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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Learn more about the project and see all the 365 Nature posts.


My daughter is on a break between summer school and the start of the new year of her forest preschool and I’ve been coming up with activities to keep her occupied. Yesterday we made solar ovens from pizza boxes and today she made a roly poly house with the help of our neighbor. They had fun scooping up some soil and then placing leaves and rocks and other plant materials they found. Then we hunted for roly poly bugs. It was challenging as they require moist places and it’s been so dry that even under the plant containers there were none to be found. Eventually, we tried the neighbor’s yard and found a few under stones. We collected a half dozen or so and put them in the container. We’ll place it on our table inside to watch them. We have a water bottle to spray a mist into the container every day and I’ll toss in some potatoes and carrots which I read they like.

We’ve had so much fun watching our wetland in a bottle, I hope this will allow us to learn more about our wildlife.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

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