Nature Club, May 15 and 16

This week was our very last Nature Club! We got outside and into the gorgeous weather to look for cool and interesting natural items. We discovered rocks, sticks, pine cones,maple seeds (helicopter seeds), weeds, buttercups, dandelions, clovers and clover flowers. Everyone had a lot of fun finding treasures to fit in their bag and take home.

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Nature Club, May 1 and 2

Happy May Day! We were very lucky with the weather for our Nature Club meetings this week. We met in-between the rainstorms that came at night. I read Nature Spy by Shelley Rotner and Ken Kreisler, which tells children how they can see such interesting patterns by looking closely at natural things. After I read the book, we all went outside to be nature spies and find cool patterns in nature. We found lots of leaves, branches, flowers and rocks. I showed the kids the new, soft needles growing on the pine tree. We also enjoyed rolling down the hill! A fun, fun day!

Nature Club, April 17th and 18th

This past week in Nature Club, I read one of my favorite books, In the Trees, Honeybees, by Lori Mortensen. The book explains how honeybees live and work: finding pollen and nectar, bringing it home, taking care of the queen bee and larvae, protecting the hive and storing honey. We talked about being kind to bees and not swatting at them since they are only looking for flowers. We learned that much of our food is grown with the help of bees pollinating the flowers. We sampled some honey and most of us thought it was delicious!

Nature Club, April 3rd and 4th

This past week in Nature Club, I showed the children my favorite nature video, Bugs Don't Bug Us. With soft music playing, it simply shows young children interacting with a number of invertebrates. These included worms, ladybugs, grasshoppers, snails,butterflies,daddy longlegs, and beetles. Kids watched, but did not touch bumblebees and honeybees (but they tasted honey!) My purpose in showing this was to get the preschoolers and kindergarteners ready for a warm season in Minnesota with plenty of creepy crawlies. I wanted them to see how interesting those animals were, and understand that they didn't need to scream and run away, or stomp on them. They could look at them and learn about them! The kids really enjoyed this little DVD,so I think they learned the lesson and look forward to checking out some bugs.

Nature Club, March 20,21

This week in Nature Club the lesson was Animal Colors. We talked about every color in the rainbow and what animals were those colors. I proved to them that animals come in every color. How many people have ever seen a blue frog? A pink starfish? We looked at all my Animal Rainbow pictures and then I had everyone draw an animal in their favorite color (or they could pick another color). We had lots of fun and knew a lot about animal colors. I reminded the kids to watch for nature AND to notice what colors they saw!

Critter Watch

It's been a long time since I posted a Critter Watch, but I had to note that TODAY I saw my first robin of the year!

Nature Club, Feb. 29 and March 5 (due to snow day)

Beetles or Stones? In this session of Nature Club, we talked about all the different parts of nature that we could think of: animals, plants, rocks, the sky and universe. Then I asked everyone to think of their favorite nature topic- what part of nature they liked to learn about. We drew pictures of our favorites. Some will appear in this blog and some will appear in PCLC on and around the Nature Club bulletin board.