Spring Outdoor Activities for Kids

spring outdoor activities for kids

I hope if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere that it’s getting warm enough where you live to add in some outdoor activities with the kids. It’s easy to do a lot of learning outside when the weather is nice; my daughter has a fond memory of doing long division in sidewalk chalk at her school. But if you need some more specific ideas, here are some fun and educational spring outdoor activities for kids to do at home or at school.

Gather some glass bottles, rocks and other natural materials to make a garden xylophone with these instructions from The Moments at Home. This looks so fun, and you can use this idea to make musical instruments with other objects you find around the home/classroom/playground too.

This post from Child’s Play ABC has a lot of great outdoor learning ideas for kids, but the one I wanted to highlight is going on a rainbow scavenger hunt. Kids can collect things of different colors and see if they can make a rainbow (or just sort things by color). Check out more ideas for scavenger hunts.

Another good activity to do with things you collect from outdoors is making natural paint brushes. Get the instructions from Messy Little Monster, and of course you can test them out by painting outside, too.

Speaking of art, have you ever made paint from dandelions? (I dyed yarn with dandelions once, and it was a lot of fun.) Learn how from Little Cooks Reading Books, and then you can use your natural paintbrushes along with natural paint!

You can also paint with mud, like in this post from There’s Just One Mommy. Or make an outdoor, garden themed sensory bin with real dirt like this one from Mess for Less.

Or kids can gather materials to help them build their own nests as they learn about how birds and other animals build nests. The Crazy Outdoor Mama has a printable and post that will help.

What activities do you love to do with kids when it’s nice outside?

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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