Fun game for hiking kids: Myth-making

On this hike, we're battling dragons.

Generally, exploring and discovery is enough for kids, but sometimes even they can grow bored with that and become restless. Remember that they naturally have shorter attention spans than adults.

Fortunately, there are lots of tried and true activities you can do on the trail that’ll keep kids from getting bored. Among them is Myth-making.

Select an interesting object on the landscape – a strangely shaped cliff, a gigantic boulder, a scenic valley – and have children make up a story about how it was created. For example, maybe a concave bend in a mountain side was created when a giant slipped backward and crashed into it, pressing the rock inward. With older children, see if the various myths about each object can be strung together into a single story. Besides being a great way to work children’s imagination, the activity also fires their curiosity about how the indentation really did get there, so be prepared to possibly answer a few geological questions!

Materials: None

Ages: 5 and up

Learn about more than a hundred other hiking diversions for kids in Hikes with Tykes: Games and Activities.