5 Outdoor Play Equipment to Encourage Kids to Stay Active

Image Credit: Vuly Play

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Staying active is an important part of keeping your kids happy and healthy, and ensuring they live vital lifestyles in the future.

Encouraging your children to engage in regular physical activity also helps to regulate their energy, improve their concentration and offers higher sleep quality. Physical play also helps children to become more confident learners as they engage with the world around them.

If you’re looking for clever ways to get your kids active, we recommend starting with outdoor activities that are fun for the whole family! Here are 5 family-friendly toys that encourage kids to get outdoors and stay active:

Bikes

Teaching kids to ride bicycles can help them to develop a healthy, active lifestyle from a young age. Not only does cycling increase muscle strength and stamina, but also encourages children to get to know their local community in a fun and interactive way.

Another great benefit of bikes is that it’s a very social activity. Children riding their bikes in a group of friends is a wonderful way to keep busy on the weekend. Riding bikes as a family can also be an excellent opportunity to spend time together. Even younger kids can be involved by using scooters to race alongside older bike riding siblings. Find out more about bikes for kids from Vuly Play.

Happiness is..... bike riding

Two little ladies being able to ride their bikes and enjoying every moment of it!

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Bikes and twins is not an easy situation when you have limited time that both parents are home with the kids. Add into that another child and it becomes a bit of a nightmare to get them all out and bike riding. Back in July 2011 my parents bought the girls bikes for their 4th birthday and they rode them a lots of times with their stabilisers on and had great fun that summer.  Then once the nice weather turned for winter they went away in the shed and did not come out again until the next spring. By this time Miss M was adamant she wanted to have the stabilisers taken off so we did that and then she cried lots and would not cycle at all.

There was very little time to take each one of them out alone as realistically that is what a child needs to learn. So 2012 was a bit of a write off for Miss M and cycling and then then by 2013 she was too big for her bike.  So Miss E had Miss M's as it was bigger and Miss M sulked and said she didn't want to ride anyway!  of course we then moved to East Sussex last summer and had loads of exciting things to be getting on with so bikes became low priority.

A couple of weeks back I was out washing my car at the top of a small hill and a friend was coincidentally washing her car at the bottom of the hill by her house and all her kids had their bikes out.  They invited my girls to have a go and try and use them. So using bikes without stabilisers they both kept coming up the hill using their feet and free wheeling down the hill. This small lesson in balance must have worked wonders as this was all the practise they had before we bought a new bike for Miss E home and got out JJ's old bike for Miss M and the two of them set off yesterday and made me so very happy.

Thank you Lord, I literally could have cried. One less thing for me to do and they are having a fantastic time.

They were both up, dressed, had breakfast and playing out in the courtyard by 8am this morning before school. Fantastic, who needs alarm clocks?

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