Super Summer Science Fun!

There are so many great opportunities for you to practice your science skills this summer and have fun doing it!

Use your tools in your own backyard!

There’s no better time to use your 5 senses than the summertime. Yes! Your 5 senses are the ultimate observing tool! Combined with magnifying glasses, rulers, tweezers, bug boxes, and shovels, your 5 senses are all you need to become curious in your own backyard. Try some of these things right outside your home:

• List all the trees in your neighborhood. Use field and identification guides to compare leaves, bark and branches. Are they pinnate or palmate?
• Find a spider web, maybe in your basement or in the garden, among the shrubs or among some weeds, and see if the spider is there. Is the web an orb web, sheet web, or some other kind?
• Put out a birdbath for birds and other critters. It doesn’t have to be a real birdbath, but could be something like a turned-upside garbage can lid. The water should be no deeper than an inch. Keep a list of the species who visit.
• Start a rock collection.
• If you see a bird collecting worms or other food for nestlings, watch where the food is taken, locate the nest, and watch it until the nestlings leave (Don’t get too close or you’ll upset the family.)
• At night and with a flashlight, sneak up on a stridulating cricket and watch it sing.
• In your basement or some other damp, slightly junky place, look for “thousand leggers.” Are they centipedes, millipedes or maybe sowbugs?
• Look for squirrels around your house. What kind of squirrels are they?
• Make an insect collection.
• Find a feather and identify these parts of it: shaft, vane, barbs, and barbules.
• List all the butterflies in your neighborhood.
• Start a Nature Study Notebook
• Learn to identify Poison Ivy. Then stay away from it! One way to do this is to go to the Google Images Page, type “Poison Ivy” into the search box, then look at the various thumbnail pictures showing Poison Ivy. ONLY GOOGLE WITH AN ADULT!
• List all the birds in your neighborhood. Use binoculars to birdwatch and then look them up in a field guide.
• Start your Birding Life List listing all the birds you’ve ever identified with absolute certainty.
• Look for bats at dusk just as it’s getting really dark. They are more thick-bodied than birds and flutter instead of soar or glide.
• In a garden flower, figure out the different parts. Locate the stamens (pollen-producing male part, consisting of filament and anther), pistil (female part that will mature into a fruit, consisting of stigma, style and ovary), corolla and calyx.
• If you find a birdnest, determine whether it is a scrape, platform, cup, adherent, pensile or pendulous nest.
• Rub a slice of white bread on your kitchen table, or anyplace you want to, slightly moisten the bread, then put it into a jar with a top on it so the bread won’t dry out. Each day look at the bread. In a few days you should find one or more kinds of fungus established on it. Fungus spores are just about everywhere.
• Go looking for insect eggs and notice their incredible variety of sizes, shapes, colors and designs.
• Dig up an Earthworm and with your hands moist so you don’t hurt itand identify its different body parts.
• If you have a moist, junky basement, look for Daddy-long-legs.
• Find a weed and try to identify it by using Iowa State’s Weed-Identification Page.
• If you have a moist or wet place outside, look for a snail or slug. On either of them, locate the two tentacles atop the head, and the two stalked eyes below the tentacles.
• In moist, shaded, undisturbed places, look for mosses in their spore-producing condition.
• Wander around looking at how the blossoms of different plants are arranged. Classify each arrangement type according to whether it is a spike, raceme, corymb, panicle, umbel, cyme, scorpioid cyme, or something else.
• Identify just one thing in your backyard — maybe a bird or a garden flower or an insect — and then use Google  to find out all you can about it. You’ll just be amazed at what you can learn! ONLY GOOGLE WITH AN ADULT!
• Look very closely at any sand or streambed gravel you can find. Try to see tiny crystals. If you have a magnifying glass you should at least see glass-like quartz crystals.
• Find a plant with spines or thorns and try to figure out why it has them. Remember that plants evolved long ago when often large herbivores such as bison, wild horses and mastodons wandered the land.
• Look for animal tracks in mud.
• Look for simple and compound eyes on an insect.
• Probably you’ve watched Robins catching earthworms in your lawn. Lie on the lawn and see if you catch as many as the Robins do.
• Find a caterpillar and notice its six black jointed legs immediately behind the head, its stubby, mid-body legs called prolegs and its end ones called anal prolegs.
• Become an official frogwatcher. Go to Frogwatch
• At night, find a streetlight or backyard light and watch for insects who flutter into it. These insects are trying to navigate by the light as if it were a star.
• Find a bean, maybe a dried bean in your kitchen, and notice its hilum. Separate its two faces, and inside the bean identify the food, seed coat and baby plant.
• In gardens, hedges, weedy places and woods, look for insect pupae. Once you find one, mark it with a ribbon or other object, then visit it each day to watch for when the adult emerges.
• One place on the Web to help you get the scientific name of plants you identify is the B & T World Seeds site. Try it out.
• Most insects are either “chewers” or “suckers.” Wander around looking at miscellaneous insects, deciding which are chewers and which are suckers.
• Learn to identify your local trees just by looking at their trunks.
• Understand your local weather by looking at clouds, seeing weather maps, etc.
• From a pond or ditch, take a jar of water and set it in a window where it gets some sunlight. Over the weeks watch what happens to it.
• In the night sky, find these constellations just like we did in STARLAB!: The Big Dipper (Ursa Major), The Little Dipper (Ursa Minor), Leo the Lion,  Hercules, and Draco the Dragon.
• Visit Wave Hilland enjoy their family Art Project and other programs.
• Go fruit picking. Berries, cherries, peaches, plums and nectarines are in season beginning in June.
• When you go onto the Internet for the first time each day, check out NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. This will help you keep things here on Earth in perspective.
• Are you a gardener? a cook? an eater? The Edible Garden at The New York Botanical Garden has something fun for all ages!