1. Create a butterfly garden.

One of the best ways to attract butterflies to your yard is to plant nectar-producing flowers that have red, yellow, orange, pink, or purple blossoms. Plant them in a sunny spot in a group so they grow in clusters.

You can also bring butterflies to you by mashing up fruit and sugar and smearing it on a rock, tree, or other surface in your yard.

Make your garden as butterfly-friendly as possible by putting out a shallow pan of wet sand or mud for them to sip from, and by providing a few rocks they can use to bask in the sun.

2. Sing a song about butterflies.

While you’re hunting for butterflies or working away in your butterfly garden, pass the time by singing a tune about butterflies. Get the lyrics to “Blue Butterfly,” sung to the tune of “Baby Mine,” on our website, or get creative and make up your own.

3. Make a butterfly you can eat.

Fresh fruit is the perfect springtime snack, so use your imagination to whip up a fruity butterfly treat. Use two halves of a pear or a few apple slices for the wings, and for the body try a piece of celery, a carrot, or a banana. Celery or carrot strips also work great for the antennae. Decorate your butterfly with raisins, cereal, cherries, or anything else you like.

For another butterfly recipe, try making butterfly muffins.

4. Learn some fun facts.

Did you know that a butterfly can’t fly if its body temperature falls below 86°F? Or that they drink the tears of turtles? And they use their feet to taste? Curious kids can learn more by checking out this butterfly article from Ranger Rick Jr. and butterfly fact sheet from Ranger Rick.

5. Get crafty.

Use a coffee filter, a pipe cleaner, and pom-poms to make a beautiful butterfly that won’t fly away. Here’s how:

• Decorate the coffee filter with markers and then spray it with water.
• Once it dries, wrap a pipe cleaner around the middle of the filter.
• Glue pom-poms onto the clothespin and clip the clothespin to the filter.
• Bend the pipe cleaner to make the antennae.

More butterfly crafts:

• Folded Paper Butterfly
• Butterfly Pencil Topper
• Caterpillar Transformation Craft

Find more fun crafts, recipes, and activities in the Family Fun section of our new Kids website.

Here’s a quick, fun way to get families outside this spring. Invite your neighbors for a community clean-up!

In our neighborhood, folks shared their yard tools and gave each other gardening tips, while parents and kids cleaned up trash from the nearby stream. Find out three tips to improve your community clean-up by watching my video diary:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some photos from our clean-up:

Here's all the trash we collected, including this baby stroller and styrofoam grave from Halloween - all in a nearby stream!

Daughter and father cooperate on trash pick-up

Have you organized a community clean-up in your area? What worked for you?

If you enjoy organizing community events, you might enjoy our Community Wildlife Habitat program where you encourage your neighbors to garden for wildlife.

National Wildlife Federation’s Storytelling Video Diary Series shares the candid tales of nine NWF staffers from around the country; armed with their cameras in the Great Lakes, California, South Dakota, the Pacific Northwest, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC, these nine staffers will share with you their individual trials, epiphanies and stories as they unfold in their daily adventures.

I’m packing for our first-ever trip to Everglades National Park. It’s my kids’ winter break, and when we sat down as a family to figure out where we wanted to go, it was my wildlife-loving son who lobbied hard for the Everglades.

As I reflect on how our family evolved into one that spends lots of time outdoors in nature, one of things that made a difference–since I’m one of those thrifty moms–was the free entrance program the National Park Service offers.

It’s Free Several Times in the Year

Last spring we visited Virginia's Great Falls National Park during one of the free weekends.

• January 14-16
  Martin Luther King Jr. weekend
• April 21-29
  National Park Week
• June 9
  Get Outdoors Day
• September 29
  National Public Lands Day
• November 10-12
  Veterans Day weekend

Check out the list of participating sites and you’ll find a mix of not only national parks, but national monuments and national battlefields, too.

Now free entrance might have helped us start our love affair with national parks, but there are  many reasons why we keep coming back.

