8 simple outdoor activities for toddlers and preschoolers to play in your own backyard, using things you already have around your house.
If you’re looking for simple outdoor activities for young children, you are going to love it here! I have so many ideas for simple outdoor play on my site!
Much of our time is spent outdoors and quite often we make our fun with items found in nature. These items allow for open-ended, creative play. Imaginations flourish and memories are made!
Here are 8 very simple outdoor activities for toddlers and preschoolers to have fun with!
Using a craft stick to file a piece of sidewalk chalk: lots of fun can be had with the colourful chalk dust!
Sidewalk chalk isn’t just for sidewalks! Kids love decorating rocks with it too!
Pinecones are also fun to decorate with sidewalk chalk!
Decorating tree trunks and roots is also fun to do with sidewalk chalk!
Rocks painted with x’s and o’s and a tic-tac-toe board drawn with chalk on an old patio table.
Create a fairy garden in an old planting pot. Soil, succulents, stones and tiny figurines. So enchanting!
Create a small water-world in a shallow pan with some plastic animals, water and stones.
Mix up some “garden soup”! Kids will have a great time snipping flowers and leaves from the garden into a bowl of water!
Give some of these simple outdoor activities with your hooligans! And let us know if you come up with any that you think we’d like to try!
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
Jacqueline
I absolutely love these outdoor play ideas. I think we need to add some ramps to our sandbox too.
Amanda @ http://gratefullygrowingingrace.blogspot.com/
These ideas are great, great, great! I particularly love the chalk dust! We do a lot of outdoor obstacle courses at our house:
Jamie @ hands on : as we grow
Those are awesome ideas – all simple and easy to do. Love that leaf maze – so cool!
happyhooligans
Thanks, everyone! Glad you liked them! My daycare is closed for the summer (all of the Hooligans are children of teachers so they’re home with their parents until September). I’m just using pictures from activities that we did from Sept to June of this past year. I can’t wait until they’re back and we can get busy doing all the ideas I’ve collected from other blogs this summer. 🙂
jenny
Jackie, that maze is a-mazing!
The Housewife
I love the leaf labyrinth! We did a maze similar to that in the snow last year. Really fun ideas — thanks for sharing them!
Eddie
Some wonderful ideas here! Your daycare kids are very lucky!
Mark
Love the rocks as tic tac toe idea. Some great ideas here that my 4 and 6 year old boys will enjoy. I will share them with my readers at http://www.excitedkids.com
Nancy Shaw
Great list of outdoor activity ideas, agree with you some of them are educational.