Outdoor Kansas for Kids
About OKKids
O.K. Kids Day
Events run from early Spring to Fall. Free entrance to State Parks very check with your local park!
Across the state of Kansas 45 sites have signed up -- hopefully there is at least one in your community. It is a free event with the opportunity for participants to experience the great outdoors and all it has to offer the kids will participate in numerous outdoor games, events and go home with a new T-shirt and prizes to remember the day by!
Why OKKids?
There was a time when Kansas kids took the outdoors for granted. They just seemed to grow up outside. True, for many, that time was spent working on the family farm, but they, and their small Kansas town counterparts, still found time to chase frogs down by the ponds, wander along the creeks and rivers, and scare up rabbits along the fence rows.
They were no strangers to sunrises and sunsets, nor to the feel of wind, rain or snow on their faces. Values learned from these times, responsibility, self-reliance, hard work, sharing, carried over into the lives they led.
Times are a lot different for kids today as we enter a new millennium. We've become an urbanized society with concrete, roads and buildings replacing fields, creeks and trees. Video games, television, and the internet keep kids under roofs. Physical education activities are distant memories in many of our schools, and obesity and social problems walk hand-in-hand down their hallways.
OKKids is an opportunity to give kids all across Kansas an alternative to their sedentary lifestyles, to show them a day of fun and excitement in the state's parks, lakes, marshes and trails.
For many of them, it will be an introduction to the beauty and enjoyment of the outdoors, for others a reawakening or reinforcing of their outdoors interests. It's a chance to have fun and be part of a statewide outdoors happening. That's the "why" of OKKids!