In three more days, spring will be here!
Spring is my favorite season of the year. I love all the newness, all the colors, and all the warmth. It’s a time to be outside of the house more, although with such a mild winter, we were able to get out quite a bit these past few months, too!
We love to do all the usual spring activities: plan a garden, go on lots of hikes, doing spring crafts. But sometimes we like to celebrate springs in ways that are a little bit unusual, too.
Here are 10 Out-of-the-Ordinary Spectacular Spring Activities
1) Do a rain study. Make a rain gauge and collect rainwater each day it rains in spring. Ehow.com has a nice set of instructions on making your own gauge. You can make a graph and see which day had the most rain. Do the buds on the trees come out more after a heavy rain? When is the weather hotter, after a light rain or heavy rain?
2) Raise a baby…animal that is! Two years ago we bought the Insect Lore Live Butterfly Garden and had a wonderful new experience watching caterpillars change into butterflies in the early spring and then releasing them at the end of spring. This year we’re thinking about raising tadpoles and then releasing the frogs into the river in the summer.
3) Look at art books and websites to find as many images of spring as you can. Check out: famous-painters.org, artcorner.com, and thefamousartists.com.
4) Research the History of Ostara – or the Spring Equinox. Here are some sites to get you started: About.com, infoplease.com, kidzworld.com.
5) Sew a blanket for a baby in an intensive care unit. My twins were born 5 weeks early and spent that time in an intensive care unit. We brought home several hand-made quilts and blankets some very special volunteers made for the babies in that unit. I’ve found one website – https://www.binkypatrol.org/article.cfm?id=96- that will give you free patterns if you need some inspiration and let you know where you can send them when you are finished. You can also just call your local hospital and ask them if they could use donations, too.
6) Use your spring cleaning to help others. Ask your kids if they could find at least ten toys they no longer play with to donate to a family in need. If you don’t personally know of anyone who could use the toys right now, donate them to your local church or thrift store.
7) Play with some…springs! Find some in broken appliances, get the Original Slinky, or do a physics experiment using springs.
8) Conduct some rainbow experiments. We love the Magic Schoolbus science kits, so be sure to check out their Mysteries of Rainbows. Some fun websites I’ve found that have rainbow experiments are: Kidzone, Chemisty.About.com, and ScienceKids.
9) Begin writing a poem in the spring…and end it in the winter. Write a poem with four stanzas. Write the first stanza in the springtime, the second in the summer, third in the fall and the fourth in the winter.
10) Learn some bird calls. Here are a few websites where you can listen to different bird calls for free. Mangoverde.com, Naturesongs.com, and enature.com.
*all of the links in this article are for your convenience in quickly seeing the resources I describe. They are not affiliate links.
Photo Credit: Made in Mississippi
What are your favorite things to do in the spring?