Nature Play Workshop for Families: A Guide to 40+ Outdoor Learning Experiences in All Seasons (Workshop for Kids)

I am a new homeschooling mom and was looking for ideas for activities in nature that also had a learning element. This book is packed full of great activities, has colorful pictures, and is an easy read. Great for parents and teachers.

The photos are helpful and it has great and easy ideas to use for a nature based education. Love it!

I love the simplicity and clarity of the various activities. The writing is succinct, pictures helpful and ideas simple. Beautifully laid out by seasons and weather. A wonderful resource for any outdoor teacher.

Purchased the book last week and my daughter and I love it. It has so many wonderful ideas and activities for parent and child and the book is just beautiful. Highly recommend!

Nature Play Workshop for Families takes a nice, simple approach to playing in nature, but with a very narrow definition of "family." Make no mistake about it, these are largely activities for 4-7 year old children. For that age range, though, they seem like a lot of fun. My youngest is enjoying reading about some of the cloud and sky journaling activities, but mom and dad will have limited interest. Some of the activities repeat themselves - foraging in fall and winter, trees and collecting activities in all seasons. The book itself is very nice, with full-color photos on all pages, excellent graphic design and clear, concise language that is very targeted for the age range that is discussed.

Highly recommend this book. It’s such a great resource for nature projects for the whole family.

While this is marketed to families, I'm here to say a Cub Scout leader or any other young kids group that goes out in the wild will benefit from this book. This book is roughly split into seasons. There are lovely color photos on every page, sometimes two or three photos on a page. These highlight and show exactly what the authors are suggesting you do. The text is clear and easy to read. The directions and simple and most of the activities require normal household products. One thing that I really liked was a section on every activity called 'Extending the experience'. This gave you a few more notes about how you can encourage the children to delve into the activity just a little bit more. For example, if you made mud cakes then extending the experience might say 'how long does it take the mud to dry? Do different types of dirt make different colors of mud? Do they dry the same?' Note that not all of the activities will you be able to do in your area. We will never really be able to make maple syrup here where I live. Also to do the winter activities we may have to go somewhere else or rethink how to do those activities. One other note is that some of these activities require some prep work that might be lengthy. You will have to plan ahead for example to make ice designs. I would say that the effort is worth it but just something to be aware of when your buying this book. I have grown children but I'm going to use this book for the pack I am a part of as a den leader. I often need good ideas quickly (an hour notice) and this book will provide that for me. I liked the weaving with natural items one. And I loved the making yoru own fabric dye out of flowers. Enjoy.

Weidel-Lubinski and Madigan’s Nature Play Workshop is an excellent little book of nature activities for families (and honestly, classrooms) interested in bringing in more nature play and outdoor, hands-ff exploration into their children’s lives. The book is organized into several sections that make the use of the book completely dive-in whenever or wherever the occasion calls for it, and most of the material is supported by learning goals, emotional development research, poetry, short observations, and a variety of modifications for the activity for every level of engagement. The first half of the book is activities organized by season, then year-round nature play, tear out or photocopiable templates, and finally the research and support documentation for parents understanding why, say, the risks associated with climbing a tree unsupervised are far surpassed by the many benefits associated with it. If there is one really strong thing I learned from this book, it is that a child can get lost or hurt or encounter people they aren’t expecting, but not experiencing those moments are far more detrimental to their development if they don’t ever experience them; similar that old saw, “a ship is safe in port, but that is not what ships are built for.” Overall this is an excellent book that is as at home on a family’s resource shelf as it is in a kindergarten classroom, and the lush illustrations, examples, and broad scope of activities truly provide a lot of really fun things that I have done with my children since getting the book. Maybe my only complaint was the weird spiritual woo in some areas, but I know what the intent was in grounding kids and helping them live in the moment, so to each their own in approaching emotional development in those areas.