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Here is a clever idea and tutorial on how to embroider on felt from Alice of futuregirl.com. She has clear step by step instructions for this procedure. When she started making handbags, she wanted cool labels and looked into ordering them, but she didn’t like the standard options, and custom labels were way too expensive. Her solution was to hand-embroider labels on felt. Futuregirl.com has several fun and useful tutorials and an extraordinary blog.
I guess moss and lichen are more things that you see in the spring than in the summer, but there are some deep shady parts of our yard that stay mossy all year, and summer is a fine time to look for plants that like to live in shady, wet areas.
Raising Up Wild Things has a really pretty set of printables to use for a moss and lichen unit study.
And just in case you’re like me and don’t really know the difference, moss is a plant that grows in damp wooded areas, while lichen is a combination of fungus and algae that live together. Lichen can live in different environments but are often found in places where you would find moss, too.
The printable includes drawings of some common moss such as sphagnum moss and wood moss, as well as common lichen shapes (crusty, leafy and shrubby). There are good sized images you can print out and laminate to use to compare to specimens you find when you are exploring nature.
There’s also a forest floor coloring page and a printable journaling page where kids can write or draw their observations and there are a few questions older kids can answer.
You can use these when you go on a walk in the woods (or the back yard) to talk about what you are seeing, or combine them with other resources to talk about things that live in the forest. Check them out at Raising Up Wild Things.
This PDF from the Morton Arboretum has a bunch of pictures of different kinds of moss and where to find them, which could also be helpful in your studies. Learn more about lichen, including what they are and what they are not, in this article from the US Forest Service.
[Photo: Raising Up Wild Things]