Monday, July 20, 2009

Favorite Educational "Toys"

Birdsong Identiflyer- we have learned a lot of bird calls with this INCREDIBLE gadget. You buy individual cards with many different bird calls on it. Some of the cards are Yard Birds, Field Birds, Forest Edge Birds, Birds of Prey, Frog Chorus, and many other great ones. Araina loves to flirt with the Cardinal and Tufted Titmouse using the Identiflyer. She'll push the bird call and they will sing right back to her. It's a little on the expensive side (each card is $10 and the Identiflyer is around $30), but well worth it!


Heritage Illustrated Playing Cards- we found these in a nature center in West Virginia. The girls just LOVE them! Pictured below are Wild Flowers and Backyard Birds, the Little Ladies play with the bird cards the most and fight over the Tufted Titmouse card. The Heritage company has over 30 illustrated decks, some titles are Ocean life, Shells, Vegetable Garden, Insects, Herbs, Shakespeare's Flowers and Plants of the Bible. I really love that they included the latin names of the plants and animals illustrated on the cards. The decks are reasonably priced at $5.95.



This is our newest gadget, borrowed from my sister Katrina, an environmental meter. We have been very interested in microclimates lately. We are hoping to figure out why our blackberries growing on our little forest edge ripened a whole 2 weeks earlier than our field berries; two completely different microclimates. This meter is an anemometer, thermometer, humidity meter, and light meter. This one in particular is very pricey ($208), so I would buy one used or borrow one.



6 comments:

Crescent Moon said...

My son now says he wants that birdsong idendiflyer.

Tammy said...

Oooh...I loooove those bird playing cards. What fun to play games and learn at the same time!

gardenmama said...

Wow! What great ideas, these look like fun : )

Tara said...

What a neat little gadget the birdsong identifier is!
I don't know about Owen but I could have a lot of fun with that :)

The Heritage playing cards are beautiful.

Anet said...

That birdsong indentiflyer is really neat! My husbund is always asking me..."what's that bird?" when he hears a song. I only know a few by heart.
Love the playing cards too, very pretty!

Ticia said...

Those first two are super cool. And we could probably use them now, but the second one we're not quite ready for yet.