Here’s mum of four Christine Mosler with her first Parent Panel post for BornFree Mum & Dad sharing her top tips for encouraging our little ones outdoors during the cold winter months.

January can be damp and dreary and it is all too easy to stay indoors all snuggled up on the sofa with a DVD and a box of biscuits waiting for warmer days. However, if your children are anything like mine, they need regular running and lots of fresh air if they are to function properly and not trash the house!

Here are my top tips for encouraging them out and about for enjoyable family walks as well as enjoying the park or garden throughout the winter.

1. Treasure Hunting: Take a treasure bag or box with you, an old shoe box will do, and fill it with special finds. To make it more of a challenge you can have a theme ‘collect 5 round objects’ or ‘5 spiky things’ or ‘5 different colours’. When you get home either display the finds on a nature table or use them to make a collage.

2 Animal Tracking: Take your magnifying glass and binoculars (deerstalker hat optional) and pretend to be detectives. There are lots of signs to look for (and lots of books to help you identify what you are looking at!)

• All the diggings and holes which mark out a badger sett (large) or rabbit burrow (small)

• Bashed snail shells on a song thrush’s stone plate

• Pinecones nibbled until they look like apple cores, all that is left of a squirrel’s lunch

• Molehills. Imagine the tunnel world below, when you get home make some tunnels with blankets/fabric draped over chairs and set up a mole hole

• Footprints (especially good on a muddy walk) Look at all the different shapes and styles of print and see if you can work out which bird or animal they come from

• Bones, pellets and pooh. Most children like looking for pooh and if you let them pooh spot they are in their element. We may think pooh is boring, they don’t, so look at the difference in size between horse pooh, deer pooh and rabbit pooh. If you can bear it, take a stick and have a poke to see if you can work out what they have been eating! You may be lucky and find owl pellets; owls spit out a pellet containing the bits of bones they can’t digest and children find these fascinating! There are usually small mammal bones to be found if you look carefully enough, my little boy has a gruesome collection of jaw bones which he keeps in a box to scare visitors!

If you take a camera with you children can record their findings and build up a booklet about their walks through the seasons. This works especially well on a regular and familiar walk.

3. Pack a Winter Picnic. Steaming hot soup from a flask when you have reached the top of the hill you fancy climbing or you reach a clearing in the forest is enough to tempt most children to walk just a little bit further.

4. Fossil hunting and skimming stones. The beach in winter is one of our very favourite places. Gone are the hoards of summer and it’s not far to walk before we have it to ourselves. Hunting for fossils, rock pooling, skimming stones and keeping the best ones to paint and decorate when we get home, all make for an excellent day out.

5. Fairy Houses and Giant’s Dens. Fairies need houses even in winter, collect sticks, moss, small pebbles and make little houses in the garden or out on a walk. If you are walking in the woodland you can build a den together big enough to sit inside; a perfect place for that winter picnic!

Happy winter walking!

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