After spending a recent Saturday morning learning about birds and bees, the girls in kindergarten through third grade talked of going home to do their homework.

For the Daisy and Brownie Girl Scouts, that homework meant hanging the bird feeder and the home they made for bees and then recording what the birds eat over the next six days. They recycled plastic bottles for both projects in the session taught by Fort Bend County Master Gardeners.

The girls also learned about trees in the session at the Bud O'Shieles Community Center, 1330 Band Rd. Rosenberg, where they had the opportunity to earn their Design With Nature Badge, thanks to Donna Blackburn, Youth Activities Director for FBC Master Gardeners and her crew. Blackburn explained the Design With Nature Badge is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) badge through the Girl Scout Council.

"We've worked with the Girl Scout Council before, but we've never done this type of badge," said Blackburn. "We've always done gardening, animals and other horticulturally related events. But this is a relatively new badge."

Blackburn said, "There is so much of the environment that they need to know about. This is one way to help them learn and get excited about and take care of the environment. It's a newer approach to get them excited."

Master Gardeners presented the topics followed by hands-on activities. Eight-year-old Charlotte, a Brownie, said, "I had a great time today. I liked learning about birds."

Nine-year-old Sophie, also a Brownie, liked learning about birds' different beaks and how that determined their diet. Blackburn had the girls use a toothpick, spoon and clothespin to represent different beaks. With one arm behind them, the girls had five to seven seconds using one of the three tools to pick up their food: macaroni representing worms, raisins as grubs, marbles as snails and Styrofoam as water bugs.

Sophie said she learned about different types of seeds for birds - wrens and finches like millet, for example. "I also learned types of birds and bees and I know how to read a tree," she added.

Tree reading came courtesy of Master Gardener Nancy Utech who brought cross-sections of a tree trunk. The girls then counted the concentric circles in the cross-sections to tell the age of the tree. Master Gardener Patti Lawlor gave the girls recycled plastic water bottles, string and a stick to build bird feeders. She talked of the importance of the 3 Rs: Reduce, reuse and recycle. She shared that experts predict by 2050 that the ocean will have more plastic bottles than fish if current practices continue.

Master Gardener Lynn Lucas introduced the girls to eight dishes of food for birds from peanuts to freeze-dried insects and encouraged each girl to take at least 10 spoons full of food with them to feed the birds when they got home. She talked about what different birds like to eat. Cardinals, for example, like sunflower seeds, while berries will attract mockingbirds.