The Dirtbag’s Guide to Outdoor Educational Activities with Children During COVID19 Quarantine & Isolation: Part 4 Further Afield

Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash

About This Series

This is part four of a 5-part series, "The Dirtbag’s Guide to Outdoor Educational Activities with Children During COVID19 Quarantine & Isolation" co-authored by expert teacher, Jessica Levine.

Read Part 1: Series Intro
Read Part 2: Bloom Where You are Planted here. 
Read Part 3: Explore More

As a brief recap, there are 3 ways we're recommending to go adventuring during this quarantine: 
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1. Bloom where you're planted: Start at your feet, in a 1 meter square of space. These activities require very little movement, but lots of focused observations. 
2. Explore More: These activities are designed for more movement, and may have you going about your yard and neighborhood. This is what we're focusing on in today's post!
3. In this post, we're talking about going "Further Afield": These activities are designed for even more movement, and may require more people, as you explore your relationship to the varied ecosystems of the natural world. ​

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Activities List Taking You Further Afield

These activities are designed for more movement than activities outlined in earlier posts, and may require more people, as you explore your relationship to the varied ecosystems of the natural world. ​

• Listen and record nature sounds. Consider creating a sound map. Sound Map is an excellent activity for instilling greater awareness of one’s surroundings.
• Meet a tree with this excellent simple activity:  In fact, Iceland recommends hugging trees when you can’t hug others right now.
• Geocaching has always offered a large assortment of learning and adventuring. Specifically, in this no-touch, social distancing time, certain geocache types (webcam caches, earth caches, and virtual caches) require no physical objects be placed or touched. Simply use navigation for these location-based experiences. Check out the Adventure Lab app from Geocaching! Each Adventure, created by geocachers around the world will take you on mini tours of areas to points of interest. You can learn from buildings, signs, statues, and more. Great fun for all ages!
• Try a science scavenger hunt. Find one you like by searching the term in google then going to imaging and printing off your favorite for the day. Join a Goosechase, an online scavenger hunt game. 
• Pick a color of the day, and as you explore #nearbynature, collect photos or samples of the range of hues for that color selection. 
• Garnering materials to build a chicken coop. Otherwise, the build part is included in Bloom Where You Are Planted Section.
• Shop for or go in search of dandelions to harvest to make dandelion honey.

• Identify plants -- look for edibles (come on, not that kind) and 4 leaf clover. Use iNaturalist to help you identify all sorts of fauna. 
• Identify trees - use a bingo card. Did you know you can always tell a dogwood tree by its bark? That’s a joke, but what about the bark of trees can be used to identify it. Do a bark rubbing--a large piece of paper is helpful, and you can even use a paper grocery sack opened up! If the tree has already leafed use Leafsnap to upload a photo. 
• Try metal detecting if you can access a metal detector. What is the most common metal? 
• Skip rocks in the creek. Build a stack of rocks on the banks. Look to artist Andy Goldsworthy for inspiration. 
• Identify animal prints. Try casting or drawing them.
• Create field art. Consider using biodegradable paint and materials or natural materials. 
• Build sandcastles at the beach, if you live nearby--if you have to drive it’s too far. 
• Look for fish, tadpoles, and crawdads in the creek--bring along a light colored empty ice cube tray so that as you scoop critters you can further investigate them, and separate them in order to better observe and maybe ID these critters. 
• Use binoculars to look in the mountains, out to the water, to see birds, and to teach about why spying on the neighbors is creepy. Use eBird, iNaturalist, or PeakFinder apps to help you learn more about what you see. 
• Make plant presses out of cardboard. Use almost any sort of paper between layers and weigh down with books. Then create herbarium sheets with information about the specimen, date of collection and name of collector.​

Photo by olena ivanova on Unsplash

• Create nature mandalas or Andy Goldsworthy inspired nature assemblages/sculptures with found items collected respectfully. Teach Leave No Trace principles.
• Grab a handful of crayons out of a box and go on a hunt to find the colors in nature. What color are new leaves? How do they compare to other leaves nearby? 
• Build sandcastles at the beach, if you live nearby--if you have to drive it’s too far. 
• Make a sound wall by suspending items from a rope or wire that make fun sounds when you strike them. For example old keys in a bunch, old tins, spoons, cups. What sound resonates the most? Which lasts the longest? Which is the highest pitch? 
• Make a map by walking or biking. Identify the plants, the neighbors, and the businesses around your blocks. This great book, Map Making with Children--A Sense of Place, has some excellent ideas, including hiding a special coin or object, and then making a treasure map for someone else to find it which can be done even in the house! 
• #trashtag--clean up a natural area near you. Post before and after pictures. ​

In the final installation of this series, we'll be collating and sharing all our resource links from this series. 
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What else would you add? What kinds of activities do you and your family or students get up to that are near to you and low social interaction? Drop them in the comments! ​​


Follow Jessica Levine:
Website: www.greenlevine.wordpress.com 
Twitter: @msgreenlevine
Instagram: @msgreenlevine  and @112Collaboratory