Looking for some fun, nature-themed activities to do at home with family? The Fur-Bearers have assembled a list of our favourites that everyone can enjoy. What are some of yours? Let us know on social media!
Indoor activities
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- Teach your kids how to tend to the houseplants.
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- Grow herbs, sprouts, or mushrooms indoors and use these for cooking.
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- Hang artwork on the walls depicting plants, animals, and landscapes.
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- Fill your children’s bookshelves with nature guides, animal picture books, or subscribe to nature-themed magazines.
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- Choose story time books about animals or the relationship between the environment and people.
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- Direct kids to nature and science-based television programming and websites, ‘nature cams’ or documentaries.
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- Make a comfortable indoor bird watching station with pillows, a bird guide, binoculars, and note paper.
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- Make a biosphere!
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- Nature games to buy.
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- Read together books on spring and gardening.
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- Make a sprout house!
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- Do some nature kids yoga.
Outdoor activities
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- Start by making a nature journal. Kids draw whatever they want on the front then do activities during the day on the pages inside.
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- Do a 5 senses warmup. Spend time looking at what animals they might see around them, thinking about what they might taste, touching the ground and describing what it feels like, closing their eyes and smelling the air, and then closing their eyes again and listening.
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- Do a scavenger hunt as one of the pages where they check off when they find a few different things like bird nests, woodpecker holes, animal paths and different smelling leaves. This gets them to look at plants differently too.
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- Get samples of conifers and osoberry (Indian plum) and ask them to see which one smells like cucumber and which smells like orange when crushed.
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- Look at different tree species through their bark or leaves by doing rubbings of them with crayons in the journal.
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- Make a sound map. Put a dot in the centre of a blank page and make a dot every time they hear a different sound in relation to where they are on the page. This is a quiet activity. Wait 30 seconds then ask how many different sounds people heard and what those sounds were.
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- Draw a picture in their journal of anything cool kids see, like a chickadee if he comes close or a cool bug they see.
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- Bug shake – always a huge hit! Take white cloth or old white pillowcases and put them under a bush. Ask kids to choose a magic word and then shake the bush. Pull out the pillowcases and have kids check out the cool bugs. Give them magnifying glasses and show them how to use them, also talk about how we aren’t going to squish any of them. These are also great to put in nature journals.
By doing some of these there’s hopefully no way you or your family will get bored during time spent at home. Remember to add your favourite activities to the comments on our social media pages!
