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.

Author Biography

Michael Sanchez is a naturalist and educator who teaches student groups at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuqurque.