Our local Botanical Gardens has a terrific children’s garden and offers special events throughout the year.  Today they had guest bugs from the Nashville Zoo, with a presentation about their characteristics.  Of course, we also spent time in the butterfly house.  There wasn’t an abundance of butterflies and moths yet, although we found some beauties.  And I noticed they’d added some other features:  a cabinet of moth cocoons, a beehive with a tube for the bees to enter and exit from outside, and flowers that would be great for hummingbirds.  We even saw two goslings with their family at the pond outside the butterfly house.

Gardens offer an great way to see various forms of life all in one place:  plants, birds, insects, reptiles (like turtles), fish, and likely more.  If your location doesn’t have a botanical gardens, use parks and neighborhood yards.

My own backyard isn’t very fancy - a tree, some hostas, some small holly bushes, greass, and a few plants in pots.  Every day we see birds.  We can even identify the robins, cardinals, and doves.  We watch them tilt their heads from side to side, listening and looking to find bugs and worms in the yard.  We have toads that live around our bushes, have seen tree frogs on the house, and listen for the different croaks.  Sometimes a rabbit hops through the yards on our street, and we wonder where is hides the most.  My daughter can tell which things growing in the yard are weeds, grass, or plants that mom has planted.  We talk about why the mushrooms I pull up are growing in certain areas of the yard, where tree roots are rotting under the grass.  She collects leaves and flower petals that have fallen, dirt, seeds, and whatever else she can find - all to make ‘cakes’ with her friends.  They’ve used sticks to drum rhythms for dancing on their cake-making pans.  They experiment to see which rocks work as ‘chalk’ rocks.

With toddlers and preschoolers, try these ideas:

1. Play I Spy

2. Search for things of a certain color

3. Collect 3 of something from the yard

4. Practice looking closely without hurting the plants

5. Smell the flowers

6. Tiptoe to see how close you can get to the birds before they fly to safety

7. Chase butterflies

8. Find a good spot to dig in the dirt and share what you see

9. Look for spider webs, yet don’t destroy them

10. Take pictures to talk about later, perhaps for scrapbooking