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Nov 27, 2020

Identifying Mushrooms is no small feat but we’ve made it easy and fun by colour coding our favourite mushrooms into a rainbow fan. We created 6 images of real mushrooms that grow in the wild. Continue adding cards to the fan as you learn about mushrooms or find them in the wild on your forest walks. Place each mushroom in the order of the rainbow - categorizing them by the colour that they are. This craft is fun and is a helpful learning tool when learning and memorizing types of wild mushrooms.

Materials:

  1. watercolour paper

  2. watercolour paint

  3. pencil

  4. scissors

  5. Metal ring

  6. mushroom field guide


STEPS:


1. Draw:


Start by drawing 6 favourite mushrooms, choosing ones that are different colours of the rainbow. Make sure you cut out the watercolour paper so that’s it’s rectangular we cut ours 7.5 inches long and 3.5 wide.

2. Paint:


Paint Your drawing using watercolour paint


3. Punch a hole:


Using a hole puncher punch out a hole at the end of the paper


4. Ring or string:


Put a metal ring through the hole to hold the papers altogether





Here are some mushrooms you can draw to create your rainbow ID fan.

Look them up in a mushroom field guide book and have fun drawing them.


Red: Amanita muscaria - Fly agaric


Orange: Cantharellus cibarius - Golden Chanterelle


Yellow: Ramaria aurea - Golden coral


Green: Clitocybe odora - Aniseed funnel cap


Blue: Lactaruis indigo - Indigo milk cap


Purple: Mycena pura - Lilac Fairy helmet


Mushroom ID for the drawings below created by 6 year old Charlotte.







Have fun exploring the world of mushrooms. Remember to be safe on your mushroom hunting adventures and never eat any mushroom that hasn’t been identified by an expert, it takes time and experience to learn to identify them on your own. Visual inspection is one of the important identification features, but not the only one - many have specific qualities of texture, smell, season, and geography (to name a few). There are look-a-like mushrooms that might confuse the untrained eye, and if you eat the wrong one there could be severe, life-threatening consequences. It‘s completely safe to look at, study and draw mushrooms, so start there until you are confident in picking and eating wild mushrooms on your own.










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