Our family was at a community event recently when a volunteer asked us whether we had Nature Play Passports. We didn’t – but we do now!
Nature Play CBR is an initiative designed to encourage children into unstructured, active outdoor play. The Nature Play Passport is a pocket-sized journal that really appeals to young children. The front half has pages for them to record their missions (more about that later); and the back half has pre-printed challenges and activities for kids to try, including geocaching , bird spotting, and trail discovery. In the centre of the passport is a set of awesome stickers for marking off activities as they get completed.
Now, the passport on its own is already pretty cool. But pairing it with the Mission Control Interface adds a whole other dimension! Parents and caregivers can register their details and then create individual avatars and logins for each child. Then, ‘missions’ can be allocated to each child’s avatar from the huge list available – while all age-appropriate missions are automatically added to the child’s profile, parents and caregivers can add more missions or take away anything that doesn’t suit. The kids can then access their individual Mission Control using their own logins, grab their passport and get ready to complete a mission! Completed missions can be recorded both in the passport’s mission pages, and in the online Mission Control, so the children are able to keep track of all their completed missions. Younger children might need grownup help to record their missions, but older tech-savvy kids will relish logging into their own Mission Control and checking for mission updates. Best of all, the missions are pretty much all very low-cost or completely free!
Nature Play CBR Passports are available free from the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, the National Arboretum Canberra, and the Canberra and Region Visitors Centre.
The Nature Play CBR website also has loads of other great resources to help us encourage our kids to get outdoors. With the long summer break fast approaching, the Nature Play program will help you find lots of different ways to get the whole family involved in the fun that can be had outside in Canberra. More information can found on their website.
Amanda McLeod