Little do they know that there are a ton of exciting gifts your kids will love that will also give them some super beneficial play time in the great outdoors. Think happy rosy cheeks, smiles, laughter, and kids that zonk out at bedtime from all that energy burned outside!

This season, make sure kids are getting active and outdoors with these awesome gift ideas for outdoor play.

Here is Be Out There’s list of top holiday gifts for outdoor play:

Gifts for Learning

• Build a Bird House, Bird Feeder or Both!: Each kit contains building materials, fun stickers, plush birds that make real bird calls and a Ranger Rick Certificate.
• Ranger Rick Magazine: Take your kids closer to nature with amazing photographs, real adventures, rain or shine activities, and intriguing information about animals and natural wonders. Subscribe to the award-winning Ranger Rick magazine (ages 7 and up), or our brand new Ranger Rick Jr. (for ages 4-7).
• Sand Table: Sand play is actually a great way for toddlers to learn.  It encourages creativity, is soothing, and helps young children build important physical and social skills that last a lifetime.
  And they like it.
• Owl Puke: Don’t knock it ’til you try it. I don’t know any little boy who can resist this and it’s highly educational. The kit includes sanitized owl puke and lets kids reconstruct real skeletons from actual owl puke. It also comes with a magnifying glass, wood dissection probe, work mat and bone sorting chart. For ages 8 and up.
• Grow a Fairy Garden: There are surprisingly quite a few kits where you grow real plants (start them inside during the winter) and add miniature fairy accents to create a beautiful fairy garden. Get inspired to make a bigger garden this spring.

Gifts for Playing

• Throwback and Low-tech Gifts: Don’t forget the simple joy of low-tech toys like jump ropes, kites, sidewalk chalk, and any variety of ball (football, soccer ball, kickball) for pick-up games on the lawn. Or for a different spin, what about a slack line?
• A Bike: This one never gets old. Bikes are timeless gifts that let kids explore and get some exercise. Don’t forget a helmet! Scooters are also a popular option to get them moving.
• All-terrain Remote Control Toys:  This remote control vehicle goes over land or sea! There are even some aircraft that sync with your iPad or iPhone (how cool). Make them play outdoors for fresh air and to avoid breaking lamps or other fragile household items.
• Great Gear:  We love the saying “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.” Make sure kids are prepared for anything Mother Nature throws at you. Hats, jackets, or these awesome rain gloves keep kids protected and outside all year.
• Play Camping Equipment: There is something magical about sleeping under the stars, even if it’s just pretend. This one-touch play tent is perfect for playing in the backyard. Complement it with a kid’s camping light – also doubles for lighting for night time exploration! Then you’ll be ready to camp this summer.
• Digital Camera: This is a great gift for older kids, even though younger and younger kids are comfortable using this kind of technology. Encourage kids to photograph your family outside or to take pictures of wildlife and post on Wildlife Watch.

Gifts for Exploring

• Ranger Rick’s Nature Notebook: In this notebook, Ranger Rick leads kids through some awesome outdoor adventures for each and every season. Kids record what they see, hear, smell and touch along the way.
• Kid’s Fishing Rod: Give a fishing rod with the promise of a trip to a local fishing hole in the future. Mattel has a great Barbie fishing rod, or build your own.
• Magnifying Glass: A handy kid-proof magnifying glass is a great stocking stuffer. Help your little explorer see snowflakes, bugs, leaves and more – all up close and personal!
• An Adventure Together: The gift of time is hard to wrap, but can be the most lasting present your kids will get. In today’s hectic world exploring a new place together or going for a walk in the neighborhood to see what you can see are low-cost, easy ways to bond with your family. Quiet moments are when some of the best memories are born!

Find more fun gifts for kids from National Wildlife Federation.

The new Healthy Living pathway is designed to provide schools with tools to promote physical activity, regular time outdoors and creative play.

• Childhood obesity has tripled over the past three decades, with one in three children now considered overweight or obese.
• Children play outside less today than in any other generation in human history.
• Meanwhile, the average child spends more than seven hours in front of electronic screens daily.
• The use of antidepressant drugs for children has risen sharply, and the U.S. is the largest consumer of ADHD medications in the world.

But here’s the good news. Time spent outdoors, physically active, and engaged in unstructured play is perhaps the best possible prescription for what ails our kids. It helps children grow lean and fit, enhances imaginations and attention spans, decreases aggression and stress, improves vision, and decreases symptoms of ADHD. It also boosts classroom performance; just this week, a new study connected cardiovascular fitness with higher standardized test scores. In addition, children who spend regular time in nature become better stewards of the environment.

Schools have a critical responsibility—and opportunity—to set students on course for a lifetime of healthy lifestyle choices. Today, the Eco-Schools USA program officially launched a new Healthy Living pathway designed to provide schools with tools to promote physical activity,  regular time outdoors, and creative play.

