Use The Screen To Get Into The Green . . . Week Five
Welcome to Week Five of “Less Screen, More Green”! These activities are designed to give each of us something new to look for, notice, and appreciate in our explorations outside. We’d love to see what you see — send us your photos, or submissions to our two writing projects, and you’ll be entered into our Spring Outside Raffle. Share your experience and win a $150 gift card to Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters to help get you ready for a new season of outdoor exploration.
We are also launching another new initiative this week, The Southern Vermont Nature-Based Learning Collaborative. This new regional network of nature centers was created in response to this drastic change in work and life, and we are thrilled to be able to promote and support one another during this time and beyond. To begin, we are sharing a weekly series of offerings and online resources, showcasing the work of the committed and inspired environmental educators working throughout the region. Click here to see what’s on deck for Week One.
Although we are in the rhythm of working remotely and creating online resources, we so look forward to welcoming everyone back into the Museum when it is safe to do so. We have lots of ideas for when the time is right!
Vanessa Stern, Executive Director and Jay DeGregorio, Senior Educator
Green, the color of life, renewal, nature, and energy, is also associated with growth, harmony, freshness, safety, fertility, and environment. Explore your own backyard, or local woods or meadow, or even in your house. Be on the search for the natural shades of green!
How many different shades of green can you find in just one emerging leaf? Are there shades of green you’ve never seen before? Can you attribute different moods to the different hues? Use colored pencils to capture the shades, or use words to describe them. Draw the different items you notice so you have a variety of shades of green on your journal page. Let’s celebrate this life-affirming color...GREEN!
How many of these shades of green can you find?
Which tree has bark like this? See our Facebook page on Tuesday for more photos, clues, and the answer!
Hint: This tree has light-colored bark that often peels off in strips.
Baskets made from paper bags!
Did you know that landfills contribute significantly to global warming? Once waste has been dumped, very little air remains below the surface generating methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as a byproduct of the digestion of organic materials by organisms. Plastic bags filled with our unwanted things contribute to the lack of oxygen flow, compounding the situation even more.
Green Up Day is a great reminder to clean up what we can while also thinking more about reducing, reusing, and recycling our things we no longer need. We want to share a few creative ways to do this! What have you thought of?
Re-use your wire hangers — you can make nets for pond dipping, bubble wands, and plant hangers!
Thirteen clever and crafty ways to reuse brown paper bags:
https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/uses-for-brown-paper-bags-1389230
Keep organic waste out of a landfill by building your own compost bin:
https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-easily-make-a-compost-2539473
Fiddlehead Forage
Fiddleheads, a sure sign of spring, are the tightly coiled tips of ferns. These delicate delights are available only in early spring when ferns grow their new shoots. The young fern fronds are mainly available by foraging. The fiddleheads eaten in North America are from the ostrich fern.
Click on the link before heading out on your search to learn about which fiddleheads are good for eating, and how to prepare them in a spring dish. (Green, of course!)
Sanctuary
In the spirit of Greening Up our world, send us your photo of your special outdoor space. Where do you go to rejuvenate? Why is this place special to you? For how long has this outdoor space been a part of your life? Write a few words to explain just how special your green space is to you!
Continue your celebration of green by reading Outdoor Palette: Joseph Salerno. His striking series “Woods Edge” uses a variety of shades of green to depict the “often haunting seasonal and diurnal changes at the margin of the woods.”
https://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/outdoor-palette-joseph-salerno
If you've been wanting to learn more about composting for a healthy backyard garden, read or listen to this story by NPR about how to go about composting.
“If you're one of the millions of Americans now stuck at home because of the coronavirus, it might feel like you're cooking more than you've ever cooked in your entire life. And maybe, as much as you're meal planning and reducing your food waste, there are certain things you're just not going to eat. Like banana peels, or, if you're me, a frightening amount of pineapple tops. The good news? There's a solution for your home food waste that doesn't involve landfills: Composting! (Plus, keeping food out of landfills can help fight climate change.) It doesn't matter if you're in a suburban home or in a tiny apartment. We'll teach you how to turn your food waste into beautiful earthy compost in five simple steps.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/07/828918397/how-to-compost-at-home
Share and Be Entered in the
Spring Outside Raffle!
Inspired by our prompts this week? Let’s keep the exchanges flowing - send us what you see!
Ways to share your inspiration with us: Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and share your photos on the weekly posts for each of the themed activities, being sure to use the hashtags for each activity. You can also simply send us an email at info@nature-museum.org.
Every time you share, you’ll be entered into our Spring Outside raffle for a $150 gift card to help get out outfitted for the season ahead. We’ll hold the raffle in early summer (we hope) and look forward to a jar full of entries to pull from!
