For children living in the city, summer can be a time for video games and television, but it doesn't have to be. If you have young children, take them outdoors for a nature lesson or two using the following activities and give them an early appreciate for the diversity of the natural world.
Lessons about Diversity in Nature: One Foot Wonder
If you can find one-foot of natural area nearby – even in an abandoned lot or between the sidewalk and road – you can teach children about the amazing diversity in nature.
Help your child cut a one-foot square out of paper or cardboard and take it outside. Place the square on the ground and ask your child to look closely at what is inside the square.
Are there ants? Pill bugs or crickets? What about the plant life? Look at the grass closely – does it all look the same or are there different kinds growing in your one-foot square?
You can enhance the experience for older children by encouraging them to look up their discoveries in nature guides and finding out what kind of insects and plants live there.
Looking at Nature from a Different Angle: An Ant Highway
For another look at the minuscule, cut a 12 to 18-inch long piece of string or yarn and take it outside with your young child.
Ask your child to think about how small an ant is and how many obstacles ants must overcome to get somewhere. Then, pull out the string and have the child build an “ant highway” with it, going over tiny twigs and around pieces of grass that could be the equivalent of trees to an ant.
Bat Senses: Discovering How Bats Find Each Other
Once they give birth, bat mothers leave their babies in large groups in order to hunt. When they get back, the mothers have to find their own baby amongst a crowd of thousands.
How do they do it? Primarily using sound and smell.
You can let a group of children experience the difficulties involved with the following game. The game works best with at least 16 children or child/adult pairs.
- Pair the participants up and give them a few minutes to decide upon a unique identifying sound – anything from a whistle or a chirp to a series of handclaps will do. Then, divide the pairs into “mothers” and “babies” and blindfold everyone.
- Send the “mothers” to find their “babies” using nothing but the agreed upon identifying sound.
- Once everyone has succeeded, it’s time to try smell-identification. Hand each pair two cotton balls soaked in perfume, a different perfume for each pair.
- Divide and blindfold the mothers and babies again and this time send them to find one another by matching the perfume scents.
Talking About Nature Lessons Learned
In order to help your children learn the most from such games, it is important to talk about the lessons.
How would your child like to be a bat baby with nothing but sound and smell to find mom by? Did he or she know so many different forms of life could live in just one square foot of land? How would your child like to be an ant trying to navigate a forest of grass and mountains of pebbles?
Each of the activities is geared toward teaching urban children about nature with limited outdoors resources - even if a patch of grass is the only access to nature a child has. With the above games and activities, plus meaningful discussion, your child might find the outdoors to be just as fascinating as the television this summer.
