Toddler Time Activities: Nature Explorers

It's been incredibly hot lately but my boys still need outside time regularly.  For the past few weeks, this has meant we have this little window of time before 9:00 AM to get outside.  Its still hot and muggy when we leave the house, but at least its not yet over 90 degrees.  Then I have to hope that will last us the entire remaining 11 hours of the day.  You might have guessed this usually only burns enough energy to get us to 10:30. 

Its especially hard to be inside when we now live in a place that has so much wildlife.  In the past few weeks we've been watching a mama doe and her twin fawns hiding in the pines by our house.  We have regular bunnies, woodchucks and turtles in our yard.  P. insists on picking at least one wildflower every time we take a walk.  In that little window of morning outside time, we've become nature explorers.  Equipped with safari hats and toilet paper-tube binoculars, we now take morning walks with a mission.  (When back from our walks, the boys have time for outside play.  I know they need unstructured play, too.) 

I've made clip art checklists of things for us to be looking for on our walks.  We have three lists to choose from before we leave the house.  Some of the items are things I know we'll see, like trees and flowers.  Some are things we usually see, bees and spiders.  Some are things we might see, such as those baby deer and the woodchuck.  Of course, you can recreate this activity no matter where you live, just use things that you know to be in your own neighborhood.  We may even do a winter version of this for Nature Window-Gazing on snowy days in the winter.  Whatever it takes to pass the time while encouraging good observations of the woods that we know find ourselves surrounded by.