Portable Nature Center: How to Keep a Nature Table When You Don’t Have the Space

Have you ever considered keeping a nature table? My kids loving going outside and bringing little nature trinkets into our home to display. I like their nature hunts to spark interest in nature journaling and research, but I don’t want to step on an acorn or find a random feather on the dining room table. We like to use a portable nature center to keep it all in one place. 

We love to study nature around here. There is a nature center close by that we like to visit. The entire room is just full of finds:  animal skulls, snake skins, dried flowers, pinecones, leaves, rocks, you name it. The kids love to pick everything up and study it and play with it. The place is like a little hands on nature museum. After seeing how much my children enjoy going there and touching everything I was trying to think of ways to do something like this in our home (minus the animal skulls of course!)

I was looking on pinterest and kept finding these BEAUTIFUL nature centers. A big table or desk in the corner of a gorgeous, Charlotte Mason Style reading room full of treasures. I even came across complete nature rooms!

I drooled and realized that this just wasn’t possible. Every corner of my house is already full of bookshelves and I just didn’t have the room. I also knew that a display like that would just get destroyed by a toddler or a dog knocking stuff over with her tail, so I just ignored the thought of this even being possible. Instead we just had baggies of acorns and pinecones stuffed into reusable bags on a shelf.

That all changed one day as I was browsing Amazon for kitchen storage and I came across this Bamboo Wood Adjustable Drawer Organizer

It was like a lightbulb went off in my head and I immediately knew I could turn that into this:

What I love most about this Bamboo tray is that the dividers can be arranged in whatever way you want them to be. This makes it very easy to customize your “table” to fit smaller or larger sized items.

There are so many ways you can use this. You can change it out with the seasons, or keep it specific to a particular theme you are studying ie; forest, wildflowers, desert, beach etc… I love that Bamboo is a renewable resource and the beautiful look of it fits very well with the natural theme.

This is how we store our Nature Table:

I keep it on the middle shelf of the bookshelf with any other extra nature finds. I will be storing a pair of binoculars and some nature journals there as well. This is tall enough to keep my toddler from pulling it down, and not too high where my older girls can’t reach it. They can easily take it down when they want to play with it or change items out for new ones. 

If you have been wanting to create a small nature center for your kids now you can!