Tell us how you explore the great outdoors with your grandkids

We are lucky enough to live in a village with a range of environments within walking distance. Our entertainment varies from picnics in fields and the local play area to welly walks in the rain, feeding ducks (and more often seagulls!), throwing stones into the local river, Pooh sticks under bridges, climbing trees, collecting pine cones, stones, flowers, twigs or anything else that takes their fancy, bird, flower and bug spotting, rolling down hills, hide and seek in bushes and behind trees and many many more activities which occur to us on different occasions. We are currently rearing tadpoles and looking forward to rolling our Easter eggs down a hill somewhere. By the way, none of this costs any money but I hope will always remain in their memories.

Myself and both daughters SIL and grandchildren will be going to France at Easter. We have rented the house before and it's in the country so lovely walks where the girls look for leaves, pine cones etc and a 10 minute drive to a beach and they love rock pooling and looking for pebbles and shells.GD2 is fascinated that I have a dish of pebbles and shells on my bathroom shelf which we collected from said beach. They are staying with me for a few days afterwards with their mother so playing with the sandpit in the garden and if weather warm enough they have their own garden table and chairs and visits to a lovely big park with a field to kick a ball which is literally at the end of my street.

We always take our little grandchildren to Whipsnade Zoo at every opportunity. They love it and so do we!!!

Lovely day today at Slimbridge! Saw swans mating! DGD asked 'were they hungry?'

Take them for tramps in the local woods looking for spring flowers, puddles to jump in and mud to get covered in, in the case of one DGS trees to pee on. We look for bugs, birds and fungi. I have a wildlife pond (no one has fallen in yet) They watch the frogs and insects, fish for tadpoles. I have a bee house which they enjoyed watching the bees take leaves into, hedgehog houses and many bird feeders. They make dens in the woods and play hide and seek. I love the great outdoors. One game to play is to sit quietly in a wood or field with eyes shut and count how many different sounds you can hear. Or, lie in long grass with eyes (and mouth) shut and feel the various creatures crawling over you and the sounds they make. Hug a tree - let a child, or adult, choose a tree and feel it for a few minutes. Blindfold them and turn in a circle then ask them to find their tree by 'feel'.
Scavenger hunts are popular too.

If all else fails Pooh Sticks.

I mostly enjoy the great outdoors with my grandkids in a knackered, wonder if there's a coffee shop near here sort of way.

My grandchildren are not great nature or garden lovers although I was as a child.

They are very wary of anything that might bite or sting.

They do however love finding sticks, and running about with sticks and so do I although I don't run about with them.

Hi any ideas of activities for a 8month thanks

I give mine all the cuttings I do not want from the plants in my garden, and also any seedlings I have left over, tell her they are hers to look after, but help her plant them in tubs, or the garden. It is then up to her to water then, so far the results have been mixed, but she does seem to enjoy gardening. Her father and mother do not.

When ours come to stay here they love being able to leave the door open and just wander in and out as they want. We live in the country, very little traffic about, no carpets so muddy feet don't matter.
They make tepees too - like yours, janerowena.
But they'll soon be in their teens and want more adventures than we can provide. They've already done a scarey Pyrenees walk (not with us) and just finished a trek to the foothills of Ana Purna with their parents. So well out of our league.
The things we can offer though are such as plant and animal identification which they find interesting.

My two DGSs are only 2 and 20 months old respectively, so still see the pavement outside their house and the park up the road as the great outdoors - there is much excitement when they spot a dead beetle in a puddle or (wow!) a squashed frog. They each have a treasured collection of dried up bug-chewed leaves, sticks, very ordinary looking pebbles and a couple of fag ends. They both point at birds a lot and to them a cocky town centre pigeon is one of Nature's wonders (I guess it is, really). I'm sure we'll be more ambitious as they get more mobile and we can walk 20 yards in less than 10 minutes.

I think jinglbellsfrocks should scoop the prize.

we will paddle along the shore and beachcomb
we will dig in the sand and make castles
we will look for frogspawn and tadpoles in ponds
the children will climb trees while I get ready to help them down when they get stuck
we will build dens in the woods
if it rains we will put on our waterproofs and wellies and just carry on!

This Spring, one of things I/we intend to do is to make it through Badger Woods, which runs along the outskirts of our town, and joins onto green space leading up to the Chiltern Hills and Dunstable Downs. Also referred to as Bluebell Woods since this beautiful flower will be in full bloom next month, and produce a sea of blue across the field.
It's a challenge making it through one end of the dense woods to the next, and to make it as exciting as possible, I intend to set up a treasure hunt and tracking/trailing activity, as well as leaf collection (for as many different samples as possible).
It's always amazing stumbling upon the badger setts and rabbit dens, and spotting the diverse wildlife - there's always hedgehogs and squirrels, and numerous birds and insects (if we're lucky, we'll spot a fox, or maybe a badger or two).
To round it off, we'll picnic on the lush green fields, hopefully bathed in glorious sunlight. The trail ends onto a path which leads back down to town and a park. The kids can enjoy the swings, monkey bars, ropes and roundabouts there to conclude our trip day.

