First, grab a bucket, box, or bag and take a nature walk. Take a look around and think about the animals, plants, and natural materials. Collect as many different types of natural objects as you can find but make sure you aren’t harming the natural environment of animals.

Place your items on a flat surface like a stump, deck, or sidewalk to start constructing your display. Begin by sorting your natural materials to assess their shape and size to each other. Sticks, pine cones, leaves, flowers, and acorns make great supplies for this project but use whatever you can find.

Step 1: Structure

Use your imagination to create a shape, design, or words to express your individuality. As you are putting together your display, notice how the different materials you have collected serve a unique purpose. If you collected sticks like me, I noticed that they gave my display a sense of structure or shape.

Step 2: Support

The acorns were the support for my structure.

Step 3: Texture & Color

The pine cones, leaves, and flowers that I collected gave my display texture and color.

Step 4: Showcase!

Creating and designing nature displays can help our brains recognize and create patterns. Patterns and sequences are all around us. Composers use patterns to create melodies. Construction workers use patterns to craft homes and buildings, and computer programmers use patterns to create software and help us communicate online.

I made a person but there are so many different things you can create. You could create a sun, a symbol, or words or phrases. Let your imagination do the work for you!