Things Differ With the Seasons

For example, our visit to the Everglades would be vastly different–from birds to bugs to sogginess–if we came during the summer months. Migrating birds always make certain park visits differ. Those parks with old-growth deciduous forests have a completely different look, and views, when those leaves are shed. Also, those northern parks seem to have a quiet calm during the winter months that is appealing to many.

My kids being sworn in as junior rangers at Acadia National Park in Maine. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

Junior Ranger Program

How cool is it that your kids can be sworn in as Junior Rangers?! The Junior Ranger program offers a flexible, self-guided schedule of activities your family can do while at the parks. If your kids complete the activities, they can turn it in for a certificate and a badge/patch. The best part is when they get “sworn in” by the park ranger. Bring your cameras!

Ranger-Led Activities for Your Family

Each national park has a unique list of ranger-led activities ranging from nature talks, walks and tours. Here’s an example of the ranger-led programs at Everglades National Park for when we’re there. Oftentimes there are special programs geared toward kids, like a touch-tank talk we attended with a ranger at Acadia National Park in Maine.

Passport Program

To encourage you to learn more about and visit other parks, the National Park Service offers Passport® to Your National Parks. My kids have loved exploring the information and thoroughly enjoy taking the passport to the ranger station to get a stamp for each park they visit. Our passport is one of the things I’m packing now for our trip.

We spotted these wild ponies at Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

Seeing Wildlife

Of course seeing wildlife always ranks high with the kids. Through ranger-led tours and programs or with your own keen observations you’re liable to catch glimpses of all sorts of wildlife at national parks and refuges. Then, be sure to log what you spot through the National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Watch website!

Do you have a favorite National Park? Would love to hear about it in the comments below because I’m always looking for the next great place to take the kids. I know I’ll share more with you upon our return, but for now I hope you’ll Be Out There at a nearby National Park during this long holiday weekend!

Photo: Michael Devlin

Take it away, Diana S Grigsby-Toussaint, Sang-Hyun Chi and Barbara H. Fiese (PDF):

“… [E]xposure to greener neighborhoods encourages children to spend more time outdoors where they may reap both physiological and cognitive benefits. Conversely, children with the lowest levels of neighborhood greenness were least likely to spend time playing outdoors, engaging in active or quiet play (rainy day kids).

In addition to their own research, the authors point to examples including “initiatives using landscape architecture to create green elementary school grounds in Canada, which found a 70% increase in light and moderate physical activity among children.”

Those of us lucky enough to grow up with backyards and trees get this, and a growing body of research shows why it’s especially important: children who play outside are healthier, more creative in their play and more likely (PDF) to have positive attitudes toward nature (and environmentally conscious behavior) when they grow up. Plus, all those “physiological and cognitive benefits.”

However, verdant parks and other spaces aren’t enough:

While neighborhood greenness influenced levels of physical activity among these preschool-aged children, as Cleland et al [35] observed, parental support factors such as engaging in physical activity with children also plays a role. This may explain why sporty kids were more likely to engage in much more active outdoor physical activity compared to rainy day kids, although both groups lived in areas with similar levels of neighborhood greenness.

As always, parents and other adults have an important role. The study underscores this along with the importance of giving non-green-neighborhood kids the opportunity to connect with the outdoors—refer back to this post on nature’s healing potential, where I linked to the story of an abuse survivor who spends time leading inner-city kids on hikes and backpacking trips. Bottom line: children sometimes need help to connect to nature.

To learn more, take a look at Kristy Myers’s five tips for spending time in nature with your family, see our Outdoors and Family Channel for easy winter outdoor activities or check out how you can get involved in NWF’s Be Out There campaign to connect kids with nature.

This past year, however, I’m so glad my family stuck with our resolution to spend more time outdoors. Over the past year we’ve created amazing memories, plus I’ve seen curiosity and creativity flourish in our kids as they’ve spent time in nature. In order to stick with this resolution I created easy ways for us to build outdoor time in our lives and tapped into a number of resources the National Wildlife Federation offers.

