Games to play on family walks

Over the past year, we’ve been on lots of family walks. Sometimes we’ve been in the mood and other times it has been a real struggle to get motivated and get the children out of the door. I found it helps if we have an activity or game to play on the way. It can move the focus from moaning and strops to something we all end up enjoying. Here are some family friendly games to help your kids stray from the dreaded question; ‘Are we there yet?’

These family friendly games provide activities for a range of ages!

Here are a few of our favourites:

Numbers

Our absolute favourite! Go on a number hunt. Where can we find numbers? How many different places can we see numbers? It actually surprised me how many different places we spotted numbers. Here are some examples from our number walk: bus number, number plates, house numbers, cycle routes, bins, road signs and speed limits. What is the largest number we saw? Can you find numbers 1-10? Was there somewhere that had a number that you hadn’t thought of? Can your little ones point out which Mark Maker characters represent any of these numbers??

Eye Spy

A classic but such a good one for looking around and using initial sounds. Eye spy with my little eye I spy something starting with b? An alternative is ‘I hear with my little ear..’ and others guess what you can hear. This is a great one as everyone is really quiet (even if it’s just for a few minutes/ seconds!).

Colours

What can you find that is red? yellow? With toddlers this is a great way to learn colours but also related them to real life objects. For older children you could pick a colour that may be harder to find such as light pink or turquoise. We also play this on long car journeys and spot different colour cars.

Spy Chart

I love this one and used it when I was teaching and we went on local area walks. This does require a bit of time before the walk and a few resources. With the children we talked about objects we might see on our walk. I did this with my children during lockdown. We were going for one of our usual walks round the park and to the local corner shop. At the time they were fed up and didn’t want to go. So, we sat down and talked about what we might see and made a little list: postbox, a green front door, a house number with number 10 on it, a bench, a road sign..etc. Some I knew we would see and others we decided we weren’t sure if we would. I let the children design their own sheet where they drew pictures and I added a little tick box next to each picture. The children used clip boards and a pencil each and off we went. My daughter who is 5 decided to just tick the things she saw. However, my son who is 7 decided to do a tally and see how many road signs we would see and how many green front doors. For this I went with my children’s ideas. Looking back at when I did this with a Year 1 class, we searched and searched for a purple front door. This activity is great for encouraging talking and making children really look for specific things.

These are just a few we like to play, but I would love to know more. Do you have a game you play on family walks? We love finding new and unique ways to play so drop your ideas in the comments!

Happy walking.

Thanks for reading.

Love Lene x