4 things to do with sticks on your next walk
And how to keep them.
On a walk, a stick gets found before I've had a chance to suggest anything. After that we're walking with a stick — not a stick, the stick, longer than he is, drawing a long quiet line in the dust behind him.
My older son goes to an outdoor school, so being outside is already part of how he learns. What I kept wanting was something for the ordinary walks — the one to the shop, the twenty minutes before dinner, the days nobody plans.
That's where the stick comes in. It's already in his hand, it costs nothing, and our walks got twice as long once I started using it instead of walking past it.
Here are the four things we actually do. Nothing you don't already have on the ground in front of you. And at the end of each one, the part I care about most — what we do so that by next Tuesday the walk still exists somewhere.
1. A house for someone small
Gather as many sticks as you can carry — it takes far more than you'd expect — and lean them against each other until they hold themselves up. That's the whole build, and the collecting is half of it.
The interesting part isn't the structure, it's the question after it: who's going to live here? An ant. A little bug. A snail. My older son names every tenant and has opinions about them. The younger one, who's one and a half, just puts his hand through the doorway to check it's a real room.
Give the house a minute before you move on. They'll start furnishing it — a leaf for a roof, a pebble for a chair — and that's when the activity turns into play, which is a completely different thing.
To keep it
Ask who moved in, and what their name is. An ant moved into ours. His name is Sasavindik — a name that exists nowhere else in the world — and my son drew him on the keepsake page, then taped one small stick from the house next to the drawing.
That's the whole record: a name, a drawing, and one stick. A photo would have shown a pile of sticks. This shows Sasavindik, which is what the afternoon was actually about.
2. A gate that opens
The gate is mine. I held the stick out across the path like a barrier and told them it was closed.
The button is my older son's. He found it on the stick itself, showed me exactly where to press, and shortly after that the gate began issuing tickets — a ticket comes out, you take it, then you may pass. None of that was my idea and all of it is better than my idea.
It has been running for weeks now. It is requested on every single walk, and I have been promoted to permanent gate operator.
It works for both of mine, which almost nothing does. The four-year-old builds the whole world around it — tickets, queues, rules about who's allowed through. The one-and-a-half-year-old doesn't need the world; he needs the button. He presses, something happens because of him, and that is the best game there is when you're that age.
To keep it
One photo of the stick held out across the path — that gesture is the game, and it reads instantly a year later. Then one line: what did the gate let through today? A scooter, a dog, grandma. Keep the ticket, if a ticket was issued. That's a sentence a four-year-old will dictate happily and read back for a year.
3. A line in the ground
Sand, dirt, gravel — anywhere the stick leaves a mark. The stick is the pencil, the ground is the paper.
He draws his name. Then a boat. Then something only he can read, which he explains at length. It works better than paper because there's no edge to the page and no wrong way to hold anything — he can stand up, walk along his own line, and keep going.
Give them a big patch and don't tidy it. The best drawings come after the fifth one, once they've stopped performing.
To keep it
This is the one where a photo genuinely earns its place, because the line is going away. The sea erases it, or the next person walks through it, and it was never going to survive the afternoon. Stand over it and shoot straight down. Then ask what it says, and write down the answer word for word. “It's a boat with a door.” Don't correct it and don't tidy the spelling.
4. A bridge on the ground
Lay branches out in a line or a ladder and now it's a bridge. The rule is the ground either side isn't allowed.
This is the one that lasts longest, because it's a course and courses get harder. Add a branch. Add a gap. Do it backwards. Do it barefoot — mine take their shoes off every time, and that's the point rather than a problem. Bare feet on bark is information a shoe can't give you. They're feeling the thing they're balancing on.
It's also the quietest activity on the list. Balancing takes concentration, and concentrating children go silent, which is its own small gift.
To keep it
Photograph the feet on the branches. It's the best photo you'll take all week and it's instantly recognisable a year later, in a way that a photo of a child standing in a park is not. And write down how many branches they crossed without falling off. The number is the souvenir.
The part nobody tells you about outdoor activities
You'll do all four. They'll be good. And in three weeks the details will be gone — not the feeling, the details. Which one he built. What he called it. How many he crossed.
I take a lot of photos and I'm glad I do. But a photo holds one kind of memory: what it looked like. It doesn't hold the name of the ant, or the answer to what the gate let through, or the fact that there were seven branches and he crossed all seven. Those come from the child, and they only exist if somebody writes them down that day.
That's why the page matters. Somewhere for the photo, yes — but also somewhere to draw, somewhere to tape the thing you found, and the question printed there already so you don't have to invent one while holding a wet stick.
That's the whole idea behind the Explorer Passport — twelve outdoor adventures for ages 3–6, and behind every single one, a page to keep it on. It prints at home, it costs less than a coffee and a croissant, and it turns a stick into a page your kid reads back to you.
Want somewhere to start? Try our free guide — a short printable for getting outside with a small child. No spam, just the guide.
So tell me — what's your kid's favourite game with a stick? Ours is the gate, and it shows no sign of ending.