Junior Ranger Badges Kids Can Earn from Home ONLY during the Pandemic

One of my blog readers sent me on a giant expedition this week!

Earlier this week, a reader left this comment on my post about Junior Ranger badges that can be earned from home (thanks, Unknown!):

I immediately checked up on this, and it's true!!! Yellowstone National Park IS offering its Junior Ranger badge program by mail, only during the pandemic!

And if one national park site is doing this, maybe there are others!

Maybe I have too much time on my hands, or maybe it was simply time that I go through my map and list of Junior Ranger programs and make sure they're all up-to-date, anyway, because I spent practically the entire day yesterday--you know, in between giving Will constructive criticism on her APES and AP Psych FRQs, being the only person in the house to actually sort of clean it, making and mailing a couple of Pumpkin+Bear etsy orders, doing just enough of an online kickboxing workout to convince myself that I'd definitely worked out that day and should absolutely eat an entire sleeve of Thin Mints that evening, and trying to convince Syd that wouldn't it be fun if she for once and for all finished this Silver Award project that she's been working steadily on for over a year--going through every site on my map, adding lots of new Junior Ranger by mail programs to my list (yay!), taking some programs that no longer offer Junior Ranger badges by mail off my list (many national park sites are now moving to a "virtual Junior Ranger" program, for which a kid does some work on their website, self-corrects it, and then prints off an image of the Junior Ranger badge), and at the same time noting the national park sites that don't usually offer Junior Ranger badges by mail, but are now doing so ONLY during the duration of the pandemic.

And here they are!

• Fort Scott National Historic Site (Kansas)
• Great Lakes Junior Ranger (Ohio)
• Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (Colorado)
• Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (North Carolina). It's unclear if submitting this completed badge book will earn a kid a "real" Junior Ranger badge, or an image of a badge. Make sure your kid is comfortable with a bit of a gamble before they work on this one!
• Historic Preservation Junior Ranger (national). You can complete this badge book at home anytime, but I'm including it in this list because when Syd and Will did it, we found that finding a national park site to submit it to was tricky! I ended up setting the books aside, completed, until we one day simply happened to travel to a national park that accepted them--I want to say that maybe it was Mammoth Cave? Anyway, at least during the pandemic the James A. Garfield National Historic Site will accept the scanned completed pages!

• James A. Garfield National Historic Site (Ohio)
• Lincoln Home National Historic Site (Illinois)
• Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts (Virginia)
• Yellowstone National Park (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming). Will is SUPER excited about this one, because even though we were there in 2014 and the kids earned Junior Ranger badges, they were the middle-level bear badges. We're going to make a whole unit study of this badge book from home so that it's new and different, and when the kids send it in this time, they can earn the BISON badges!!!
• Yosemite National Park (California)
• Zion National Park (Utah)

I am SO excited about these, and Will is, too. We homeschool year-round, but after Will's AP exams are finished and she takes a bit of a break, we'll begin having more fun, project-filled days than we've been able to indulge in for quite a while, with those two big standardized tests looming. I am absolutely thrilled that we can now spend some of these days learning about and doing fun hands-on activities related to these special, limited-time-only Junior Ranger books--what a great way to sneak some engagement, enrichment, and education into what's starting to look like a long, long, long quarantined summer.

P.S. Want to follow along with our projects when we begin our studies for these Junior Ranger books? Keep in touch via my Craft Knife Facebook page!