Our newest one was just found today, the Deptford Pink.  Unfortunately Alex had grabbed and plucked the only bloom there was before I could stop him.  I was able to put it in a little container of water. 

Hannah and I both choose the Deptford Pink to illustrate.  It has such beautiful “hot pink” petals.

Hannah’s Journal Entry

My Journal Entry

Alex chose the Ox-Eye Daisy to illustrate.

He drew this in about 20 seconds, and the next thing I knew he was headed out the door with the butterfly net!  It wasn’t long before Hannah joined him, and they brought me this beautiful little butterfly.  We unfortunately weren’t able to identify it.

We also wen’t outside with my new tree identification field guide and were finally able to identify Hannah’s tree that she chose to journal about through the seasons.

Pignut Hickory Tree

The leaves on the big tree were too far up, but a little walk in the woods produced a smaller Pignut Hickory that we could get a sampling of leaves from.  And, as a bonus we found a pignut right below the tree to observe.  Hannah did a leaf rubbing after we came inside to put in her journal.

It was so easy to identify with this new guide, Identifying Trees – An All-Season Guide to Eastern North America, we love it!  It has closeup pictures of the bark, leaves and nuts.  It was so easy to for me and the kids to use.

I wanted to share this beautiful photo.  This was taken from the spot in the woods where we found the tree.  Ahhhh, I could have sat there all day!

After coming back inside the nature fun wasn’t over yet.  While sitting on the couch reading a book, Hannah jumped up and snapped this funny photo of an Fox Squirrel making his way up the pole for a bite of suet.

And then, just after we were sitting back down to read again, guess who showed up at our feeders?  An Indigo Bunting!  Hannah, with her heart beating fast, took a great photo!  You can click on the image for full-size.

It’s truly a rare treat to see them at the feeders because the guides say they only will come to them before insects become plentiful, and they are only in our area in Spring and Summer.  And just moments later the female came too!  How exciting!  She wouldn’t stay still long enough for a photo though.

So much for finishing reading our book!  I’m going to have to turn that couch around so we can’t see out the window!

If you’d like to participate in these wonderful Green Hour Challenges, visit Barb at Handbook of Nature Study.

This morning, before even more rain came, we headed down to the wood’s edge with old clothes and muddy shoes on determined to spend some “quiet” time in nature (well at least “I” wanted it to be quiet lol).  And have nature time we did!

This was the view from where we were looking up at the back of our house.

We went to the kid’s “secret place” that they play in the woods at the edge of our backyard.  We had moved an old plastic seat down there to have a nice comfy place to sit and draw and look at our field guides and also to enjoy the fantastic views. 

There was honeysuckle bushes all around us, so the air smelled sweet and thick with it.  So we decided to use one of the honeysuckle blooms to observe and try to find the plant parts.

We quickly found out that with this delicate flower, it as going to be detail work, but surprisingly we were able to identify most of the parts using this great flower parts guide that Barb had pointed us to.

The little, flattish yellow things are the anthers on top of the skinny filaments; the roundish green/yellow balls are the stigmas (we think); and we even think we saw where the nectary is (where the sweet nectar is produced).

We also observed a Philadelphia Fleabane wildflower, they are in great abundance around us now too.  After reading a little about them, we talked about how the flower buds stay bowed down until they bloom and then stand up tall!  Neat!  If you look closely at this picture, hopefully you can see the ones that are not bloomed yet, bowing down.

SInce these are in such abundance right now, Hannah’s chose to do a nature journal entry on this beautiful wildflower.

Alex spent part of his nature time working on his pretend farm and turning over rocks in the creek which made Mom flinch each time (yes, I had warned him about the possibility of finding snakes)!

He chose to draw some of the trees we observed while out there.  Which lead to a great conversation.  We discussed about the veins in a very large maple leaf we found and how they carry water to the whole leaf.  Then he asked how old the big maple tree was, to which I replied I’m not sure, but it is definitely older than me.  He snickered at that!  And then that lead to him asking me if the Earth was 2,008 years old to which lead to a whole discussion about the timeline and when Christ came, when man was created, etc.  See…nature study leads to all sorts of discussions, including History!  I can’t tell you how many times this has happened.

