Rusty Keeler: She says, she remembers my saying no bad weather, and she quoted it as no bad weather, just wrong clothing. So you know, you could get your super suit or you just make sure that everybody’s got the right clothes, including yourself, and then you go outside.
Hi, this is Rusty Keeler, and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast, where we talk about play nature, playing in nature, and the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen.
All right. Here we are together again. Yay. Well, let me start by saying Happy New Year and happy second season of the Play Nature Podcast. Yay. We did it just about a full circle around the sun, and we’re starting fresh. 2026 and I’m excited because this is a solo episode, just me and you, and I’m back sitting next to one of my favorite places here, six Mile Creek in Ithaca, New York, and it is January 8th.
My son’s. 14th birthday today, and we first, we’ll just kinda set the stage here by Six Mile Creek. Let you know the environment, the atmosphere in nature. Um, we’ve been having a good winter, actually. Lots of, we’ve had lots of snow, lots of cold. We had an early winter, which doesn’t always happen. And I’ve been getting out on cross country skis and, you know.
Playing in it, right? That’s how you enjoy all the seasons. You know, you find your way to play, to get out there and enjoy it and experience it. And that’s part what we’re gonna be talking about today. But actually, today’s an interesting day by the creek because it is sunny, sunny and in Ithaca, New York in the winter months.
It’s not often sunny. Yes, it is gray. It is very gray. Now we get different shades of gray. Yes. You look out and be like, oh, it’s a, it’s a light gray sky today. Oh, it’s a medium gray. Oh, it’s blotch colors of gray. Oh, it’s dark gray. A couple days ago, it was so dark. I have like Christmas lights set on timer so when it gets dark at night, they go on.
Well, it was so dark during the day with the gray skies that the Christmas lights went on during the day. Oh my. So. That’s why you have to get out and play in the snow in that weather. And even though it’s gray outside, we all remember that we have the light of the universe shining in our hearts and we can shine that out in the world.
So, uh, it, that can be our, we can bring the light that can be our mission in the dark times of the winter to bring the light out into the world. So today it is sunny and we’ve had a thaw and it’s feeling warm today. Yes. It’s approaching 40 degrees. Does that sound warm to you? Yeah. Here in Ithaca, you know we’ve had a lot of weather in the teens or single digits Fahrenheit.
I’m talking Fahrenheit here, so when you approach 40, it feels warm and I can guarantee you. That there are people in Ithaca, in shorts today outside because it’s sunny and it is above freezing. Yeah. So people are probably jogging around, uh, trying not to slip on ice in their shorts. Yeah. Well, I’m not in shorts.
You the, the much repeated phrase. No bad weather, just bad clothing. I would think shorts in winter apply to that statement. Yeah. But anyway, so, so there it is where I’m sitting and the creek is flowing and there’s a lot of water because, you know, it’s been warming and the snow has been melting and we’ve even had rain.
So there’s a lot of water in the creek, but then by the edges where the rocks are, you know, things are melting and the rocks are being shown again, popping up through the ice and snow. And then you see all sorts of neat crystal formations. Uh, the creek, the water that was the creek by the edge and Ithaca is gorg.
And so I’m in a gorge and I can see ice, you know, ice that was dripping water from the different layers of the gorge. And yeah, still a nice little kind of wintry scene, even though it’s melting, but there’s blue sky, glorious blue sky. And so that is where I am. I’m coming from. Today. And so I got the sunshine in my heart to share with you in the blue skies above, and yeah.
So what do you think of season one? How, how have you liked the podcast so far? Any favorite moments, any ahas or reinforcing things you already do? Any favorite guests? Any favorite jokes? Yeah. Well, email me. I wanna hear her. What do you think? And so I’m excited today because no guests, just you and me, and.
I’m gonna do some more recap stuff in future episodes ’cause there’s, there’s so much, uh, with, with the last guests and so many different ideas and, you know, things that makes me think of for our mission of connecting kids to nature through play. The place where we live and the seasons and all that stuff.
And the state of play and play schema and yeah, so many different ideas. So. Yeah, we’ll, we’ll look, we’ll look ahead in future episodes about that and, and I will include, I had a huge aha moment. Yeah. After talking to Heather Burnt Santy about play Schemas. Did you hear that episode? If you didn’t go back, check it out.
It was one of my favorites. Yeah, we, we got it into it and you hear my mind being opened and blown repeatedly. But the aha actually happened after, uh, I went in, I was at the IPA International Play Conference, uh, the US Play Conference in Louisville this year. And after I had the podcast with Heather, I went to a session with Heather and well.
