Fellow group members were also happy to be climbing over downed logs and racing through the undergrowth.
For early childhood teacher Helen Collins, seeing her charges have fun outdoors has influenced her postgraduate research on outdoor education so much she has made a movie about it.
She hoped it would inspire parents to see the importance of allowing their children to get outdoors and take a few risks.
''It's all about total wellbeing. There is a lot to learn out there and if they don't learn to manage themselves when they are little, how can they make sensible decisions [when they're older]?''Ms Collins works at Play and Learn Fairfield, an early childhood centre which runs a nature programme aimed at getting its charges into the outdoors on a regular basis, visiting parks and beaches.
Centre owner Jan Beatson said the two-year-old programme was inspired by the Forest Schools movement in Scandinavia.
Many young children went from home to inside the four walls of daycare and home again. Instead, this programme gave young children the opportunity to learn to take risks and be challenged in a supervised environment.
Such programmes had benefits for health, fitness and the development of social and cognitive skills, she said.
Toys were not taken into the outdoors so children learned to entertain themselves, making their own fun, she said.
Running such a programme was a challenge as she and her teachers were taking on extra risk and responsibility, Ms Beatson said.
''It means extra staffing, doing risk analysis and we are well aware if anything happens it's on our heads, but we believe it is worth taking the risk.''
