Getting outside to play and learn with outdoor activities you have put together with or for your children is fun. Simple supplies like chalk, paint, water, a roll of drawing paper, old water bottles, and some farm animals were used to create these fifteen outdoor activities. Some are messy, but not one of them is difficult to put together. All of these outdoor activities feature things that you may have at home already or could get at your local big box store.

Outdoor Activities and Learning Games for Kids

If you are heading to the beach this summer, you may want to take a plastic tablecloth along with you. We used a plastic tablecloth as the liner for a very own homemade tide pool. JDaniel was thrilled to help dig the hole for the tide pool. Filling the tide pool with water was almost as much fun. We all worked on filling it together. Getting to sit in the tide pool was the best!

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You may not be able to go to the beach this summer. If you can’t you can bring the beach to your water table. We have water table with two sections. In one section we placed water. In the second section we place oatmeal. (The oatmeal was supposed to be soft sand.) Then we took out some of JDaniel’s farm animals and a farmer for his Fisher-Price Little People Fun Sounds Farm. The animals had the best time playing in the sand and splashing in the water. The farmer joined in too.

The water table also has been used to create a pretend play ice cream parlor with ice and shaving cream. That was messy, but great for pretend play.

Gluing foam fish to the bottom of a pair of flip flops creates a great tool for painting fish prints. JDaniel brushed paint onto the bottom of the flip flops and walked up and down a roll of paper on our deck or driveway. The fish flops made a really fun under water scene.

You can also do math with golf tees and yarn on your deck. They make great tools for making shapes. These shapes can be used to talk about geometry, area, and perimeter.

Color chalk circles draw on the drive way made a great way to work on sorting objects by color. We used objects that were already in the garage for this color sorting fun.

Hopping, skipping, or galloping down a  chalk number line is such fun. I wrote the numbers on the number line, but your kids could easily do the number writing for the number line. It is one of our favorite outdoor activities!

Creating a chalk drawing face with items found outside is also a lot of fun. It is fun to change them around and see if it makes the face changes its mood.

Starting seeds in an indoor paper plate garden and moving them outside once they have sprouted is lots of fun! It is one of those indoor activities that becomes an outdoor activity.

An upcycled juice bottle makes a great watering bottle when caring for seeds. This one is really easy to make.

JDaniel and I created a spider web trellis in our backyard. We used a plastic lid and a garbage bag to make a spider to live on the web.

Giant alphabet letters are super fun. We did a number for activities with these giant chalk letters and a spray bottle.

These recycled fish loved hanging on a coral reef made a fallen tree branch. They hung out of the deck for a day before going to live in JDaniel’s room. He just loves this recycled bottle fish mobile.

We have also made a patriotic wind spinner that was outside on sunny days before going to live in JDaniel’s room.

An outdoor gnome or fairy home made with items from our recycling bin was fun to make and great for pretend play.

I hope you will find an outdoor activity in this collection that you are dying to head outside and try with your children. If you are looking for more outdoor activities for kids, you may want to visit my Outdoor Fun for Kids Board.