Fwd: Counting Robins & Eco-Art Materials
Wendy Nadherny Fachon
From: Wendy Nadherny Fachon, Host of the Story Walking Radio Hour <storywal...@substack.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2026 at 11:26 AM
Subject: Counting Robins & Eco-Art Materials
To: <storywal...@gmail.com>
Counting Robins & Eco-Art MaterialsCrayons made with Rocks and Paper made with Elephant Dung
My most vivid childhood memory of springtime was watching my mother count the first robins she saw after all the snow had melted away. She would lick the pad of her right hand thumb and press it quickly into the open palm of her left hand. Then she would make a fist with her right hand and stamp it against her left palm. She would give each robin a number, starting with one and counting up from there. The red-breasted robin is the first bird I learned to recognize. My mother never explained what she was doing, except to say it brought good luck. Over fifty years later, I was wondering about the significance of my mother’s springtime habit, which led to discovering a similar tradition called “Stamping Robins” by licking a thumb and grinding it into the opposite palm. When I was a child, postage stamps were made with a lick-and-stick adhesive. My mother’s right thumb represented the stamp and her left palm represented the postcard or envelope. Her fist represented the rubber stamp used by the post office to confirm the date of receipt and to mark the stamp as “spent.” The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual event that happens in Mid-February. People around the world count and report the number of birds they see in their backyards over a four-day period. This helps scientists track bird populations and understand their health and distribution. Stamping robins is a fun way to start learning about backyard birds, counting and, maybe, participating in this citizen science activity.
Mom was an a second grade teacher, art teacher, and bird lover. She would have loved playing with the box of Crayon Rocks I found last week in a gift shop. 32 natural colors! Made in Kentucky Amish country! Biodegradable! Compostable and made from a renewable resource - natural soy wax instead of petroleum-derived parrafin wax. The makers combine soy wax with other plant waxes and a variety of non-toxic powdered pigments to create beautiful colors. They use a natural ground rock to give the crayons body. The color goes on smooth and blends easily, almost like an oil pastel, but without the mess. The other cool things about these rocks crayons is their shape and grip. A special education teacher, Barbara Lee, is the inventor. Lee helped many students learn to write adequately so they could pass their exams. She figured out how important it was for children to develop a strong tripod grip early in their education process. The tripod grip encourages children to use thumb, first and second fingers and aids them in fine motor development. Read more and shop at crayonrocks.com.
For Valentine’s Day, Dean gave me an unusual gift, a mini sketchbook of handmade paper, manufactured in Sri Lanka from a mixture of elephant waste and post consumer paper. Surprisingly, it’s clean, colorless, and acid-free! The texture reminds me of elephant skin, and it is cleverly marketed as “Pachyderm Paper.” An elephant’s diet is all vegetarian, and so its poop is basically raw cellulose. The maker cleans and processes the mixture of cellulose and converts it into crafting paper that can be used for notebooks, cards and other gift items. The Asian elephant is a vulnerable species found on the island of Sri Lanka and across India and Southeast Asia. Farmers in Sri Lanka have been killing elephants, because they interfere with agriculture. An adult elephant eats 300 pounds of roots, grasses, fruit and bark in one day. Agriculture is the dominant form of land use in Sri Lanka. Elephants and people can only co-exist where crop damage can be compensated. The makers of Pachyderm Paper plan to do this by showing exactly how elephants can be a sustainable economic resource. Read the story and support the elephants by shopping at MrElliePooh.com. Rock… Paper… Add Scissors for small hands. Pre-schoolers learn scissor skills by watching and practicing. Parents can show their children how to repurpose paper grocery bags as art material - tearing, cutting, folding, drawing and writing. Offer kids large scraps cut from paper bags, junk mail envelopes, magazines and scraps of gift wrap, and watch them to CREATE! Wendy Nadherny Fachon is host of the Story Walking Radio Hour and author of The Angel Heart. If you enjoyed this post, read Exploring the Language of Flowers with Children. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
© 2026 Wendy Nadherny Fachon
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