Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.
It will never fail you.

-Frank Lloyd Wright

I got Ranger Rick magazine for years and years and years.

I’m going to go ahead and credit it for my ongoing love affair with nature photography, especially frogs (for no real reason I can think of, I just associate frog images with Ranger Rick) and macro.

The National Wildlife Federation now publishes three different magazines for a wider range of kid ages:

• Wild Animal Baby for toddlers is board board sized with nice solid pages to hold up to some serious love; 
• Big Backyard is basically the same as Ranger Rick but with games and vocabulary scaled to the pre-K and kindergarten crowd;
• and of course, Ranger Rick itself, for kids ages 7-12.

(Where does a kid turn for his nature photography fix after age 12? National Geographic, I guess.)

If you have a NOOK, you can get e-subscriptions to save paper, but then how do you cut out pages for projects and wall decor? Just seems silly to me.

Anyway, the National Wildlife Federation also has some cute new wildlife apps for kids available for iPhone or iPad, another avenue to get your kids excited about learning about the great outdoors and its inhabitants. Right now they’re just 99 cents!

 

What Did Snakey Eat?
In this delightfully silly game, preschoolers develop thinking skills by matching 
the shape in Snakey’s belly to one of the three suggested objects. Did Snakey swallow an umbrella? A rhinoceros? Or even a school bus? The giggles never stop when preschoolers see the crazy things that Snakey has eaten. Choose the correct object 
and Snakey will spit it back out, then swallow something even funnier!

 

Click the Birdie
Score points, discover cool bird facts, and have tons of fun in Ranger Rick’s adventure-packed app. Use Rick’s special digital camera to photograph some truly awesome birds as you travel to wild places throughout the United States. Visit a Cypress Swamp, an Arizona desert, the Hawaiian Islands, and other fun locales. At each stop, you’ll meet three different birds to photograph. If you frame all three just right, your photos will appear in Ranger Rick’s bird gallery.

But look out! These birdies are quick, and you’ll need fast fingers and sharp eyes to catch them before they fly away. Keep clicking and soon you’ll be a pro at this intriguing game, which also teaches kids about wildlife and fosters a love of nature and exploration.

 

Raiders of the Lost Aardvark
Join Ranger Rick the raccoon on a wild ride through Africa in this thrilling detective game that tests your sleuthing skills. A rare mummified aardvark has been unearthed in sub-Saharan Africa, rocking the archaeological world. The archaeologist who discovered it, Jack Snare, believes that the aardvark holds the key to unlocking some of the world’s greatest natural mysteries.

Snare takes his aardvark mummy on a global tour of prestigious museums. But en route to the Natural Science Museum in Africa, his precious cargo is stolen! And strangely, after the theft of the aardvark, some of Africa’s rarest and most endangered animals begin to disappear as well.

Is the aardvark cursed? Was it never meant to be found? Is there something sinister behind the disappearances? Put on your detective cap and help Ranger Rick track down the clues to solve this mummy mystery!

 

Know of any other wildlife & nature apps suitable for kids?