Give Your Kids a Green Education

(Family Features) - Looking for creative ways to enjoy the warm weather and get outdoors with your kids? Perhaps you need an original craft or activity to occupy your child during rainy days or quiet times. Or, maybe you're eager to educate your children on ways to respect the environment by reusing and recycling common household items.

When it comes to giving your kids a green education, hundreds of great ideas are just a click away at abundantforests.org. The site, by the Abundant Forests Alliance, educates visitors about the importance of keeping our forests-the nation's most renewable resource-healthy and thriving. Users browsing the site can search for activities by keyword, or by categories, like "Fun with Kids," "The Great Outdoors" or "Crafty Ideas for Moms."

Here are some of the site's educational, family-friendly suggestions:

• Take a family walk around the neighborhood, collecting leaves from different trees and taking photos of the trees. Have children turn their finds into a personal tree reference book.
• Encourage your kids to read a book that teaches them about the many things we get from our forests. (The site provides a recommended reading list at abundantforests.org/reading.)
• Plant a tree with the kids in your own yard to provide shade. An added bonus: just three well-placed mature trees around the home can cut air-conditioning bills by 10 to 50 percent.
• Celebrate holidays or special occasions by helping children make their own greeting cards. Be creative and reuse items around the house, like old wrapping paper, ribbon, buttons or even clippings from magazines or newspapers.
• Find a forest near you and bring your family for a hike, bike ride or picnic.
• Make a scavenger-hunt photo frame: Search for twigs, pinecones, leaves, flowers and other found items and then glue them on a plain wood frame.

In addition to offering activities, the site also serves as an educational resource. Want to teach your kids the amount of forest acreage in your state? Simply log on to find the answer. Curious about what it means for a wood or paper product to be certified sustainable? The site explains the high standards required to practice certified sustainable forestry.

For more crafts, activities and fun forest facts, visit abundantforests.org.

Quick Forest Facts

• Forests in the U.S. cover about a third of the country's entire land base-and are still as abundant as they were 100 years ago.
• Trees and forests are the nation's single most renewable resource.
• Four million new trees are planted every day, more than making up for what is harvested.
• New technologies now make it possible to use almost all of every tree harvested, even the bark and sawdust, so nothing goes to waste.

SOURCE: Abundant Forests Alliance