We also saw lots of Eastern Tent Caterpillars.  They are all over the place right now, one even tried to hitchhike back in the house on my shirt!  The kids have recently collected a few, one of which has already gone into it’s cocoon.  They turn into Eastern Tent Moths.  You can click on the image and hit enlarge to get a better view.

Hannah spent some free time collecting materials to make a “fairy house”.  I will post some detailed pictures in another post.  She did a great job and had so much fun using her imagination!

Alex and Gabby spent some sweet time together exploring.

Challenge #14 is about pressing flowers and over the last couple of weeks, we have been collecting wildflowers from the edge of our backyard and woods and pressing them.  They are still currently in my recipe books being pressed, but they will soon be added to our nature journals.  I absolutely love the homemade press that Barb made, so we will be certainly making one of those for our future pressings.

We were able to be outside for 2 hours today!  It was great therapy!  Just as we started to pack up our stuff to come back inside, the rain started to come down and it’s not stopped since!

To join in on the Green Hour Challenges, visit Barb at Handbook of Nature Study.

 SIGNS OF SPRING

We secured the top of the bag with a rubber band, and hung it outside near our feeders.  Our hope is that we may notice some of these materials in a bird nest in the future.

For our study of a focus area item this week (Birds)…well it sort of found us…we had a great time identifying a new bird  to our backyard.  We were blessed to observe and study the Northern Flicker, I wrote a post about our encounter HERE.

Oh, and to celebrate our nature walk this week, when we returned back to my parent’s house, we made these cute little candy bird’s nests which I had found out about at Kim’s Blog.  They were so yummy and fun to make!  Thanks for sharing this Kim, they wen’t along perfectly with our studies.

“Nature-study is science brought home.  It is a knowledge of botany, zoology, and geology as illustrated in the dooryard, the cornfield or the woods back of the house.” – Handbook of Nature Study, Page 21

This week we were to pick another item from our focus area to read to the children about, and have our nature walk time.  In addition to picking another bird species to focus on, I have also chosen to focus on beginning recognizing bird songs this week.  This is something that I have been desiring to do for a long time.  I was surprised to see that Hannah already had a jump start on me, by picking around on the keyboard trying to mimic some of the sounds.

The weather is slowly starting to improve, and this week we we’re able to get back outside in the great outdoors!  We went for a long nature hike in the woods behind our home early Sunday afternoon before Easter dinner.  My husband and my Dad joined the children and I for our walk this week.  Gabby stayed behind with Grandma.  It was sunny and about 45 degrees, not too cold. Our main objective for our walk was to spend some time observing the birds around us in quietness, in hopes of seeing and hearing a bird that is not a frequent visitor to our feeders.

To start out our walk, we first took notice of our creek and how much calmer it was since the snow and rains had stopped.

We also took notice of many different kinds of mosses, and took a small sampling of each.  We were really impressed with all the different kinds, and the beauty in each one.  And also were impressed with all the different places we saw it growing:

“on a stick”

“on the ground”

“on an old log”

“on the creekbank”

We also saw lots at the bottoms of trees.  We were interested in checking into the names of the varieties, but after checking at home, we found that there can be up to 100 different moss kinds in our area; that’ll be a subject to dive into later!  But we sure had fun just observing it and also using the moss we brought home later for a project.

We were also hoping to find some bird feathers or old nests but came up empty handed for that.  But we did have a few moments of quiet to listen to a bird singing quite closeby.  We used the binoculars and the bird cooperated quite well by sitting still for a long time for us to get a good view.  We identified it as a male Eastern Towhee.  This is one I haven’t seen near our home in a long time.  He was singing so beautifully, and I was able to get a good recording on my new Sound Recorder that hubby surprised me with recently!  I haven’t, however, figured out how to upload it to my blog yet.  But here is what we heard.  He has a characteristic sound which seems to call…”Drink your teeeeeeeeee!” 