I had a mind blowing aha moment that kind of changed how I see play. The kind of the nature of growth and development through play Our place kind of on the outskirts of it, but like what it is. So, yeah, I’m excited. I That could be a whole episode. So maybe that’s the next episode. I’ll talk about that. So stay tuned.
This episode is about winter. Yeah. What we can do in winter with children. What are some fun ways to explore the season of winter? The season of cold, the season of ice and snow. If you’re in a place that has ice and snow. Now I know maybe you’re, you’re lucky and you are still down south. If it’s, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, you’re down south and you’re kicking it in the warmth and you got blue sky and sun and all that kind of stuff, you are in shorts and that’s proper, proper clothing.
Or maybe you’re listening and you’re in the southern hemisphere in, in which case you are in summer. But you’ll see there’s still some ways that you could explore these winter ideas in warm weather places too. So I’m gonna just jump right in here because I’m born, raised and continuing to live in upstate New York.
So winter is big and you know, I had a really beautiful experience. Alright, I’m gonna start with some stories here, but, uh, before I jump in, um, and at the very end, stay tuned to the very end because I have a question I’m going to answer from a listener of what loose parts to do in. Winter, how do you do loose parts in winter?
So I’ll get to that at the end. But I had a really beautiful moment, uh, experience this a couple weeks ago, uh, in winter where I went back to my hometown to visit a friend with my sons and Skinny Atlas, New York, kind of up near Syracuse. And you know, Ithaca is a little farther south and we don’t get as much snow and I kind of miss the big snowstorms of, of old days, you know?
And up there you get lake effect snow, which is this phenomenon kind of. You hear about Buffalo, New York getting all this crazy amounts of snow and Syracuse, New York, and Oswego, New York because the huge lakes are up there, the Great Lakes. And the water moisture gets picked up and then it gets turned into snow precipitation and it.
Dumps down on these cities that are fortunate or unfortunate enough to be next to the east side of these great lakes. So anyway, where I grew up, we would get this lake effect snow, and it’s just comes down hard. Hard and heartily and yeah. So I miss it. But anyway, we went up there, uh, after the holidays to visit a friend, and lo and behold, we got in the midst of a giant lake effect storm, the lake effect snow machine.
As the media called it. Anyway, it was grand. Um, I was, you know, wondering how am I gonna drive back to Ithaca in this, um, tons of snow, just like in the air coming down. We were only there for like three or four hours, but there was like six inches of snow on the car that we had to brush off, and we’re walking around in it.
And it took me back to my own childhood and what it felt like to be in these big snow storms. And sure enough, we had the proper clothing, we had long underwear, we had snow pants, hats, gloves, boots, coats, you know, all, all the proper stuff. So that was really fun to get out in it. Meanwhile, I was still out in, in Ithaca doing things, uh, to enjoy winter.
And so here come my tips and ideas for you. Sorry to go off on a tangent like that, but you know, winter. It can be great, right? So get the long underwear and the snow pants and snow pants for the kids, but also snow pants for you. As I like to remind teachers. Everybody looks cute in snow pants, so make sure you have snow pants too.
So one of my first tips, fun tips for enjoying winter with kids is ice sculpture. Uh, now I’m not talking chainsaw ice sculpture. I’m talking freezing water in interesting containers and making sculpture that way. And so one of the easiest is water balloon. Yeah, fill up some water balloons and if you’re someplace where it’s freezing or below freezing, stick ’em outside overnight.
Or for a couple days. And lo and behold, once they freeze, they create these really beautiful like sphere oblong, interesting shaped sculptures. And they look like, like high-end blown glass sculpture. So my porch railings and picnic table outside, uh, they’re, they’re covered with these cool sculptures. And I also like take plastic bins or five gallon buckets and fill those with water and stick them outside and let ’em freeze.
Turn ’em over. Uh, and you have some interesting sculptures. Maybe I’ll include some pictures or links to pictures and show notes or something. ’cause you gotta see it. And so another thing that you could do with these sculptures with the water is. You can add color also so you can put food, coloring a few drops of food coloring in each water balloon as you’re filling it up.
Makes incredible patterns. Makes incredible shapes inside. Like it. You gotta try it and let me know how it goes. And if you are in a warm, weathered place, you can still try this by putting a water balloon in your freezer. Yeah, do a couple in your freezer or little plastic containers, leftover containers and stuff like that.
