Nature Play Ideas – Building a Cairn

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Welcome back to Day 2 of our Nature Play mini series – sharing nature play ideas from our recent holidays. Our first idea we shared was all about counting & sorting things. Today, we are stacking and construction! My kids LOVE being outdoors, which is wonderful, as it is what childhood should all be about. Running, hiding, exploring, collecting – ENJOYING nature. There are many things you can do whilst out and about and that don’t need any equipment, but just your imagination. So onto our next nature play idea:

Nature Play Idea: Building a Cairn

Nature Play - 2 - Building Cairns

This is one nature play idea, where ideally you should use stones – as traditionally these are how a cairn is made. Our other nature play ideas, can be adapted to suit the natural materials in your environment.

A cairn is a man made piles of stones and come from the Scottish word  càrn. They come in all shapes and sizes and can be found all over the world and have all sorts of different meanings and purposes. One of the most common modern day use of them is to mark out hiking trails. But they also have religious or simply decorative purposes.

Building a cairn is lots of wonderful benefits – there is working as a team – finding nicely shaped stones, deciding which to place at the bottom and how to build them up. The are sorting skills and then there are construction skills to explore. Finally there are of course the balancing skills – watch out your cairn may just topple.

We had lots of fun with our cairn and we made a number on this holiday. By coincidence, we stumbled across other holiday makers making HUGE ones on the beach and it was really fun to see how high they could get.

Check out our other Nature Play Ideas!