Use some of the free, online coloring pages listed below to create your own desert mural for your child to color or paint.
Desert Coloring Pages:
Desert animal information and coloring pages
Desert animal coloring pages from edupics.com (scroll partway down page)
Realistic desert animals and plants to color
Friendly Lizard coloring page
Coloring page: Roadrunner catching a snake (cartoonish)
Rattlensake coloring page (realistic)
"Color" a desert online
Desert Diorama:
You can print out a diorama background, and then all of the plants and animals too, for your kids to assemble! Pretty cool -- and free!
Your Own Indoor Desert:
-- Fill a baking pan with sandbox sand or craft sand. If your child has a large collection of plastic animals (as my daughter does), help her find the desert animals and put them in the pan. Or, buy a couple of desert animals just for the occasion (a splurge, I know, but some kids play with animals a LOT, and then it's worth it). I'm not too strict about who "lives" in the desert after the first few minutes (our desert was soon inhabited, for example, by a Saint Bernard puppy).
Play-Doh Cactuses:
We just kind of thought this up as we were playing, and it was fun! Help your child make cactuses out of green play-doh, and then let her stick in toothpicks for the "spines." Talk about why some plants have spines as a defense mechanism. (Would your child want to eat something with spines? No way! Unless your child is like my infant son, who would probably try to eat that play-doh cactus anyway!)
Sand Art:
Show your child how to drizzle glue on paper, cover with sand, and then lift up the paper and tap the sand off to reveal "sand writing." Nora liked seeing her name written in sand.