Stick those in the freezer. A few drops of food coloring and yeah, and then put it outside for fun. See what the kids do with it. What do they think of it? A variation on that is something that a friend of mine, a, a preschool director, told me that she learned from Bev Boss. A Bev boss book somewhere along the line.
And it was this idea of making ice blocks. And she was doing this in the summer actually, so she was freezing these blocks in her freezer, uh, with food coloring. So they’re, oh wait, were they food coloring? They might have not been food coloring, but food coloring became a part of the activity. So she had ice, these ice blocks.
Out of like leftover containers and she brought ’em outside with the kids and, and, and then the materials were salt and food coloring. That’s it. And so she let the kids like pour salt on the ice and salt, melts the ice and makes these holes and it goes pretty fast. And then you add, kids have food coloring, so they’re squirting the color in there.
And yeah, it’s like a grand experiment. So ice sculptor and then ice sculpture, sculptor plus salt and color, or just color. Now if you have snow, this is a great thing. You can fill squirt bottles with a food coloring and water mixture. And then how fun is that squirting color all over snow. So if you have snow, this is a great thing to do.
And you know, food coloring, it could be a little pricey for those little squirt things, but did you know that you can buy food coloring by the gallon? Yes, and you, you could buy it by the gallon for not much more than a pack of those little squirty bottles, finger squirting bottles, uh, that you get in like the cookie baking section of the grocery store.
But if you go online and say food coloring by the gallon, it’ll come up and it’s, it’s pretty reasonable. So I have, uh, in my basement four, four jugs of, of food coloring that will. Uh, I can pass down from generation to generation. It’ll be enough for a lifetime. But anyway, yeah, you fill up those squirt bottles and you know, maybe you’ve done this.
Yeah. It’s fun to squirt and if you’re in a warm climate, maybe you just put up paper and you squirt, squirt the paper with food coloring and see what effects happen that way. Yeah. Now, funny little story. You know, I was, you know, I’ve been doing nature play stuff for. So many years and so many years before I even had kids of my own.
So, you know, I was into it like, like you, I was, I was into it. Uh, and then it was interesting to have my own kids and then watch them do all the things that children do when they play. So there was a big fire and ice festival at Ithaca Children’s Garden here, and one of the activities that we had was the classic.
Food, coloring and water in squirt bottles. And my son, he must have been four, maybe five years old, jj, he had those squirt bottles and he could not help himself. Squirting, squirting, squirting snow, squirting snow, mixing the different colors, squirting, squirting, squirt, and it, it was just, it was the most natural thing in the world.
And yet it was also fascinating for me just to see him suddenly doing the patterns, the play patterns that. So many children will do what you, you put out a squirt bottle of color with snow and say it’s okay, and they’ll go for it. And so he, it’s like he couldn’t help himself just like so many four and five year olds, you know, and we think about schema as we’re learning about these different patterns of play.
Uh, maybe that squirting the snow and watching it transform. Is that one of the schemas? Transformation. Transformation, fascination. So he was caught in the spirit of the transformation, fascination of sporting the snow with color. Pretty fun. And then that leads me to just thinking about being outdoors in winter, in cold weather.
Yes. It’s good to do that. Yeah. Now we know that, you know, you, you still wanna be careful, you know, there’s blizzard conditions that aren’t good or super frigid. You know, conditions that aren’t good. But most of the time if you have the proper clothing, it’s great to go outdoors. That friend up in Skinny Atlas when we were in the snow storm, she’s all excited ’cause she has this.
Uh, she calls it like her super suit. It’s like a snowmobile suit, head to toe, one piece thing. And so she, she says, she remembers my saying no bad weather, and she quoted it as no bad weather, just wrong clothing. And of course, I think the famous German quotes, no bad weather, just bad clothing, but I kind of like that too.
No bad weather, just wrong clothing. So you know, you could get your super suit or you just make sure that everybody’s got the right clothes, including yourself, and then you go outside. And I think being outside in winter, a lot of it is common sense. Right. You, you know, you wanna get out there because you want children to experience all the seasons of the year, all different kinds of weather.
We want that. We want them to learn about where they live and how they’re growing up. What’s the place that they’re growing up and what’s it like and all seasons of the year. But it’s common sense. You know, you, you gotta consider, of course, consider the temperature. And also the age level of the children that you’re, you know, you’re working with or that you have also how hardy they are and the conditions, sleet, ice, rain in winter and your situation.
