Outside Spring Play Ideas

In 2014, I read an article by Katie Wells, founder of the Wellness Mama blog. The title of the blog was "Why Kids Need Dirt" and it forever changed my OCD tolerance of dirt. We started to save "old" clothes for use as play clothes outside and thrifted for fun utensils to use in their mud kitchen. Nine years later, we're still playing in mud, but now we have a potato field and the kids bathe in it. 

And with that, here are our favorite outside activities for spring!

Mud kitchen

Wrap sticks in yarn

Bake dandelion cookies

Look at subnivean zones - these are the tunneled path marks in the grass that the mice live in during the winter. They are fun to search for!

Bike washing station

Plant flower bulbs

Mud soup

Smores over a fire

Grate chalk soup - my kids don't use chalk for drawing :P They use a meat pounder or the back of a spoon to powder the chalk and sort it by color into different bowls. Then they take this colored chalk, add water and decorate the top of the "soup" with flowers. Now we have a restaurant with many varieties of soup!

Owl pellets - this is our new favorite thing to do. Under the pine trees near us, the kids have been finding owl pellets. They dissect them using tweezers and create a bone chart of the mice and vole skeletons. 

Paint rocks - sometimes we leave painted rocks at playgrounds for other kids to find. We also make rock strawberries for our garden beds. 

Whittling sticks

Plant seeds - seed starts for our garden.

Birds migrating home - we live by a spring-fed pond and often see migratory birds flying through. Great fodder for a nature journal. 

Resources:

Raising Wild Things - free bird migration nature study and moss nature journal pack

Free Dandelion Printable Workbook

Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner - book about subnivean zones!