It has been a long-cherished belief of mine that boys are like puppies: as long as you give them a good walk/ exercise, they're generally happy for the rest of the day :) Hence when our little blessings arrived, we turned from a fairly 'indoors' kind of couple, to a family who can frequently be found out and about in the fresh air... and LOVING it! I remember I relished being outdoors as a child & can only wonder where I lost that. I'm so grateful to my boys for giving it back to me :)
Thie first thing that prompted this train of thought today was reading an article (sorry to say I can't remember where now, but you'll have read the sort before) bemoaning the lack of time that children spend outdoors nowadays.
Secondly, the boys received their "Nature Detectives" spring pack from the Woodland Trust, absolutely packed with goodies such as a Nature Decoder, mystery code challenge, tree blossom hunt, wordsearch, spotters sticker & colouring sheet, flower & tree top trumps, newspaper project to complete (all of this, and they also get weekly challeges sent by email) - and as it only cost us £20 for all three boys' membership for the year (bargain!) I'm sharing the link for anyone else who might be interested... Nature Detectives.
Even better, you don't have to be a member to get some fab ideas for enjoying the 'great outdoors' - follow this link for free downloads, also provided by the Woodland Trust. There are way too many resources for me to go into here, but some of our favourites are the bingo sheets - with a selection of objects in nature to tick off as you go on your walk (we like to laminate ours so they don't get ruined within 5 minutes)
So, I'll admit that this blog entry has turned into a bit of a 'plug' for the Woodland Trust's five-star resource, but as more and more people are becoming aware of the essential challenge to get our children experiencing nature outdoors, I like to think that these links may help someone who stumbles across these pages :)
Love this!
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