This month has seen a flurry of media activity, with Nature Tots being mentioned in the August issue of North Bay Biz magazine (www.northbaybiz.com), this Sunday’s Press Democrat (www.pressdemocrat.com), and in the August issue of Sonoma County Family Life Magazine (www.sonomafamilylife.com)!

We have one of our first free classes coming up, thanks to a donation from Novato-based Circle Bank! The session, called “Our Feathered Friends” will be held Thursdays at Ladybug Park in Rohnert Park from 10:00 to 11:00, starting 9/24 through 10/15. In this class, children will learn all about birds, including attracting and feeding birds in your own backyard, and life cycles and seasonal patterns of birds. Class size is limited, and is on a first come first served basis (with pre-registration) so if you’re interested in signing up, please contact me at 707-333-1331.

We’re also starting a new class on 8/19 called “Web of Life” in which children will learn about the relationships between plants and animals along the food chain. We’ll learn about various animal species, and how they (and us!) are all connected.

Lastly, I wanted to pass on some information about an organization called Kids for Peace, mentioned to me by Shirley Weyker, a mother of one of my recent students. Their mission is to cultivate every child’s innate ability to foster peace through cross-cultural experiences and arts, service and environmental projects. I especially loved their ideas about how to care for our earth, found here: caring for earth ideas. A great time to check out the organization and get involved is on their Great Kindness Challenge on August 8th. (for more information see www.greatkindnesschallenge.org). The event will start at 10:00am at the Howarth Park boat ramp. For more information or to sign up, please contact Shirley at shirlthewhirl@hotmail.com.

Thanks, and hope to see you outdoors!

Stephanie Derammelaere

Collages of all kinds make great crafts – they are a lot of fun for children to make and they offer a lot of different learning opportunities. For example, you could make a nature color collage where you try to find as many different colors as possible in nature and glue your findings onto poster board or a piece of cardboard. Punch holes in the top and tie some string through, and voila!, you’ve got some great artwork to hang on the wall! Other ideas for nature collages could include finding different kinds of seeds, making a collage of different colored and different types of leaves (great autumn project), or a feather collage. For the very young ones, making a collage of anything they find in nature and inevitably bring home (pretty leaves, sticks, small rocks, acorns, etc.) makes a great collage too – it doesn’t always have to follow a theme.

Below is a picture of some collages we made recently with my two children as well as my sister’s three children, all in the two to five year old age range. We decided to make a “touch collage” where the children’s task was to find different textures in nature. They found smooth pebbles, grainy sand, rough sticks and bark, bumpy leaves, spiky pine needles and rough peach pits. We glued all these findings onto cardboard rectangles.

A major contributor to our environmental problems is the manufacturing and disposal of plastics. Specifically, plastic water bottles are a huge part of this problem given that Americans buy an estimated 28 billion plastic water bottles every year, with nearly eight out of every 10 bottles ending up in landfill where they will sit for about 700 years – the average time for a plastic bottle to biodegrade.

Besides being bad for the environment, many plastic bottles have been shown to cause harm to people by leaking toxins into the water.

Even if every bottle were recycled, the very existence of plastic bottles raises another issue. The Earth Policy Institute estimates that making bottles to meet the US demand for bottled water requires more than 15 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year.

Help your children decrease the use of plastic water bottles by getting them their own reusable water bottles made from materials like stainless steel or aluminum. One of my, and my children’s, personal favorites are the SIGG water bottles, which can be found online at www.sigg.com, or at local retailers like Sonoma County Outfitters, Oliver’s Market, and REI. Their children bottles are the perfect size for little ones to hold and handle and they have many fun, bright designs. My children each picked out their own bottle, and, while they can be a bit pricey, I have saved a ton of money in the long run by not buying disposable water bottles. Also, I found that a side benefit of these bottles is that my children love drinking from them, encouraging more water drinking which is great for their health too.