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Games to Play With Butterfly Nets

Most children love both the outdoors and insects. Girls and boys alike may spend hours each day outdoors running through the grass, inspecting the ground and bushes for interesting insects and chasing butterflies and grasshoppers. You can feed this interest and educate your children at the same time with games. Gather some children's butterfly nets, available at local toy stores, and head out to your backyard or the nearest park for some fun.

Insect Scavenger Hunt
- This game is a great way to educate your children about where bugs live and how they disguise themselves. Get some realistic-looking plastic bugs, available for a few cents each at toy stores, and scatter them around your yard. Put them where those bugs would normally live--put crickets and grasshoppers in the grass, praying mantises on trees and balance butterflies on the heads of large flowers. Make a list of the bugs and challenge your children to find them all and place them in their butterfly nets. When you find each one, ask why that bug might want to live where you placed it. You can modify this game to be played indoors on rainy days; simply help your child make grass, trees and flowers from construction paper first.
Butterfly Basketball
- This game is good for a group of children, whether you have a lot of your own children or your child has a group of friends visiting. Get a bunch of plastic butterflies in any color and split the children into two teams. Give one child from each team a butterfly net and give the other members of the team the plastic butterflies. Arrange each team so the child with the butterfly net is standing several feet away from his or her team members. On the word "go," have the children start tossing butterflies into the nets. The net holder's job is to move the net to catch as many butterflies as possible. The team with the most at the end wins.
Butterfly or Bug Tag
- This game is fun no matter how many children you have; parents can have fun with this, too. Help each child make a bug costume of his or her choosing. They can make butterfly, dragonfly or ladybug wings, grasshopper antennae, giant spider legs or bee stingers. Choose one child to be "It" first and give them a butterfly net. Have the children put on their costumes and go outside. Tell It to try to tag the bugs with the butterfly net. Designate a spot to be a "bug cage" where It can store his bugs until all are captured. If It gets too close to the bug cage and gets touched by one of the bugs, It becomes a bug and the bug that tagged him becomes It. This way, all the children get a turn being It and bugs.

Kids Games