Fun for all at Children's Day activities

Myles Solicito, 3 with his dad, Hesih at the Children's Day in the Redwoods. Photo/Stephen Parker

Rotorua's Redwood Forest has been a hive of activity with families heading along to the annual Redwoods Children's Day.

The event, now in its eighth year, took place today and attracted hundreds of families who took part in the forest games, storytelling, hula hooping, arts and craft, and nature walks.

One of the event organisers, Jill Walker, said today's activities were focused around celebrating the forest.

"All the activities are environmentally-friendly and have been set up to encourage children to explore the forest and see what they can find.

"We deliberately have no map of the activities so people have the chance to look around on their own and discover things for themselves."

Ms Walker said the puppeteer and art stations were popular but new activities such as the hula hooping and trapeze artist were also crowd favourites.

"We've had a lot of children's art work this year and we have been trying to display them all because it is not very often children's art is exhibited in public places and they love seeing their work hung for everyone to see."

She said the event had been wonderful and was a testament to the positive collaboration between organisers.

"The Redwoods is really pumping and my dream for the future is to see more young people get involved with the event - invite them to come do their own thing, bring something of theirs to the table."

Locals Hesih and Aura Solicito decided to go along with their two children Myles, 3, and Yuri, 6. Mr Solicito said it was the first time they had been and the children loved it.

"This was the first time they had actually been to the forest so their first impression when they walked in was, 'wow'."

He said it was great to see so many free activities and many of them were activities mums and dads could get involved in too.

"The kids loved the rotten log activity, at one point even we were kneeling on the ground helping them dig out the log and see what was inside so the event really is good fun for everyone.

"It is so beautiful out here so we wanted to bring the kids and teach them how nature works and how it needs to be looked after.

"They have absolutely loved the event, we'll definitely be coming back next year."