Spring and Easter Themed Nature Crafts

As the weather starts to get a bit warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to start heading outside for nature walks and collecting natural materials for projects. Here are some great ideas for using natural materials on spring and Easter projects.

Let kids explore what it’s like to be a bird by giving them the challenge to create a nest using only natural materials and no adhesives. This idea comes from Kids Craft Room and it gives you a chance to collect materials, construct your nests, talk about and watch birds (or find bird nest building videos), even crafty tiny eggs or birds to go into the nest.

Put the kids to work collecting all the little fallen twigs in the yard and then you can craft with them. DIY Candy has collected 20+ craft ideas using twigs, and while they aren’t all suitable for kids (at least not without supervision), they should give you some good ideas for how to use sticks in your crafting.

Mother Natured used blown eggs to decorate with natural materials for a pretty and long-lasting Easter decoration. You could do the same thing with plastic or papier mache eggs if you have those on hand.

Or you can use egg shapes cut out of cardboard and decorate them with natural materials, like in this post from Sprouting Wild Ones. Or gather materials and make egg-shaped pieces of clay — or really any shape you like — and use the plant matter to make prints in the clay and paint them when they are dry. My Bright Ideas Blog shows you how.

Arts and Bricks has a cute collection of nature crafts for Easter, too. I particularly like the leaves cut like eggs and then painted or otherwise decorated, which is shown above with a picture from Learning and Exploring Through Play.

Need even more Easter and spring nature craft ideas? Check out this list from The Magic Onions.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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