A Uganda gorilla trekking trip with children offers a rare opportunity to connect young people with conservation in a way that no classroom or documentary can replicate. But the hours between activities—long vehicle transfers, morning waits at the lodge, afternoons after an adult’s trek—benefit from structure. Conservation-themed games and activities designed for the Bwindi context keep children engaged, deepen their understanding of the ecosystem, and create memory associations that link the experience to the ideas you want them to carry home.
Wildlife observation journals
Before the trip, give each child a blank notebook designated as their personal wildlife journal. Throughout the safari, encourage them to draw animals they see, note the date, location, and one fact about each animal, and record questions they want to ask the guide or look up later. The act of drawing from observation—rather than from memory—forces careful attention to the animal’s actual appearance: the texture of a buffalo’s horn, the length of a colobus monkey’s tail, the shade of brown in a gorilla’s fur. Children who keep observation journals consistently report richer memories of wildlife encounters than those who observe passively.
For younger children (ages 5-8), printed templates with outline drawings to colour and labelled body parts to identify can structure the journaling activity without requiring independent drawing ability. For older children and teenagers, unstructured journals that combine writing, drawing, and pressed plant specimens (small leaves, seeds, and flowers collected from the lodge garden rather than the protected forest) build a more personal and lasting record.
The food web game
Before a game drive or forest walk, create a simple food web on paper showing the relationships between species that the group might encounter: sun → plants → mountain gorilla; sun → insects → frogs → snake → hawk; sun → plants → forest duiker → leopard. Give each child a role card (they are “the gorilla” or “the fern” or “the rain”) and use a ball of string passed between players to show feeding connections. When one element is removed (the “gorilla” drops the string), the web changes for everyone connected to it. This game makes abstract ecology concepts—interdependence, keystone species, trophic cascades—physically tangible and memorable.
Conservation detective challenges
Create a series of “conservation detective” tasks for children to complete during the trip, each involving observation and simple reasoning. Examples: “Find three different ways people use the forest around Bwindi” (fuel wood, medicinal plants, water); “Spot five different bird species and sketch one of them”; “Ask a lodge staff member what their most important job is for protecting gorillas.” Each completed task earns a stamp or sticker in their passport booklet. At the end of the trip, the completed booklet is both a record of achievement and a basis for conversation about what they learned.
Storytelling: the gorillas’ perspective
After observing a gorilla group, or watching video footage at the lodge, invite the children to write or tell a story from the gorilla’s perspective. What did the gorilla see when the trekking group arrived? How did the silverback decide the humans were not a threat? What will the family do for the rest of the day after the trekkers leave? This imaginative exercise deepens empathy with the animals and reinforces the ideas of gorilla family structure, individual personality, and daily life that the observation introduced. For younger children, narrate the story aloud together, building it collaboratively with the child’s input guiding the direction.
Lodge-based craft activities
Several lodges near Bwindi offer craft activities for children that use materials from the local environment: weaving with banana fibre, printing with forest leaves, making clay figures of forest animals. These activities are typically supervised by community members from adjacent villages and provide both a productive use of lodge time and a direct connection to the material culture of the communities that coexist with the park. For children who find animal observation too passive, the physical engagement of craft making often produces stronger engagement and more positive memories of the visit.
