Synergy: Nature Crafts

Nature Crafts are activities that combine natural materials with interesting projects. For example, children might use twigs and string to build their own toy raft or paint rocks to create animal figures. While not all the materials may come from outdoors, nature crafts primarily focus on activities that involve observing nature, gathering natural materials, and creating crafts that reflect the joy of nature.

Read the recently published nonfiction book, then learn more at the website:

MY BIG BOOK OF OUTDOORS written by Tim Hopgood encourages readers to explore nature through the four seasons. From building a bug hotel to creating a leaf mobile and making paper snowflakes, the book combines factual information with fun and easy craft projects. The simply, colorful illustrations with engaging blocks of text will attract young readers. 

FIREFLIES & MUDPIES is a website encouraging children to create crafts. Their Nature Crafts section includes a wide range of hands-on activities using natural materials. Most of the activities involve easy to gather materials.

To visit the website, go to https://www.firefliesandmudpies.com/

To learn more about outdoor arts and crafts, go to https://www.firefliesandmudpies.com/category/kids-crafts/nature-crafts/

ARC courtesy of Candlewick.

Book: The Nature Craft Book

THE NATURE CRAFT BOOK by Clare Beaton is an arts and crafts book for nature lovers.

Part of the Read, Learn & Create series, this nature book contains fifteen crafts and two recipes. Colorful collage illustrations help users learn about birds, insects, plants, and animals while providing easy-to-follow directions for engaging projects. After an introduction to nature and the format of activities, users explore over a dozen topics. From birds to twigs, children read about the topic. Then, follow directions to create finger puppets, apple chips, leaf prints, and other fun activities.

Librarians will find this book to be popular with children who enjoy nature crafts. Teachers will find useful activities for the classroom. Several of the projects will be new too librarians and worth a look.

ARC courtesy of Charlesbridge.

Book Review: Scrapkins: Re-Thunk

SCRAPKINS: RE-THUNK by Brian Yanish provides engaging activities and easy to follow directions for creating fun projects from common household materials.

This visually appealing book contains dozens of activities that involve using materials that people often throw away such as empty milk cartons, cereal boxes, and bottle caps. In addition to providing detailed instructions for creating instruments, puppets, and toys, the book also contains lots of other activities to maintain interest and spark creativity.

Librarians will find this nonfiction book to be popular with children who enjoy arts and crafts. Place the book in a maker space containing the raw materials necessary to create some of the projects. Display the results in the library to highlight the arts and crafts section of the library.

Go to the Scrapkins website at http://www.thescrapkins.com/ for lots more ideas.

Published by Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan on March 29, 2016. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Website Review: Batterypop

BATTERYPOP is an excellent video website for kids.

It can be difficult to locate quality educational videos on the major video sites like YouTube. Instead, try this child-focused website. Although many of the videos are focused on entertainment topics, there are also lots of educational videos available.

The Shows section features web video series. Seek out series focused on educational topics such as ROCKALINGUA, a musical Spanish language series and ANTS, a nature series.

The Channels section provides videos from related organizations such as such as UMIGO, a math adventure series. This area also links to the National Film Board of Canada’s videos for children.

The Gamezone section contains resources for gaming fans. Youth who enjoy Minecraft will find lots of videos of interest.

Videos are also organized by topic. Be sure to check out the Science and Math area for lots of STEM connected videos. The Crafts area contains ideas that could be adapted for library makerspaces.

Librarians will find this to be a valuable starting point for connecting youth with age-appropriate videos.

To visit the website, go to http://www.batterypop.com/about-batterypop.

App Review: How to Make Origami

HOW TO MAKE ORIGAMI by Sergey Burlakov is an easy-to-use app demonstrating how to create dozens of origami projects.

The app features patterns in categories including birds, boats, boxes and containers, clothes, flowers, Valentines, and other models. Each project contains a series of easy-to-follow steps. Users are presented with step-by-step instructions presented as text and also visuals. Simple animations show the folding procedure for each step. These animations can be repeated if necessary. The animation speed can also be adjusted.

Perfect for makerspaces, librarians could create a whole station around this app by just providing paper to get students started. Provide students with books for more ideas.

This app is free, but contains ads across the bottom and occasional pop-up ads.

The app developer has other craft apps available including how to quill, make balloon models, how to bead, and how to model clay.

To download the app, go to https://itunes.apple.com/…/app/how-to-make-ori…/id472936700….