The Healthy Living pathway is designed to empower schools to:

• Enable more students to walk or bike to school
• Use the school grounds as an outdoor classroom for hands-on, active learning
• Restore recess as a vital part of every school day
• Strive for a better balance between “screen time” and “green time”
• Make physical fitness and outdoor time a priority for students and staff alike
• Extend these values home to families and out into the community

The Healthy Living pathway works in concert with Eco-Schools USA’s related Healthy Schools pathway (launched earlier this year), which focuses on the physical environment at schools—the building and grounds. Together, the two pathways also provide support for schools addressing the “Healthy School Environments” pillar of the new federal Green Ribbon Schools award program, which calls for “high standards of nutrition, fitness, and quantity of quality outdoor time for both students and staff.”

To find out how to become an Eco-School, visit the Eco-Schools USA website. To learn more about the current state of children’s health—and how a resurgence in outdoor play can reverse the downward trends—visit the Be Out There campaign.

Today I attended the first ever White House Summit on environmental education.  There were speakers ranging from Richard Louv to NASCAR. 

The Presidential Environmental Youth Awardees were inspiring.  And it was wonderful to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan express his enthusiasm for environmental education and the new Green Ribbon Schools program (inaugural winners to be announced on 4/23/12!).

However, it was pretty clear from the onset that there was indeed an elephant in the room…

Just a few weeks ago the White House recommended to Congress (through its annual budget request) the effective elimination of three environmental education programs that were funded by Congress at about $35 million last year (or about 1/4 the cost of a F-22 Raptor fighter jet).

What does the elimination of these programs mean?  What is at risk?  First, let’s consider just a few examples pulled from thousands of local grants to schools, nature centers, parks, zoos, science centers, natural history museums, aquariums and other community-based organizations over the years:

• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Missouri received an EPA grant to engage their youth in environmental education and outdoor experiences.
• The Galeton School District in Pennsylvania received EPA funds for under-served students to monitor water quality to determine the environmental impact of natural gas extraction from Marcellus Shale.  
• Environmental Learning for Kids (ELK) in Denver, Colorado, received an EPA grant to provide career, leadership and life skills for you under-served youth through its Leadership Corps program.
• The Seacoast Science Center in New Hampshire received a NOAA grant to create new partnerships across New England for teaching informal, outdoor ocean science to under-served families in five New England communities.
• The Science Museum of Virginia received NOAA funds to provide earth science and climate change education for visitors through its Science on a Sphere platform.
• Trout Unlimited in the Chesapeake region received a NOAA B-WET grant for their Potomac Waters Youth Education Initiative to educate students about the importance of headwater streams to brook trout and the entire watershed.
• The University of Wisconsin received a NSF grant to create a regional Great Lakes network to increase the adoption of effective climate change education programs by working with teachers, businesses and the public.
   

This is just the tip of the iceberg!  These funds support programs like National Public Lands Day and the development of innovative curricula.  The National Environmental Education Foundation has leveraged millions of dollar in public/private partnerships through a modest federal investment.

At the summit, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that EPA would maintain $5 million in funding for FY 2013, which is about half of what Congress provided last year.  This is a good step, but we still have not seen a detailed plan for how these funds would translate to grants and other support from EPA. 

Administrator Jackson also reinstated an inter-agency task force created by the 1990 National Environmental Education Act to improve coordination among federal agencies and stakeholders.

Unlike the steps announced by EPA, no one mentioned the major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Program or the National Science Foundation environmental education programs.

At the end of the day I left with some new ideas and was pleased with the reinstated task force,  but I did not hear a commitment to the financial investment our nation needs to prepare the next generation to address climate change and enter the new green jobs sector.

Did you attend the summit?  Watch it online?  Please share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment below.  And stay tuned for future action alerts to support environmental education.

There are a lot of little moments throughout my life that made me this way and brought me to NWF, many of which took place outside my front door. This video is actually an indoor moment about a tiny little thing—that wasn’t hard to do or hard to grasp—that apparently made a big impression on me when I was about six. Are you dying to know what it was? You will probably be surprised! Watch this video and find out!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I guess the point I’m trying to get across is it doesn’t take a lot to build a connection with the natural world. I work on NWF’s Be Out There movement to reconnect kids with nature. Every generation says it, but it’s a different time. Getting a good healthy dose of outdoor time isn’t as easy as it once was and regardless of age, it’s so good for you! I’ll share some outdoor moments—old and new—along this crazy ride, and hopefully you’ll share some with me too.

National Wildlife Federation’s Storytelling Video Diary Series shares the candid tales of nine NWF staffers from around the country; armed with their cameras in the Great Lakes, California, South Dakota, the Pacific Northwest, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC, these nine staffers will share with you their individual trials, epiphanies and stories as they unfold in their daily adventures.

