If the children develop an interest in this game and you don’t have time at the moment to supervise a nature trip to a park or preserve, they could tailor their cards for what may be available in the backyard, perhaps including ants, aphids, snails, slugs, earthworms, leafhoppers, caterpillars, dandelions, plantains, Dutch clover, pineapple weed, and other suburban plants and animals. Making their drawing on a stiff paper product like a file folder and attaching it to a clipboard will make it more likely to survive the excursion.
A sample example of a nature-based bingo card using generic icons.īefore they leave for their nature excursion, they could look at the sky and predict the weather they expect to experience and include an icon for it on their bingo card – sunny, bright and cloudy, dark clouds, rain, or rainbow.
You help them decide what it takes to win – all in a line, diagonal, round the world, etc. Then as they find these items in nature, they color in the squares with a highlighter.
Instead of a letter and number code for a traditional bingo 5×5 grid, they sketch plants and animals in the grid. Before heading out for a walk in the woods, prairie, or wetland, kids could prepare their own nature-based bingo game where they record their observations (see Kid’s Corner for a couple of bingo pdfs already available).
