KidsOutAndAbout Austin

June 25, 2026

Local in-person events this weekend

FREE events this weekend

Local in-person events next weekend

2026 Summer Camps

Fruit picking

Birthday Party Locations

Pride Activities

Post your organization and events to our site (It's all FREE!)

Sat, Jul 4: Belton 4th of July Celebration
Sat, Jul 4: July 4th Parade and Frontier Days
Sat, Jul 4: Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular - Sponsored by H-E-B
Sat, Jul 4: Cedar Sparktacular
Sat, Jul 11: McDade Watermelon Festival
Fri, Jul 24: Classic Game Fest
Sun, Aug 2: K-pop Demon Hunters Family Paint Party
Sat, Aug 22: Austin Pride Fest
Thu, Aug 27: Gillespie County Fair
 

Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:
 

The summer I was 5, my parents took our family to Cape Cod for a week. In Provincetown, we bought a kite, then headed to the dunes in North Truro, where my sister and I spent hours running full-tilt up and down the bare white hills. We’d scramble to the top, turn, and launch ourselves downward, legs windmilling, hair flying, lungs full of salt air and triumph. Invariably, we’d fall, slap into the soft, sun-warmed sand, pop back up, and do it again.

Tumbling down the dunes was gravity. Sand was friction. The kite tugging on our arms was air on the move. We didn't have words to describe these phenomena—we were little kids, not tiny physicists with notebooks. A decade later, my calculus teacher would give me the words and symbols to process motion conceptually, but experiences like this had already taught my body that I was an actor in the physics of the world. My body understood.

Summer is the perfect time for kids to learn motion from the inside out. Motion is in amusement park rides, in waves bobbing ducks and inner tubes up and down at the lake, in trains pulling you forward in one dimension and airplanes moving you through three. It’s in bikes and swings and Frisbees and trampolines and slip-and-slides, in tumbling through the days without realizing that learning is happening.

As tour guides to our kids’ universe, we can point gently: Feel how the swing slows at the top? Notice how the wave lifts you before it lets you down? See how leaning changes the bike’s path? But the point is not to turn summer into physics class. The point is to help kids notice how the world feels as they move through it. The equations can come later; now is the time for motion, and for the emotion that accompanies it. Summer’s gift is the body’s memory: wind, water, speed, balance, falling, landing, and getting up to run again.

—Debra Ross, publisher of KidsOutAndAbout.com, co-author of The Eclipse Effect: How to Seize Extraordinary Moments to Build Strong Communities