10 activities on....Nature walks

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1.      Create a nature assault course. Fashion loose branches into jumps, race around prickly bushes, leap over ditches and tiptoe through patches of daisies without touching one…lose a point if you do step on a daisy!

2.      See what you can discover with a pocket microscope. Be fascinated by what leaves and flowers look like up close and see if you can you find a bug that will sit obligingly still while you take a peek.

3.      Make a quadrat and have fun exploring the changing biodiversity during your walk. Record what you find in the frame. Identify and tally the number of plants and note any other features. Then try this again in a different patch on your walk. We cut frames out of some cardboard recycling and they worked perfectly for the duration of the kids attention!

4.      Have fun hunting on a rainbow or alphabet scavenger hunt.

5.      Collect flowers and leaves to create a beautiful ‘stained glass’ picture. The Artful Parent has a great tutorial here.

6.      Collect pretty flowers and press them. Perhaps they can be used on home made cards or even for the stained glass picture in the previous activity. Pressing flowers can be done by placing them sandwiched on kitchen towel between heavy books or using a flower press.

7.      Fill a vase with flowers! Simply draw a vase onto some paper or card and then make several holes for the flower stems to poke through. Pick some pretty flowers and fill up your vase. We had lots of fun trying this but hadn’t planned how to transport them home. Thankfully they didn’t get too squashed between pages in my notebook and made it home in one piece. We then used some sticky tape on the back to hold the stems in place.

8.      Make a nature globe by placing cut up petals and leaves in a jar of water. Ninos and Nature has a great tutorial here with the added bonus of learning a little Spanish too.

9.      Take a bird book out with you and see how many different birds you can spot. Also check out Merlin Bird ID, an app that you can use to identify bird song. See if you can hear the skylark.

10.   Learn all about bees and see how many different bees you can spot on your walk. There are hundreds of different bees in the UK.