Give Your Kids a Green Education

(Family Features) Looking for creative ways to enjoy the
warm weather and get outdoors with your kids? Perhaps you need an original craft or activity to occupy your child during rainy days or quiet times. Or, maybe you’re eager to educate your children on ways to respect the environment by reusing and recycling common household items.

When it comes to giving your kids a green education,
hundreds of great ideas are just a click away at
Abundant Forests Alliance. The site educates visitors about the importance of keeping our forests—the nation’s most renewable resource—healthy and thriving. Users browsing the site can search for activities by keyword, or by categories, like “Fun with Kids,” “The Great Outdoors” or “Crafty Ideas for Moms.”

Here are some of the site’s educational, family-friendly
suggestions:

* Take a family walk around the neighborhood, collecting
leaves from different trees and taking photos of the trees. Have children turn their finds into a personal tree
reference book.

* Encourage your kids to read a book that teaches them
about the many things we get from our forests. (The site
provides a recommended reading list at Abundant Forests Alliance.

* Plant a tree with the kids in your own yard to provide
shade. An added bonus: just three well-placed mature
trees around the home can cut air-conditioning bills by
10 to 50 percent.

* Celebrate holidays or special occasions by helping
children make their own greeting cards. Be creative and
reuse items around the house, like old wrapping paper,
ribbon, buttons or even clippings from magazines or
newspapers.

* Find a forest near you and bring your family for a hike,
bike ride or picnic.

* Make a scavenger-hunt photo frame: Search for twigs,
pinecones, leaves, flowers and other found items and
then glue them on a plain wood frame.

In addition to offering activities, the site also serves as
an educational resource. Want to teach your kids the
amount of forest acreage in your state? Simply log on to
find the answer. Curious about what it means for a wood
or paper product to be certified sustainable? The site
explains the high standards required to practice certified
sustainable forestry.

For more crafts, activities and fun forest facts, visit
Abundant Forests Alliance.

Quick Forest Facts

* Forests in the U.S. cover about a third of the country’s
entire land base—and are still as abundant as they were
100 years ago.

* Trees and forests are the nation’s single most
renewable resource.

* Four million new trees are planted every day, more
than making up for what is harvested.

* New technologies now make it possible to use almost
all of every tree harvested, even the bark and sawdust,
so nothing goes to waste.

All materials courtesy of Abundant Forests Alliance

Courtesy of Family Features

Related story - America's forests - a continually renewable resource

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