If you’re thinking that 2012 is the year to get your family outdoors, here are a few tips to get you started:

We hiked Pilot Mountain State Park the day after Thanksgiving while visiting family in North Carolina. We hiked around the monolith you see in the background. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

First Day Hikes

Why not kick off the New Year with a family hike? For the first time ever all 50 state park systems are participating in First Day Hikes, special programming for New Year’s Day encouraged to get families out to their local state park. Even if you’ve hiked a particular trail other times of the year, winter offers a completely different perspective — a calm quiet, coupled with views typically blocked by leaves on the trees. Our family enjoys checking out local state parks when we travel to see family for the holidays. So for Thanksgiving we hit Pilot Mountain State Park in North Carolina while visiting my in-laws, and we plan to hit a Delaware State Park tomorrow during our visit to my Mom’s. Here’s the events on tap tomorrow at Delaware State Parks. To find a First Day Hike near you, search here.

Walk Through the Neighborhood

The easiest way to spend more time outdoors is to just walk out the door and explore your home turf. Now if your kids are anything like mine you may hear a chorus of complaints sometimes when you’re trying to get out of the door. My solution:  create a scavenger hunt. On the days when they’re resistant — like Christmas weekend when my in-laws were here — I have them come up with a theme and a hunt for us to do. Last weekend’s was a holiday decoration scavenger hunt where we looked out for things like Santa statues or a wreath with a red bow.

Our kids camped in the family room before making the jump to camping in the backyard. (Photo by Kristy Myers)

Camp in Your Yard

Have fond memories of camping when you were a kid? Why not bring that fun to your own family. Start simple by camping right in your own backyard. If it’s too cold to venture out right now, you can set up a pup tent in your family room or basement for a fun indoor campout. Or, if you don’t have a tent, tap into your kids’ imagination by building a blanket fort to campout in. Then, when the weather is nice you’ll be ready for our Great American Backyard Campout on June 23.

Get Your Green Hour

Okay back when I was a kid it was just called kicking your kids out the door to spend time playing. Today we call it Green Hour, but it’s basically the same thing. It’s finding time for kids to have unstructured play time outdoors — time for kids to be kids. The National Wildlife Federation offers activities and resources through our greenhour.org website.

Geocache

Is your family into the latest electronic gadgets and gizmos? Then geocaching might be for you because it’s a great way to pair screen time with a fun outdoor adventure. Geocaching is a combination of old-fashioned treasure hunting, while using GPS technology, and spending time outdoors. With the help of a handheld GPS device or smartphone, people can hunt for geocaches hidden in public areas all over the world. To find out more, check out this information on Ranger Rick’s Geocache Trails.

Photolibrary.com

Well, it’s that time of year again! Thanksgiving is just around the corner. It’s time for raking leaves (and jumping in them), sipping spiced cider, and enjoying all the wonderful changes of the season.

In honor of my favorite holiday (yes, I prefer to eat than get presents), we’ve provided a list of wild crafts and activities your kids will “fall” over — all in the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Get outside with your kids and work up an appetite!

1. Make a Thanksgiving Centerpiece

Go for a walk and pick up pieces of Fall as you go – beautifully colored leaves, acorns, small pine cones and more. Bring them home and make this easy craft.

2. Make a Snack-o-Lantern

Turn your leftover pumpkins into feeders for backyard visitors such as squirrels, chipmunks and birds. Learn how.

3. Make Pumpkin Prints

Your kids will love making colorful pumpkin prints using nature’s paint brush – a carrot!

4. Make Thanksgiving Place Cards

Get the family involved! These place cards are easy and beautiful to decorate your Thanksgiving table.

Photolibrary.com

5. Pick Apples and Make Autumn Applesauce

Or if you aren’t near an apple orchard, find a local farmers market and pick out some ripe delicious apples to turn into easy autumn apple sauce!