Family childcare. And sometimes it feels like, oh, all those clothes, it makes more work. To get everybody ready with snow pants and snow boots and hats and gloves and yes, more work. But I invite you to flip that phrase around and instead of thinking of it as more work, what if it’s just the work? That’s the work this time of year, because we want children out in nature.
Part of the work is the snow pants, the gloves, the boots. Yeah, and so getting out there and then experiencing it with all the senses, what do you and your children observe outside? How is it different than other seasons? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? Have birds left for the winter where you live.
Or have birds arrived? Where you live in winter. Are you in Florida now? And there’s Robins everywhere. ’cause they’ve, they’ve left upstate New York and they’ve come down south. Okay. But getting outside for children is great. But let’s just also pause here. And how about you getting outside? It could be with children, but maybe also, how about you experiencing winter?
Yeah, you put it on the proper clothing and going and sitting. Maybe you sit for an hour, maybe you walk for an hour in winter, you know, and observe you time, and maybe you could think about ways. To track what you’re seeing and smelling and hearing. Maybe you draw, maybe you write, maybe you just observe silently in nature.
Yeah, and think it through those right clothes. Is it cold out? Is it frigid? Is it wet? What kind of footwear should you have? What kind of hat should you have? But yeah, give carving out some time that you can have some nature time to yourself observing the season. Another thing to do when you’re outside in winter that I, you know, if we’re always thinking about that place based education.
We talked to Gemma in Hawaii about this, but we’re also talking about it in winter, upstate New York. So it’s observing the differences. What is it like this time of year? And one thing that I love looking at is the sun, right when we have it. Where is it in the sky? Because it is very different this time of year than in summer.
So that might be something with children too, just to kind of look and see where is it? Is it straight up overhead? It’s kind of where it is in summer or is it an angle towards the south. And you know, this time of year the sun sets early, at least where I am. And so that’s interesting too to Mark, where is that sun setting in the sky?
Because if you note it will move from south this time of year in the northern hemisphere to the north. Equinox, it might set close to due west and then summer solstice, it’s moving up higher in the sky, more to the north. So just keep track of that. Why don’t you, why don’t you just notice that and maybe you’ve, maybe you’ve never thought about that before, but it changes everything.
It makes the season, in fact. And then you could research why it’s the, you know, the tip of our, the axis of the earth and the proximity, you know, close to the sun and all that jazz. So kind of interesting, but something that you can observe right now when you’re outside also. And other ideas, of course, the winter fairy huts.
Yeah. Would you, would you make some fairy huts with your kids outside? What are the materials that you could find this time of year? Are there leaves and sticks? Are there branches? Are there rocks or is it more snow and igloo, fairy hut styles or snow forts for fairy huts or fairy, yeah, fairy snow forts with food coloring squirted on them or ice cubes sprinkled around.
Or ice sculpture fairy huts. Hey, I like that. That’s pretty cool. And while we’re thinking about the cold, while we’re thinking about the sun, we can also think about fire. Yeah. Maybe Now in winter is the perfect time to have a warming fire. Yeah, maybe you could have a big bonfire or just a little campfire or a little tiny cook fire.
Yeah, I think now might be a great opportunity ’cause you could warm your hands, you could roast some marshmallows. You could cook some hot chocolate over, a little open fire. So now might be the time to do a little research on that. Are there rules that you have to follow? Uh, what kind of safety measures should you take?
Should you have in place? Five gallon bucket of water nearby, uh, far away from your building or other flammable things? Can you check with, uh, you know, your town? Can you have a little fire where you’re at? All that kind of thing. And should you have it in a fire pit or a a metal fire stand? Lots of ways to do it, but maybe now you can investigate.
How could we have a little fire outside to warm ourselves in the cold winter? Okay. Switching just to this idea of the seasoned and sensory experiences. Did you know that citrus fruit, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, limes, that kind of thing, they’re actually in season. They’re ripe in winter. Here in North America.
And so now’s the time to get to like the best of the best, like get some tangerines, really get the, you know, we live in a, in a time when you can get oranges all year long, you can get tangerines all year long. But here in North America, here in the us now is the time to get the real, the ones that are like.
Really ripe it in season. So that’s fun. I think they’re the most delicious one. It’s the most delicious time to get that. So that would be another interesting way to celebrate the season by having fruit, even though that’s not maybe from where you live or maybe it is from where you live. Lucky you. But eat, eating the fruit of the season.
