The Berks County Parks and Recreation Department is launching a program that gives children an opportunity to deepen their connection with nature while learning.<\/p>\n
The Backpack Lending Program makes available supplies, lesson materials and books to children in kindergarten through fifth grade at several county parks. Each backpack has a set of pencils and field guides to write down observations about what they see.<\/p>\n
There are four kinds of backpacks:<\/p>\n
\u2022 The Art Backpack provides a chance to create artwork out of natural materials found in the parks.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The Insect Backpack provides the opportunity to collect and observe various insects.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The Birding Backpack includes field guides and a bingo card to discover birds in the parks.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The Wagon Works Backpack provides the activities to explore the history of bridges while becoming your own architect.<\/p>\n
The backpacks are free to borrow and available at the Angora Fruit Farm, Antietam Lake Park, Beidler House\/Allegheny Aqueduct, Berks Leisure Area, Gring\u2019s Mill, Berks County Heritage Center and Stonecliffe Recreation Area.<\/p>\n
Those interested in the program, can reserve a backpack by sending an email to LGauker@berkspa.gov.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Berks County Parks and Recreation Department is launching a program that gives children an opportunity to deepen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,708,28,128,130,129,289,706],"class_list":["post-181423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-outdoors","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}