Outdoor Families

For most of their lives, my children grew up in a rural environment. This meant that most of our home-based outdoor adventures occurred in our backyard or the shared woodland behind our home. When the days grew short in the months of November-February, this often meant we were going out to play in the snow … Read more

Getting outside with medically complex kids comes with the normal challenges of taking kids outside, but also comes with a completely unique set of obstacles to overcome and logistics to coordinate. More and more research is coming out showing evidence of improved physical, emotional, and mental health in children that spend regular time outside. This … Read more

One of the very first things I taught in my high school biology classroom was how to make observations about nature. I took my ninth and tenth grade students outside to three trees next to the parking lot and I asked them to make as many observations as they could in twenty minutes. It took … Read more

Earlier this year, I was out on a hike with my boys when we crossed paths with another family on the trail. The mother was trying, in vain, to get her family’s attention by pointing out a woodpecker busily searching for food in a nearby tree. Both her children AND her significant other had their … Read more