Now, I know mushrooms grow a lot bigger than this, but this is the biggest mushroom we’ve ever had in our yard.  It measured 11″ across the cap and about 3″ across the stalk!  I guess they like all this hot steamy and wet weather we’ve been having.

Anyways just wanted to post some photos of things that have been going on around here in our nature times.

Alex continues to spend lots of time in his second home…the creek.

I’ve still been keeping up with my love of taking wildflower photos. This has been one of my favorites of a Deptford Pink. 

Cindy and I are currently writing six new units, one of which is on butterflies, so I’ve been busy taking lots of butterfly photos, including this one of a gorgeous Monarch. 

Another one of the six units will be on conifer trees, so a trip to the local arboretum was due to observe and collect cones… 

…to do lots of fun experiments with! 

Such as learning about how conifers spread their seeds by dropping one and watching it twirl around. 

And then I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the Queen Anne’s Lace which seems bigger and more abundant than I’ve ever seen it this year. 

I’ve also been enjoying the Robin’s Plantain, which also seems to be doing really well this year. It has to be all the rain we’ve had… 

 …which has also made the woods more green, thick and lush.

Today, Alex found an awesome find…a beautiful orange bracket fungus! Yes, I know I’m a strange one to get excited about fungus, but it was such a gorgeous “sherbet orange” color, and once you study fungus you find it rather fascinating. 

Well, that’s about it for now! More structured school will be starting up for us again soon. We pretty much school year round, taking breaks when we need and want. But a more concrete schedule will be resuming shortly. I have changes in mind for my blog as we begin another school year…stay tuned. Perhaps that just what I need to find that inspiration again!

The word fungus doesn’t usually make us think of fun nature study. In fact if you’re like I was before learning about it, the word conjured up sorta unpleasant thoughts, to be honest. Now, I’m proud to say that I’ve become amazingly interested in studying all about fungi. Seriously, it is truly fascinating! I’ve come to find that fungi aren’t just associated with things that are bad, there is actually a whole lot of good about them and without fungi as our “clean-up crew”, our earth would be in big trouble.

So just what is a fungus anyway? People sometimes think of fungi as types of plants, but they are not. In fact, for a long time scientists grouped plants and fungi together. That was until the invention of the microscope which brought into focus and made perfectly clear the differences between plants and fungi. Fungi hang out in one place like plants do, and mushrooms in particular grow in soil just like plants do, but they aren’t green and they do not make their own food using the sun like plants do. The truth is that fungi must seek out their food just the same as humans and animals do. But they aren’t animals! And, they don’t all grow in soil either.

Fungi seek out their food in living and dying things such as dying and dead plants and trees. They are essentially a clean up crew and take care of breaking down, or decomposing things, otherwise they’d lay around and pile up for a very long time.

So because of these facts and others, fungi has gained a place in the scientific world in it’s own category, the Fungus Kingdom.

Fungi come if various forms from the familiar mushroom you may have seen in your yard or on your pizza for that matter, or the fungi sprouting on a dead tree trunk or even the lichen growing on living trees. Other members of the fungi kingdom are mold, such as you see growing on that old piece of food in your fridge, and also the yeast you use to make homemade bread. And of course there are really less desirables ones too such as the ones that cause serious illnesses as meningitis and the nuisance of athlete’s foot.

Another thing that makes fungi different from plants and animals is the smallest part of every living thing, the cell. Plants and animals are made up of various types of cells. Plants have different cells that make up their leaves, stems and roots. Animals have different cells, like we do, that make up their heart, lungs,etc. Fungi are different because they are single-celled, their cells are all the same. Plant cell walls are made up of cellulose, while fungal cell walls are made of chitin, the same substance that forms the tough outer skeletons of insects and spiders.

This is just an introduction to the world of fungi that I’ve been learning about! As I said above, it is very interesting and worth learning more, just as everything in God’s creation is!

On our walk, we found many different types of fungi, such as this sac fungi, some type of elf cup mushroom, I think. They were so tiny.

And this furry white fungus that was growing on a small fallen branch.

Oh, and look, Gabby found a mushroom right on her shirt!! 

In other news, my posting has slowed down for two reasons, our very fast, but obviously injured computer crashed this past week, and I am temporarily using a very painfully slow computer until the other returns from being fixed, and Cindy and I will be headed to the Lexington Homeschool Fair this Saturday to set up a booth for Shining Dawn Books, and that has had me plenty busy in preparation. If you are anywhere near Lexington, be sure to stop by and see us!

dust and soaking into the earth. It was time to go on a mushroom hunt.”

- The Mushroom Hunt by Simon Frazer

We’ve had a very rainy, wet spring here which has been like a beacon call for mushrooms to pop up all over the yard and in our landscaping.

We’ve been busy hunting them, dissecting them, sorting them, wrtinng abotut them, trying to identify them , and making spore prints out of them. Mushrooms may not seem like a prime teaching opporutunity, but think again! They are very cool fungi!

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 Original Post:

Once again, God’s creation allured us into study.  After two days of rainy, wet and cool weather, the mushrooms have made their grand appearance in and about and all around the outside of our house.  This morning, my son exclaimed “Cool, look at all the musrooms!”   And so toadstool school commenced.  This photo is just a small portion of them in our landscaping.

We found them around and under rocks, around and under the drain pipe, and playing “peek-a-boo” from under the concrete by our front porch.

It was simply amazing how many there were.  I think they are so neat looking.

So of course we were obliged to slip on our gardening gloves and gather a handful for study!

The Handbook of Nature Study has an absolutely wonderful and full of great information section on mushrooms.  We learned folklore about mushrooms:  toads love to sit on them (toadstools) which of course was very fitting for our up and coming toads, and that fairies use them as umbrellas.  While observing them, we learned the different shapes and types of mushrooms and identified these as convex, we learned the different parts of mushrooms from the cap to the gills to the stem and to the Mycelium (roots).  We learned that spores, which mushrooms produce by dropping out of their gills, are like their “seeds” which are carried away on the wind to create new mushrooms.

We saw that some of them had a filmy white covering over the gills.  And got a giggle out of this family of five, just like us!

Then the kids first choose out a special one they would use for journaling, and then the fun part that my son just could barely wait for…..dissection!

We took some and split them right down the middle to observe.

Then we set about to try a really neat project of making Spore Prints.  We took two flatter looking mushrooms (ones that the gills were nice and flat), cut the stems off, and placed them on pieces of white cardstock.

We covered them with bowls and set them on our nature table to sit overnight.

If all goes well, in the morning we should have nice little spore prints from where the mushrooms have deposited them on the paper.  You would normally need a compound microscope to see most spore features but spore color can be seen by the naked eye with the help of a spore print!  If they turn out well, I read somewhere that you could take a clear polyurethane spray to preserve them for your journals.  If they work well, I will add a photo to this post in the morning.  Oh, and we found two more mushrooms in our back yard that were a different kind, plane shaped, so we cut the stems from them and added them to our spore sheet too.

And last but not least a Plant Journal page was filled out, noting the size, parts and characteristics of the mushroom.

Helpful Websites:

What is a Mushroom?

Mushroom Identification

Mushroom Diagram

We also finished up our Clouds Unit Study today!  I’ll hopefully be able to pull that final post together for this weekend.