While the kids were out exploring the mud and observing frogs, I taped this video diary:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So to summarize, here are five ways to embrace mud this spring:

1. Show your kids that you are totally okay with them getting muddy.
2. Have a mud mat and hose handy.
3. Bring inexpensive nets and shovels.
4. Have easy snacks pre-made by the door so they don’t have to go inside to eat.
5. Write a specific goal for an outdoor place you want to explore with your children.

And here’s a bonus tip if your kids are small and you need to stay handy. I bring a book or magazine to pass the time while I sit nearby. My husband brings his MP3 player and Sudoku. I’m trying to give them a true free hour without adults telling them how to play or how to learn, but I do want to keep them safe. So if I can keep my hands busy, I’m more likely to sit quietly and just let them do their thing.

Hopefully this video inspires you to be okay with mud and let the kids get knee-deep in it. They are learning and celebrating life!

Here are some resources to enhance your spring nature explorations:

• Wildlife Watch – Get a customized list of wildlife for your area and report which wildlife you see.
• Nature Find – Find muddy places near you.
• Certify Your Yard for Wildlife – Invite frogs to your yard by gardening for wildlife.

Suggested Tweet:

5 Ways to Embrace Mud This Spring – Makes Kids Happy! - http://blog.nwf.org/2012/03/mud/ @nwf

National Wildlife Federation’s Storytelling Video Diary Series shares the candid tales of nine NWF staffers from around the country; armed with their cameras in the Great Lakes, California, South Dakota, the Pacific Northwest, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC, these nine staffers will share with you their individual trials, epiphanies and stories as they unfold in their daily adventures.

My son and I with Ranger Rick circa 2002

Then I thought about who I share a birthday year with, a true American Icon, Ranger Rick and his magazine. Yes, we were both started, so to speak, 45 years ago.

My heartfelt Happy Birthday and Thank You to Ranger Rick for his influence on my life.  

For 19 years, I’ve had the privilege of working with my colleague Ranger Rick and for National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center located in Michigan. Does it sound strange to call Ranger Rick a colleague?  Not to me. I’ve walked with him in an Earth Day parade. I’ve handed out, boxed up and shipped his magazine to literally thousands of school kids over many years. I’ve camped at the Great American Backyard Campout with him. He sits on my desk each day.

Before we were colleagues, Ranger Rick and I were childhood friends. My family subscribed to Ranger Rick magazine and I fondly remember writing reports on wildlife at around 8 years old. Who as a child writes reports for fun?  But I had a love for big cats when I was younger. I’d clip photos from Ranger Rick magazine of lions and tigers and cougars and I’d write a little synopsis for each one. There were a lot of house cats in my reports too, I admit. I’m not sure I ever showed these reports to anyone. If I ever run for president, my secret cat reports will probably come out. It won’t be good, all the cats were naked.

The moral of the story is…birthdays come and go, but the gift of sharing nature and wildlife with your children can last a lifetime. This is important to take a moment to consider.

We take care of what we love.

Be Out There. Start early, start for yourself, start for your kids, start now.

Photo: Michael Devlin

Take it away, Diana S Grigsby-Toussaint, Sang-Hyun Chi and Barbara H. Fiese (PDF):

“… [E]xposure to greener neighborhoods encourages children to spend more time outdoors where they may reap both physiological and cognitive benefits. Conversely, children with the lowest levels of neighborhood greenness were least likely to spend time playing outdoors, engaging in active or quiet play (rainy day kids).

In addition to their own research, the authors point to examples including “initiatives using landscape architecture to create green elementary school grounds in Canada, which found a 70% increase in light and moderate physical activity among children.”

Those of us lucky enough to grow up with backyards and trees get this, and a growing body of research shows why it’s especially important: children who play outside are healthier, more creative in their play and more likely (PDF) to have positive attitudes toward nature (and environmentally conscious behavior) when they grow up. Plus, all those “physiological and cognitive benefits.”

However, verdant parks and other spaces aren’t enough:

While neighborhood greenness influenced levels of physical activity among these preschool-aged children, as Cleland et al [35] observed, parental support factors such as engaging in physical activity with children also plays a role. This may explain why sporty kids were more likely to engage in much more active outdoor physical activity compared to rainy day kids, although both groups lived in areas with similar levels of neighborhood greenness.

As always, parents and other adults have an important role. The study underscores this along with the importance of giving non-green-neighborhood kids the opportunity to connect with the outdoors—refer back to this post on nature’s healing potential, where I linked to the story of an abuse survivor who spends time leading inner-city kids on hikes and backpacking trips. Bottom line: children sometimes need help to connect to nature.

To learn more, take a look at Kristy Myers’s five tips for spending time in nature with your family, see our Outdoors and Family Channel for easy winter outdoor activities or check out how you can get involved in NWF’s Be Out There campaign to connect kids with nature.

