I must confess… I stole this idea along with the title from the National Wildlife Federation blog, but it was way too good not to share it with my readers. Here is their post with some great ideas for making your own family’s field guide: http://www.nwf.org/en/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Outdoors/Archives/2010/Field-Guide-Backyard.aspx
If you have a digital camera, an online computer, and a printer you are set to go. Take pictures of the flowers, bugs, birds, and anything else you find in your yard or neighborhood. If you don’t have a camera, draw the pictures. For starters, print your information out on regular printer paper, punch the pages and organize them into a 3-ring binder with sections for flowers, birds, animals, insects, etc. If you can’t get your own pictures to print in your notebook, find them on the Internet as you do your research to find the information you want to include about the wildlife for your field guide.
I like the suggestion on the National Wildlife Federation blog to post your work on a web page. Blogs are very easy to set up. Your children might enjoy getting comments from friends and relatives on your family’s very own field guide. I set up my first blog with the WordPress blog site at http://wordpress.com/ . It is very easy to use. If you use other people’s pictures from the Internet, be sure to get their permission before publishing them on your blog.
A few years ago I purchased a new camera about the same time we moved into our present house. We were too busy to create beautiful flower beds, but I was determined to find the beauty that was already present in the yard. So I made a search for what I called “teeny tiny flowers” that were growing in the grass and along the ditches. I wrote an article that was printed in our local newspaper along with some of my pictures. In the picture above, these little white flowers grew beneath the pine trees behind our house. I still don’t know what they are. I will try to identify them along with some of the other flowers over the next few weeks and start my own field guide here under the category “God’s Creation.”
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