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Archive for the ‘Nature Activities’ Category

by Denise Willms

If you’d like to help your kids make some Christmas presents, do an easy Christmas craft, or just add a few nature lessons to your Christmas seasons, making Christmas bird feeders together is a fun way to do all three.

Our family makes these Christmas birdfeeders every year, and we enjoy watching the winter birds that come to visit our home. They also make nice gifts for family and friends. They’ll enjoy watching the birds that visit their backyard when they display your gift.

What You Need:

• Whole grain bread, toasted
• Smooth peanut butter
• Bird seed
• A drinking straw
• Colorful string or yarn
• Christmas cookie cutters

What You Do:

Toast the bread then let it cool. Use your Christmas-themed cookie cutters to cut Christmas shapes out of the bread. Use a butter knife to spread one side of each shape with peanut butter.

Pour some birdseed onto a plate. Place the cut bread on the plate, peanut butter side down. Press the bread down gently so the birdseed will stick.

Remove the bread from the plate, and lay it down on the counter or a cutting board. Use the drinking straw to make a hole at the top of your new bird feeder. Pull some colorful string or yarn through the hole and hang on a tree branch. We like to use Christmas colored yarn to make our tree look festive.

Now sit quietly and watch who comes to enjoy your Christmas treat. When the bread is gone, the birds might even take the string to add to their nests.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Denise Willms is a homeschooling mom of two, and owner of WAHM-Articles.com. You can find more information on homeschooling at http://www.learnhowtohomeschool.com

by Rachel Paxton

Fall is a fun time to learn about squirrels and nuts. Today my boys attended a class at our children’s museum called “All About Nuts”.

First the teacher made sure no one had any nut allergies (very important!). Next she showed the children a variety of nuts and had them feel each nut and describe what they saw. She taught them the name of each nut. Each child got to bring home a small bag of nuts.

Next she had the children go on a “nut hunt”. The children searched for small pictures of nuts the teacher had placed around the room.

The children next heard a story about a squirrel, made a squirrel puppet, and sang a song about squirrels. They got to bring home some squirrel coloring pages.

It was a lot of fun! A great way to spend a fall day.

I searched around online to find you some squirrel resources to do a squirrel lesson with your child. I found some really cute free squirrel-themed coloring pages you can download for your child to color.

If you would like to do some work with numbers and counting, here are some fun acorn numbers worksheets.

Books about squirrels: The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri, How Do You Know It’s Fall? by Allan Fowler, and A Squirrel’s Tale by Richard Fowler