This month, try making a woodland garden (or terrarium)! Setting up a woodland garden in your home is a great way to get to know some of the native plants in your community up close and personal and it can serve as a temporary home for any moisture-loving animals you’d like to observe for a while.

An old aquarium would make a good container for your garden, or even a very large, wide-mouthed glass jar. Place a layer of gravel, and then a layer of charcoal on the bottom for drainage. Either transplant soil along with the plants you dig up, or you can use a layer of potting mix. Put in some large rocks, and some small logs, trying to make the garden look as natural as possible. To keep the moisture level high, you can cover the aquarium with a sheet of glass or plastic, but make sure to have an alternative cover with holes to use when there are animals in residence. Don’t forget to look up what plants you’ve included and find out their water requirements!

During this holiday season, give your backyard feathered friends a gift by making some birdseed biscuit ornaments! One recipe makes two 3-inch biscuits or a single 4-inch biscuit. Mix together 3/4 cup of birdseed, 1 tablespoon of flour, and 2 tablespoons of water. Spray or wipe a metal cookie cutter with oil and place it on a foil covered cookie sheet. Pack the mixture into the cutter, inserting half a straw near the top to create a hole for hanging. Bake the biscuit (with the straw) in a 170-degree oven until the biscuit is hard, about one hour. Let it cool. Remove the straw, thread a ribbon through the hole, and hang it outside in a sheltered spot. This could also be a cute gift idea that your children can help you make for bird-loving friends and family.

Colorful autumn leaves make perfect preschool craft materials – you can paint or color them, make leaf prints, laminate a special selection for a placemat (or use contact paper), decorate the house with them, make leaf crowns, create leaf mobiles, make leaf rubbings – the list goes on and on!

For this month’s nature activity we chose to make butterflies with some autumn leaves. First, I cut out a body of a butterfly out of cardboard (you could use construction paper too) and the children decorated them.

Next, we colored a “background scene” on a piece of construction paper (clouds, trees, flowers….wherever a butterfly might be likely to be found).

Then we found two matching leaves per butterfly, taped them to the back of the body, and cut off the stems and taped them to the top of the head for the antennae.