The 365-day nature play challenge
Parent Lisa Turner shares her experience of undertaking a daily outdoor challenge with her daughter, to inspire other families to spend more time outdoors all year round.
Throughout 2025 my daughter ‘B’ (aged 10) and I took on a challenge. Every day we did something fun outside in the natural world. We hoped that we could build a habit of playing outside more. We posted daily reports to instagram and facebook and wrote a blog.
Twelve months on and these are some of the things we have learnt:
Finding time was harder than bad weather…
Starting off on 1 January I thought the hardest thing would be to find things to do in the winter. Actually, this wasn’t so difficult. We played with shadows in the fog, splashed in puddles and made flags to fly in the wind. The trickiest thing was finding time to play after school and around clubs. In January, this made it really hard to get out in the light. We ended up doing lots of challenges in the dark and really appreciated it when the sun started setting later.
It turns out 10-year-olds really like this stuff…
B embraced it far more than I expected her to. I anticipated strops and lots of arguments but there weren’t many. She did object to my ideas quite a lot but loved coming up with her own. She’s not a sporty child and is naturally cautious, which has made it harder to get her outside in the past. Now she really enjoys it and knows how to find the things she wants to do.
The best days were often the simplest ones…
The best days were often the ones which didn’t cost anything. Crab fishing was brilliant and, closer to home, snail racing was really fun too. Being nature detectives and searching for foxes or hedgehogs made outdoor walks a lot more entertaining. We live in a terraced house in a town and I’d thought, before we started, that we would have to travel a lot but we had some of our best times in the scrubland behind our house. There we could pick random stuff and muck about without worrying about hurting anything.
B has got more confident…
As the year progressed B got much more confident. She sees the natural world as a playground now. As she’s moved into year six at school she now goes out on her own, enlisting her friends to find conkers and chase falling leaves. The challenge has given her a repertoire of things to do that are not based around electronics. When she gets stressed or has a bad day, she now opts to go outside and that works much better than her tablet.
Best things to try...
For other parents and caregivers out there, these are some of the challenges we enjoyed most:
- Racing snails (we made a course in chalk and put lettuce at one end and the snails at the other).
- Climbing trees (it took me ages to work out you have to find the right one).
- Playing with the wind.
- Letting the kids find their way somewhere they know.
- Making a bird nest and trying to find somewhere to put it.
- Finding a secret place (and watching the world go by).
- Discovering a good stick and working out what you can do with it.
- Looking for ingredients and making a potion.
Get involved
We are on the cusp of a new season – why not give some of these ideas a try with your family. For more inspiration, check out the full 365-day list of activities on Lisa’s Trails, bales & snails blog.
