these to create cone critters with glue and googly eyes and funny little felt hats.
  15. Shape walnut-sized pieces of bees wax or modeling clay into miniature woodland critters. Find a mossy rock home for them.
  16. Take a night time walk and listen for owls, spring peepers, wood frogs and more.
  17. Build a bee hotel:
  18. Raining outside? Put on your raincoats and rainboots and sit quiety watching the raindrops hit the puddles and the soil.
  19. Look for the moon each night and create your own moon chart out of white paper circles cut to shape and glued onto a background of black roll paper.
  20. Peel some crayons and do some tree bark rubbings.
  21. Start some sunflower seeds for a sunflower fort this summer.
  22. Create big and small stick stars to hang in your yard!
  23. Pretend you are a wild animal! Have each member of your family choose a different New England wild animal to be for an outing in your nearby woods. What would a deer be
    doing? A bobcat? A white-footed mouse?
  24. Challenge your family to a birdwatching contest! Can you find 20 different species in your neighborhood?
  25. Visit a nearby pond. How good is your aim? Toss a piece of driftwood into a nearby pond and then the game is to hit the stick with a rock.
  26. Play tag in a nearby woods, park or your yard. Make up your own rules to the game!
  27. Lie on your bellies on the newly emerging grass and imagine life as an earthworm.
  28. Go on a muddy hike to look for animal tracks!
  29. Create a nice long whole family list of Signs of Spring!
  30. Take photos of your family in nature and tag Four Winds and BPRW in your social media: #btvparks, #fwni, #nearbynature, #thenatureprogram, #fourwinds


Photo by Tetyana Kovyrina from Pexels