We love going for our nature walks and the kids naturally end up asking lots of questions about the plants and creatures that we spot while we are out.  They always want to know the names of the trees (I am really bad with trees) and the type of insects we spot (I honestly can not remember what the different type of beetles are).

So we have started taking little spotters and iDials with us on our walks.  Sometimes I leave them in my backpack until I get a question which I cannot answer and other times I give them to the kids and they go explore and see if they have find anything on their list.  Either way I am finding the Spotter sheets and iDials from the Woodland Trust website brilliant.  They are informative, written for the UK,  and I am able to pack a bunch of them into my backpack as they are small and lightweight (I do tend to laminate ours so they last longer).  They have a BIG selection and all of them are FREE to download

So I thought I would share the ones that we are using and loving.

My son really likes the Beetle ID and Ladybird ID sheets.

And the poo spotter is also a firm favourite with him.

My daughter is currently trying to figure out what different plants are called so she likes the Beautiful Blossom sheet, the Spring Flower ID sheet and the Summer Flower ID sheet.

And there are lots of pages on moths and butterflies – we like the fact that they split the moth spotting pages into day and night flying moths

She also is using the Leaf iDial together with the Twig iDial when we are out as a way of trying to identify different trees.  She is finding the two work really well together.  She normally starts with the leaf iDial and then checks with the twig iDial to see if the two results match (it ends up being a built in check as sometimes she is not 100% sure if she selected the correct leaf).

We also have downloaded the Fruit and Seed iDial which I am sure we will get around to using.  (The iDials print out as 2 separate pages.  We then cut out the circles, laminated them and attached the two circles together with split pins)

Another useful iDial is the garden bird one and they also have a wild bird iDial

It really is worth spending some time on their website as they do have LOTS of stunning Free to download nature pages.

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