And then it also is an interesting thing to think about, like here in upstate New York, we don’t grow ci citrus, but we, we grow apples and pears and berries and all that kind of stuff. So it’s, and that’s all summer or fall based. You know, it, it ripe, you know, things are ripe in fall and summer and that’s where we pick stuff.
So, I mean, I didn’t learn this till like five years ago, five or six years ago when all the, you know, the citrus shows up in the grocery store around Christmas. It’s like, what’s going on? Oh, that’s when the fruit in those places is ready. So, you know, it’s just kind of tying in again to the season and the cycles and the earth.
I was thinking about earth speed, where the sun is in the sky, and then what’s. Producing what fruit is producing and what flowers are blooming. And so my last little idea here is planting an amarillo bulb, a flower bulb in a pot for your, for your classroom or your home. Yeah, maybe You always already do that.
You know, it’s often a holiday gift kind of thing. Every year, I give all my family members an Amarillo bulb to plant, and it’s something that, you know, you might see at, uh, a grocery store or one of the big box hardware stores. You know, they sell ’em around the holidays, but it’s a nice thing. Again, upstate New York where it’s gray and brown, the leaves are down and nothing’s growing.
It’s nice to have. This flower in Amarillo and it growing and it’s growing, like it gets very, very tall and then it bursts into beautiful blossom, these great big blue blooms. Uh, so that’s kind of fun too, to have something in the winter that is blossoming. Yeah. So what do you think any those ideas appeal?
Well, you’re appealing oranges. Alright. Well, let’s just end with that question from a listener about loose parts in winter.
What loose parts can you have in wintertime? And of course, one answer could be all the normal loose parts. All the loose parts that you already have could work fine outside traffic cones and boards and hula hoops. Ladders, plastic containers, milk crates, plastic dinosaurs, of course, tires, all that stuff works.
Or maybe, you know, you have some things that are more for digging. If you have lots of snow, you have more things for digging forts or making forts or containers to put snow in. To make blocks of snow, as if you’re gonna build an igloo. Sometimes I, with my sons, we like to, uh, get like, you know, plastic bins, storage bins, and we pack snow in them, flip ’em over, and then you got a big snow block.
And then we do another snow block. And, you know, you do a lot of that and you can make an igloo, but you can at least make a, you don’t have to do a full igloo, you could just make a little wall or you just have a few blocks of snow everywhere. And that’s super fun. Then you get out the squirt models of color, right?
So that’s fun. Maybe you get extra boards, you know, maybe you’re in a place in winter where it isn’t cold and frozen all the time. Maybe it’s freezes, and then it’s thaws, and then it’s snowy, and then it’s muddy. So maybe you want a bunch of boards to make bridges across the mud. Obstacle courses over the mud.
And then kind of my favorite, uh, way to reframe the loose parts in wintertime. You know, everybody loves a mud kitchen, right? In summer, we’re all year long, but how about you create an ice laboratory? That’s right. We’re bringing all the, we’re bringing all the ideas together here of the ice and the food coloring and the snow, and the loose parts to an ice laboratory.
It’s kinda like a mud kitchen. Picture, a surface could be on the ground, but it could have your little table or could be even be your actual mud kitchen surface and you have your frying pans and pots and pans, but you also then have the snow there. And you have ice sculptures that you’ve made, you’ve, you’ve frozen extra ice cubes in your freezer with food coloring in it, and you pop those out.
And so you have a mud kitchen tabletop that is filled with colored ice cubes or some of those water balloons or some of those water balloon sculptures frozen that you crack. Open halfway through, and they’re not frozen all the way through. And then they’re like these little vessels. And then you can put different things in those.
You can put the ice cubes in there, or you could fill it with the squirt bottle colored water. Yeah. Yeah. So the ice laboratory, let them experiment. Squirt the snow, stir the snow, add the frozen ice pieces. How fun is that right? Yay. Yeah. So there we go. Fun In wintertime, even when it’s cold, even when it’s gray, you have the light of the thousand universes in your heart, shining bright for your children and your spirit.
And the fun never stops. Alright, so get outside, spend some time. In winter. Observe it, love it, and let me know how it goes. Yeah, send me some pictures. Send me an email. Alright. Till next time, have fun out there.
All right. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment? Or a question, email me at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide.
Fun stuff in there. And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures, and when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts, or saying yes to risky play. My favorite motto is dream big, start small and never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
