Connecting Families With Nature

As you may know, I’m living in beautiful British Columbia and if you listen to Dr. Bonnie Henry, she reminds us daily about how going outdoors is so important for our mental health, particularly during this time while we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. It will be Earth Day on Wednesday so there’s no better time to connect with nature.

Nature is Open to You!

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You’re Invited to the Challenge!

I’d like to challenge you and your family to connect with nature in some way. This blog is small, so I know the comments may be limited but I would LOVE if people would be willing to share examples of how you connect with nature. These posts will give you a prompt to go out and try. After you try it, I hope you will share your experiences.

For those who love technology but haven’t yet discovered nature, here is a bridge to get you there. Look for nature apps for your phone. This is a great way to take your love for technology outside and see what you can learn. You will be truly amazed!

Seek by iNaturalist is one such app. You will love the immediate results. As you photograph plants, birds, and flowers, the name appears. Sometimes the app only gives a more general idea and sometimes more specific identification but it is a cool way to get kids involved in looking more closely at plants, flowers and really everything in nature. You can identify wildlife too and there’s a way to earn badges if that appeals to your children. I know the former girl guide in me would have loved this though I must say that girl guide badges were MUCH more difficult to earn.

Here are a couple I haven’t tried yet…

There’s also Outdoor Family Fun with Plum. This offers family activities to explore nature in your neighborhood. It is a PBS Kids project. Get new missions each day!

PBS Kids offers another app called Nature Cat’s Great Outdoors. There are more than 100 nature prompts offered. Adventures get saved in a journal and kids can go back and view past adventures. There are opportunities to draw, paint, take photos and record sounds.

Have you tried any of these apps? Share your experience in the comments!

Thank you for stopping by my blog. If you stop by on Mondays, you’ll find more new children’s book releases, both fiction and non-fiction. You are welcome here any time!

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