We live near a local children's farm and love to spend time there with our grandson. He enjoys running around, feeding the animals and playing on the toys. He sees everything through young, curious eyes.

Geocaching is great fun - my DGS is still too little for it, but we do it with friends and their GCs. I guess you could call it a treasure hunting walk. You get the map or GPS coordinates on line for a hidden clue and object near where you want to go, then search on foot, making sure nobody sees you hunting. There are caches all over the UK and almost everywhere else too. Sign the little book, take an object from the cache and leave something in its place (something like a little bell from a Lindt bunny or a cracker gift tend to be the right size). Sometimes easy to find, sometimes fiendishly difficult, so depending on the GCs age a recce first may be a good idea. www.geocaching.com

Oh to be outdoors - play parks here we come and if there is some sand there all the better. Grandson only 2 so we're not quite so adventurous yet as some the others

We love to go to Sherwood Pines , you pay to park but then can enjoy lots of lovely woodland walks, the grandchildren love the adventure playground area and the little huts which they sweep out with branches. They also love making a den and sitting on the storytime chairs. We either take a picnic or go to the cafe for a lovely hot chocolate.

I've done quite a lot of sitting in bird-hides with my grandson. He is a real bird lover and takes millions of photos of them. But he is now 16, so he won't need me for this for much longer.
All four of my grandchildren have enjoyed walking or rock climbing on Dartmoor with me over the years.

We are very lucky, we have a very long garden, in which we build a fresh tepee every visit, with woods and a river and a walk at the end of it, and watermeadows that lead to the British Trust for Ornithology's nature reserve. DBH identifies birds, but is also the representative for keeping count of this area's butterfly species and numbers. Our GCs are very happy to go on quite long walks with granpa, far more than I am, in fact. For a start he doesn't make them carry his tripod! Today he was muttering about the stone curlews being back in time to show them how they nest on the ground near us. From a distance of course - real Easter eggs!

We'll go on a midnight adventure. We'll wait until it's dark then explore the local country park using torches. Although we go there a lot it's like a totally different place in the dark.

On one of the rare occasions I was enjoying the great outdoors with my two recently, a wasp stung one of them on his willy when he was taking a leak. Surprisingly, he still enjoys the outdoors, but much prefers to go with his mates in the Scouts.

Sadly for me I won't be spending time with the grandchildren over Easter, but happily for them it's because their daddy will be home after being away for a long time so they'll be with their parents instead.
We all love being out of doors and never allow ourselves to be limited by the weather. When they do stay with us we're very fortunate to live almost in sight of the river and within a twenty minute (slow) walk of the seafront so we take advantage of the closeness by plodging in the river/sea shallows and exploring the beach. Rock-pooling is always a success and the children love finding things on our stony beach. Alongside the river there are meadows and a community orchard so foraging is also something we do during the late summer/early autumn. In summer we collect elderflowers and the children help me to make cordial. Also by the river is our allotment, which is a treasure trove to be plundered by the little ones. The five year old munches his way through copious amounts of fruit and vegetables whilst 'helping'; he then 'assists' by washing the jam jars so I can make jam.
We are also within easy access of a forest and of Dartmoor National Park, so walking the Graffalo Trail, cycling through the forest or ascending a Dartmoor tor (with the youngest in a backpack) are all enjoyable adventures for the little ones.

GC have always enjoyed the outdoors. They have proper walking boots and poles and will be out and about in the wonderful countryside we have here. I live close enough to the beach for poking around in rock pools and dragging driftwood along the beach. The baby doll likes to go with us and paddle in the rock pools even though Grandma ends up pushing the buggy and holding the clothes and a towel to dry 'baby'.

We live very close to the sea and we spend a lot of time on the beach. During the colder months we wrap up well and go looking for seaglass, shells and other interesting objects washed in with the tide. You would be amazed what you can find after a particularly high tide. The children love to make, what we call beach trees. They find a big stick or branch and grandad digs a hole to "plant it" into. We then decorate it with seaweed, bits of old rope and any other "treasure" we can find. Great fun.

Later this month we will be visiting DS1 and family in rural northern California and I look forward to walking with the DGC through the huge ponderosa pines just outside their home. We will take the other Grandparents' dog and walk along the irrigation channel looking for large sugar pine cones, but watching out for bears!