This past year, however, I’m so glad my family stuck with our resolution to spend more time outdoors. Over the past year we’ve created amazing memories, plus I’ve seen curiosity and creativity flourish in our kids as they’ve spent time in nature. In order to stick with this resolution I created easy ways for us to build outdoor time in our lives and tapped into a number of resources the National Wildlife Federation offers.

If you’re thinking that 2012 is the year to get your family outdoors, here are a few tips to get you started:

We hiked Pilot Mountain State Park the day after Thanksgiving while visiting family in North Carolina. We hiked around the monolith you see in the background. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

First Day Hikes

Why not kick off the New Year with a family hike? For the first time ever all 50 state park systems are participating in First Day Hikes, special programming for New Year’s Day encouraged to get families out to their local state park. Even if you’ve hiked a particular trail other times of the year, winter offers a completely different perspective — a calm quiet, coupled with views typically blocked by leaves on the trees. Our family enjoys checking out local state parks when we travel to see family for the holidays. So for Thanksgiving we hit Pilot Mountain State Park in North Carolina while visiting my in-laws, and we plan to hit a Delaware State Park tomorrow during our visit to my Mom’s. Here’s the events on tap tomorrow at Delaware State Parks. To find a First Day Hike near you, search here.

Walk Through the Neighborhood

The easiest way to spend more time outdoors is to just walk out the door and explore your home turf. Now if your kids are anything like mine you may hear a chorus of complaints sometimes when you’re trying to get out of the door. My solution:  create a scavenger hunt. On the days when they’re resistant — like Christmas weekend when my in-laws were here — I have them come up with a theme and a hunt for us to do. Last weekend’s was a holiday decoration scavenger hunt where we looked out for things like Santa statues or a wreath with a red bow.

Our kids camped in the family room before making the jump to camping in the backyard. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

Camp in Your Yard

Have fond memories of camping when you were a kid? Why not bring that fun to your own family. Start simple by camping right in your own backyard. If it’s too cold to venture out right now, you can set up a pup tent in your family room or basement for a fun indoor campout. Or, if you don’t have a tent, tap into your kids’ imagination by building a blanket fort to campout in. Then, when the weather is nice you’ll be ready for our Great American Backyard Campout on June 23.

Get Your Green Hour

Okay back when I was a kid it was just called kicking your kids out the door to spend time playing. Today we call it Green Hour, but it’s basically the same thing. It’s finding time for kids to have unstructured play time outdoors — time for kids to be kids. The National Wildlife Federation offers activities and resources through our greenhour.org website.

Geocache

Is your family into the latest electronic gadgets and gizmos? Then geocaching might be for you because it’s a great way to pair screen time with a fun outdoor adventure. Geocaching is a combination of old-fashioned treasure hunting, while using GPS technology, and spending time outdoors. With the help of a handheld GPS device or smartphone, people can hunt for geocaches hidden in public areas all over the world. To find out more, check out this information on Ranger Rick’s Geocache Trails.

Families can mark their trees with a red ribbon and return later to cut them down.

We’d set aside last weekend to do our holiday decorating, so as the weekend approached and the weather forecast was good I suggested to my husband that we check for a local tree farm where we could select and chop down our own Christmas tree.

We’ve often bought cut trees from local vendors, but I can’t say for sure the trees themselves were local. I’m a big supporter of buying my food local, straight from the farmer so it only made sense that I should take that next step and buy my tree straight from a local farmer, too.

Although it was our first time cutting our own tree it won’t be our last. The kids had a ball wandering the land in search of the perfect tree for our family. Inevitably we’d find “the one” only to find that it was already claimed by another family, shown by a red ribbon tied on it.

"The one" at Blue Heron Tree Farm in Centreville, MD.

Beyond the fun we had, I feel good about our choice because during their growing cycle these trees provide oxygen, as well as habitat for many types of wildlife. Also the leftover tree can be recycled to mulch or left as a snag, a dead tree that provides habitat for wildlife.

We also supported local farmers Harriet and Ed Caporin, owners of Blue Heron Tree Farm. Buying local helps our economy and, in cases like this, it keeps the land as a productive farm versus over-developed.

Outdoor fun. Adventure. Shopping local. The smell of a fresh cut tree. If any or all of things lure you to buy a local Christmas tree, you can find a farmer near you by searching the National Christmas Tree Association directory.

‘Tis the Season from the National Wildlife Federation:

• 5 Gifts Birds Are “Tweeting” About This Holiday Season
• This Year, Shift Your Gift Into a Gift For Wildlife
• Reindeer: 12 Fascinating Facts About These Amazing Creatures
• Simple Holiday Crafts to Make With Your Kids
• Habitat Certification and Other Gifts for Gardeners
• The Northern Cardinal: Find Out About the Bird That Most Symbolizes the Season