Create a Thinking Walk

Kew invites you to create your own Darwin-inspired Thinking Walks for families, schools, youth groups and outdoor organisations.

Thinking Walks complement the Great Plant Hunt, created by Kew, commissioned and funded by the Wellcome Trust. The Great Plant Hunt aims to get the UK's primary schools and their pupils out and about and excited by nature.

Lily, Ash and Joseph the tortoise

Who are Thinking Walks for?

Anyone and anywhere with outdoor space can use Thinking Walks to explore their local patch - from Brownie groups in their local green space to hosting your own child's party in the garden at home.

The sections below have everything you'll need to organise your own Thinking Walk -long or short, big or small!

Getting started

There are pre-designed boards with images and text and designed around four themes already completed so you can just 'pick them up and go'. We also offer templates that you can adapt to tell the stories specific to your site.

Browse Kew's Thinking Walks

We've also included loads of extra downloads that will help make your Thinking Walk fabulous. These two documents will help you to get to grips with the basics:

Introductory boards

These are useful boards to find out more about the Great Plant Hunt, Darwin and his Sandwalk. These boards are best placed near the beginning of your walk to help set the scene.

A newspaper pot for planting seeds in.

Complementary activities

These are optional, extra activities for participants to do before, during or after the Thinking Walk.

They are a good way to spread the flow of participants around the route and are also designed to be stand alone activities outside of Thinking Walks. They are taken from the primary schools' Great Plant Hunt Teachers' Handbook.

Useful information

Use this as a springboard when planning your own Thinking Walks.

This extra information is taken from the primary schools' Great Plant Hunt Teachers' Handbook. Although aimed at teachers much of the information is transferable for use by outdoor organisations and interested individuals.