Outdoor Fun with Kids: Explorer Unit

This post is part of the Fall Outside Play Ideas for Kids from All Things Kids.  See the end of this post for more details and to link up your own posts!

Looking for ideas for outdoor fun with kids?  Promote your little ones to the Explorer Unit!  Pack up your bags, head out to the woods, and wait for instructions from HQ in this fun DIY adventure:

Today’s post actually comes to you courtesy of my amazingly creative older sister Amy.  She is the one who should really have a blog – except that she’s far too busy being awesome!  So instead it falls to me to share with the world one of the many super fun adventures she has with her kids:

This morning, I told the kids that there was going to be some pretending … Then when I could get them by themselves, I said that I’d gotten a secret message the night before, I didn’t know who from, to go to a certain place by 9:15 and to be ready for adventure. We went to a park with trails.  I had set up my phone with an alarm that they’d never heard on it before, and at 9:15, the alarm went off: “Guys! It’s Headquarters! We’ve been promoted to the Explorer Unit!”

I then hit snooze (for 20 min), and each time the alarm went off, they knew it was HQ calling!  First HQ revealed that there were backpacks for each of us in the back of the car, and in each of these was a badge (fancy, right?) and our mission: My daughter’s was to make a map of this uncharted territory, my son’s to keep track of animals that we saw, and mine to write other observations.

HQ also called us with the Explorer Unit promise that we had to recite: “Explorer Unit works together — ALWAYS!”, which we pledged, putting our hands together, about 50 times on the trip. When we realized we had no lunch, HQ told us that they had dropped our lunches from an airplane up ahead (awfully easy to drop these around in the woods while the kids are spread out looking).

We had a BLAST!!!! Secret missions are a HIT!

Some Fun Variations

– scavenger hunt at the zoo
– collecting as diverse a set of leaves as possible. To submit our collection to HQ, we picked out the best and “laminated” them between two adhesive sheets and sent them off.  On my own, I cut them out of the sheets and then put them in the mailbox on Thanksgiving.  The kids got a special letter from HQ telling the kids that HQ was finished with the leaves and wanted to return them for a Thanksgiving decoration (which was lovely, by the way — they spread them out on the table and hung some of them up).

Today the bloggers of All Things Kids are bringing you a series of great Fall Outside Play Ideas for Kids from All Things Kids.  Be sure to check out all the links!

But we also want to see your great outdoor fun ideas!  Share them below: