Coming home from the beach or a walk in the woods with a fine collection of rocks, shells, pine cones, and seed pods is easy. The trick is to know what to do with them once you get them back to your room. What's fun is that identifying, preserving, and displaying your treasures will let you learn all about them and get you started on becoming a true natural history collector.
Natural History Collector: Hunt, Discover, Learn! is full of hands-on, kid-friendly projects for the budding naturalist. The opening chapter introduces kids to different ways of creating their personal field guides for keeping track of what they see, when and where they see it, and what makes it interesting. They'll move on to techniques for cleaning and caring for treasures, such as drying flowers, pressing leaves, and desalinising rocks and shells.
The book's drawings and photographs will help kids discover what to look for when they examine feathers, seeds, and minerals (and recognise the difference between sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic). Extra projects focus on display; making shadow boxes, creating collectors' cases from egg cartons and candy boxes, labelling, hanging, and mounting collections.
Coming home from the beach or a walk in the woods with a fine collection of rocks, shells, pine cones, and seed pods is easy. The trick is to know what to do with them once you get them back to your room. What's fun is that identifying, preserving, and displaying your treasures will let you learn all about them and get you started on becoming a true natural history collector.
Natural History Collector: Hunt, Discover, Learn! is full of hands-on, kid-friendly projects for the budding naturalist. The opening chapter introduces kids to different ways of creating their personal field guides for keeping track of what they see, when and where they see it, and what makes it interesting. They'll move on to techniques for cleaning and caring for treasures, such as drying flowers, pressing leaves, and desalinising rocks and shells.
The book's drawings and photographs will help kids discover what to look for when they examine feathers, seeds, and minerals (and recognise the difference between sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic). Extra projects focus on display; making shadow boxes, creating collectors' cases from egg cartons and candy boxes, labelling, hanging, and mounting collections.
Introduction
Curioser and Curioser
Keeping Track of Your Collection
Project: How to start and keep a field notebook
Storing Your Collection
Cataloging Your Collection
1. Collecting Rocks and Minerals
What are rocks and what are minerals?
Where to look and what to collect
How to clean and care for your collection
Project: Make a display board
Interview with a Budding Scientist
Geodes and crystals: Why some rocks get all the
bling
Project: Grow your own crystals
Epsom Salt Crystals
Table Salt Crystals
2. Collecting Animal and Bird Tracks
Keeping Records in Your Notebook
Where to Look
Collecting tracks with a camera
Tips for photographing tracks
Project: Making casts of tracks
Casts in soil
Casts in snow
Make a track album
Displaying your collection of tracks
3. Collecting Seashells
Meet the mollusks
Two familiar types
How to build your collection
Caring for your collection
Project: Turn a pizza box into a collector's shadow
box
An Interview with collector Tom Eichhorst
4. Collecting Fossils
What are fossils?
Identifying your fossils
How to collect
How to clean fossils
Displaying and storing your collection can we
get photos of these?
Keeping records
Project: Model magic
Collector Mary Anning
5. Collecting Insects
The age of insects
What defines an insect
Identifying insects
Where to look
Supplies
Killing insects
Mounting and displaying your collection
Project: make a plant and insect display box
Caring for your collection
What to know about buying insects
An interview with Dr. Ayesha Burdett
6. Collecting Plants
Start by looking locally
How to collect: Part 1
How to collect: Part 2
Preserving your plant collections
Pressing and mounting flowers and leaves
Project: Pressing plants
Project: Mounting dried and pressed plants
Drying thicker plants and Leaves
Drying delicate flowers
Preparing pine cones
Organizing your collection
Appendix
About the N. M. Museum of Natural History and
Science
Resources
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Michael Sanchez is a naturalist and educator who teaches student groups at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuqurque.
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