6. Make Delicious Pumpkin Cookies

You’ll bring a smile to your child’s face — and to several dozen cookies — when you make this treat together.

Try these out and let us know what you think! Or share your favorite fall activities with us.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Explore more ideas and inspirations for outdoor play at www.beoutthere.org.

Inspires words of happiness

Let me share my joy

The Japanese art of Haiku requires a creative mind, and nature can provide one of the best sources of inspiration to get the creative juices flowing. Writing Haikus about the wonders of nature can be a great way to ease young minds from vacation mode to back-to-school mode. It’s a wonderful creative outlet for adults too. That’s why the National Wildlife Federation is sponsoring a Haiku contest for people of all ages.

Writing haikus is easy, fun and a wonderful way to connect you and the kids in your life with the great outdoors. We’re looking for any and all nature-themed haiku poems, whether it’s about a summer vacation at the lake, or bird-watching in the backyard, we want to hear about it. My son’s haikus were always about worms and other creepy crawly critters!

Just like the one above, a Haiku is three lines. And it doesn’t even need to rhyme – it just needs to follow the following rules:

•    First line =  five syllables
•    Second line = seven syllables
•    Third line =  five syllables

Winners will be featured on the National Wildlife Federation website and in the September issue of the “Be Out There” newsletter.

Entries can be submitted at www.nwf.org/haiku. You must be 18 or older to enter, but you can also enter on behalf of a child. Entry deadline is August 31, 2010. If you are looking for some fun activities loaded with ideas for Haikus, check out www.beoutthere.org/activities.

The Great American Backyard Campout (GABC) is right around the corner! This weekend, families across the country will celebrate the annual event.

In the same outdoor spirit as their 2010 Girl of the Year Lanie, American Girl is serving as the national sponsor for the GABC to encourage kids everywhere to enjoy the outdoors.

The GABC is a great opportunity for kids and adults to get outside and experience nature, while creating lasting memories with family and friends. Connecting with the outdoors benefits children’s health and inspires their sense of adventure.

By participating in this Saturday’s Great American Backyard Campout, we hope to encourage kids to view the outdoors as their favorite play space—where they can explore, imagine, discover, and daydream, just like Lanie!

- Kate McDonald

Visit beoutthere.org to learn more about NWF’s Be Out There movement.

Summertime with my youngest child, Grant, always seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye.

Between golf camp, tennis team and lessons, soccer camp and swim team, Grant was quite overscheduled during the summer months. So when I proposed the idea of having a campout for a few friends of his in our small backyard, he jumped right on the opportunity for a camping party.

The rules were simple—no Game Boy or TV (he would have dragged extension cords through the backyard). The challenge was keeping our backyard campout limited to a small group which we were able to do (check out my vintage photo!).

The most ironic element of this family event—I called Grant’s outdoors sleepover the Great American Backyard Campout—yes, I really did! This was 12 years ago when he was just 9 years old.

We kept our activities very simple. We set up badminton in my next door neighbor’s backyard, stocked up on water guns, and played flashlight tag (with said water guns). Our Collie, Spice, was always underfoot, attempting to play with all the nine-year-olds.

Dinner was easy during our campouts—hot frankfurters (in deference to Spice), chips, and at the end of the evening we served the obligatory s’mores with spooky stories.

Getting the kids to stay in the backyard at night was the challenge, plus Spice felt compelled to remain in the boys’ tent which made it pretty toasty in there, but I finally could call it a night and get some sleep myself.

Memories of my family’s version of the Great American Backyard Campout have stuck with me quite vividly over the past 12 years. I look forward to creating new outdoors memories on June 26 this year.

Want to hear more from Karoline? Stay tuned—she’ll be blogging about her plans right here in the coming weeks. Visit backyardcampout.org to register your campout today. Contact Amanda at cookea@nwf.org if you have any questions.