Wooden Birdhouse kits are available in feeders and bat houses too, and make for  excellent projects with kids of all ages.

Be it church groups, scouts, or even school science curriculum, there’s no better way to teach kids about nature, wildlife, and the world around them.

Thanks to The Cornell Lab of Orinithology’s “NestWatch” and affiliated citizen-science projects, teachers are provided with the tools they need to set up nest box trails at schools, through the “Home Tweet Home” partnership with Nature and PBS. Some schools are even monitoring nests as part of a new NSF-funded initiative called “Communicating Climate Change”, aimed at community projects that seek out local indicators of climate change.  In Ithaca, NY, Dewitt Middle School students monitor nests in wooden birdhouse kits, and record data such as first egg date, a critical piece of information used by researchers to understand how birds are responding to climate change.

For more information on existing cirricula, or after-school and environmental activities, please visit www.nestwatch.org