Visiting National Parks is our favorite way to vacation. We love to hike and take in as much of the beautiful scenery and history as we can. Each of our children have national parks passports and we enjoy collecting passport stamps when we visit different parks and monuments. Our love of the great outdoors and national parks inspired us to start learning and researching the many amazing national parks. It started as a way to extend my 1st grader’s learning when we had to start staying home, but it has blossomed into a fun learning activity for the whole family. We have been researching a specific national park each week and then creating a podcast to share or new knowledge with friends and family. We’ve had so much fun, I thought I would share some of the resources we have been using to learn over the past few months.
A great website to get you going is of course, the national parks website.
We also enjoyed watching America’s National Parks on Disney+. These documentaries have some more graphic content, so I definitely recommend previewing the episode to see if it is a good fit for your kids. (We may have skipped a few sections about rutting season to avoid too many questions.)
Rock the Park episodes are a really fun way to see some different adventures in different parks. My boys really enjoy watching the two friends, Colton and Jack visit different National Parks. You can find episodes on their youtube channel.
We have also enjoyed reading some National Park themed books! We made an afternoon of it by creating our own trail mix combos and reading books. Here are a few books we enjoyed:
Our Great Big Backyard by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush Hager is a fun story about a family road trip to visit National Parks that turns out better than expected.
This fun board book introduces national parks with fun illustrations.
If I were a Park Ranger by Catherine Stier takes a look at all the different roles and jobs that a park ranger might do, and introduces different national parks.
This National Parks book is currently on our hold list with the library. We are excited to check it out when it becomes available.
This National Geographic book and this kid’s guide book have been great resources as we have researched National Parks to include in our podcast.
