I was actually a little disappointed with this book. We love nature and nature projects in our family, so I was excited to find some new ways to play and learn with nature. For the most part, this didn't really do the trick for me.

This is a very short, full-color book with instructions for doing 8 simple science projects that supposedly use nature.

The projects are:

Make a rainbow (put water in a glass baking dish outside and let the sun shine through it on a piece of paper, and then see if the rainbow looks different on red or blue paper)

Make a sunset (pour some whole milk in a glass of water and shine a flashlight through it, to see how light looks different colors when it has to travel through more milky water)

Make a cranberry volcano (pour cranberry juice in three glasses, add lemon juice to one and baking soda to another, to see how it reacts to acids and bases)

Make a bottle thermometer (use a tiny food coloring bottle, straw, alcohol and food coloring to make a tiny thermometer that will change where the colored alcohol goes up on the straw if you put it in hot water or ice water)

Sundial time (make a sundial from a paper plate, tape and a pencil)

Flaming fireworks (dip wooden skewers in glue and then in salt or copper sulfate and then light them on fire to see that the salt and copper burn at different colors)

Great big bubbles (use dowels and yarn to make giant bubble wands)

Fall chemistry colors (chop up fall leaves and put them in alcohol, filter them, and then suspend pieces of paper towels in the liquids so the pigment will travel up them)

I considered the last one the best nature project, though the others can be fun science projects. I was disappointed that even the sundial used man-made materials like a paper plate and pencil instead of showing kids how to use natural objects like a stick stuck in the mud, per se.

Good color photos are shown of all of the steps, and it does a good job of going over safety rules. Small blurbs tell kids what the science behind each one is, too.

All in all, this is a short book that might be a fun library pick, but I wish it had gone farther with the nature theme and the number of projects.

My rating system:
1 = hated it
2 = it was okay
3 = liked it
4 = really liked it
5 = love it, plan to purchase, and/or would buy it again if it was lost

I read a digital ARC of the book for the purpose of review.