“Children can’t bounce off the walls if we take away the walls” – Erin K Kenny

If you have a child anything like mine, this quote will resonate strongly. If we don’t get outside daily, my son goes crazy. We are now in Stage 3 Lockdown and one of the four reasons that people can leave their homes is for daily exercise. I have seen lots of questions about what constitutes exercise. I want to stop and reflect on how our children exercise. Children don’t exercise in the way that adults do. They don’t go for a 20 minute run or an hour walk. Children exercise differently. They build strength, balance and endurance differently. They develop their proprioception, flexibility and vestibular systems differently. They exercise through play. How can we make exercise playful, but still beneficial for kids when they are at home or when out and about in nature? Here are some ideas to get you started:

The library is closed, the museum is closed, swimming is cancelled, playgroup is cancelled, sports are cancelled, festivals, concerts and indoor arts are cancelled. We are stuck at home for the next 1-6 months with our children and no organised activities. Everything has been shut down.

But, and this is a big but, as Nature Play WA put it very nicely in their Instagram post yesterday, time in nature has not been cancelled.

What if, rather than see this time as arduous, we step back and return to the simple things? We slow down. We see things as our children do, with all their senses and all their curiosity. We take time to meander for hours (and yes, now we have hours to meander) and soak in all the beauty we can find out in our natural world. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a peacefulness that we thought was lost.