We also observed several signs of woodpeckers.

The kids also took time to have a little swinging from vines fun.

Here is a list of other items we observed:  Red-Tailed Hawk flying high above, huge old oak tree, deer tracks, Shagbark Hickory tree, wild onions.

I do have a confession to make, I became quite frustrated with my kids towards the middle/end of this walk because they just couldn’t keep quiet!  I tried so hard to have them observe peacefully and quietly for more than just a moment, so there wasn’t much opportunity to really listen; and I think when the trees are still stripped bare of leaves and everything crunches underneath it’s just louder anyways.  So, I admit towards the end, I sent them home a bit early with their Dad, how awful am I!!!  I need to seriously work on patience with these walks.  Since I love nature so much myself I tend to make it about “me” too much.

So my Dad and I hung back and enjoyed some quietness listening to things around us.  I took this video clip towards the end while sitting by the creek, you can hear the Red-Bellied Woodpecker in the background (another one we have learned the song of this week).  And also my 2-year old screaming off the deck for “Mama, Grandpa, where are you?” (guess it just can’t be completely quiet with kids, huh?!)  I realize though the most precious sound on this clip is her voice.

I also did an entry on the Eastern Towhee in my journal because later on Sunday while standing on our deck, my Dad and I observed him taking a bird bath in our creek.  It was soooo neat!

 Visit Barb at The Heart of Harmony to participate in the Green Hour Challenges.

Ok, I admit it, this week I just couldn’t do it…I just couldn’t drag us out in this weather! Last week it was truckloads of snow, this week we’re drowning in rain and mud. We made an honest attempt to go out in our backyard on Monday, but between the ankle high mud and brrrrr cold temps, we did an about face and marched right back inside. So, this week we took the “inside approach” to nature study, which honestly turned out to be a lot of fun too!

Our focus area pick from last week was birds, however as you will see from my recent postings we had a lot of gardening-type things going on too! But for this post, I will center on our bird studies. Here’s a rundown on the things we did.

For Objective #1 we were to begin keeping a running list of our observations from our focus area. So we spent some time this week observing our bird feeders and the woods behind our home and began recording our observations on our lists.

We plan on taking every opportunity we can to add to them, especially when we can get out in the great outdoors again! Oh, what is it like for you lucky nature-lovin’ folks who live in wonderful weather year-round?!! Ok, I‘m just being jealous! I really do love it here.

Ok, moving right along to Objective #2. We were of course supposed to take our outside nature walk and observe using our senses. But, what I did, was during our “from inside the house bird observation time,” we opened the window for a few moments and listened to the sounds, looked closely around and observed the birds in the trees as well, and had meaningful conversations. It was really very peaceful, lots of beautiful bird sounds, cute squirrels running all around (and tearing up my feeders!), the drip drop of rain falling, and the sights and sounds of the rushing water in the creek. It was as if the floodgates had been opened and all the water was racing together to reach the finish line! The rushing water of the creek is truly a sight and sound to be deeply observed right now, because during the drier summer months it pretty well stays almost dried up; so that is very exciting.

Objective #3 was to add anything new that we observed during this time, which we have mostly done; I have a few more things for us to add.

For Objective #4, we we’re to give an opportunity for a nature journal entry. Alex chose to draw a picture of an American Robin. As you can see in the picture, he showed it first picking a worm out of the ground and then flying up to her babies in the nest. Hannah chose to do a bird journal sheet for the Northern Cardinal.  We also did a Northern Cardinal bird study that I organized to use.

In addition to the things above we also had a lesson one day on the Red-Tailed Hawk. Click here to listen to their sound.  We have been very blessed to have a pair that are nesting nearby and we have been able to observe them frequently. We have affectionately named them Rusty and Ruby. You can keep up with my blog entry on that here. So we read from the Handbook of Nature Study about Hawks which was so very interesting (as always). Our favorite thing we learned was the following:

“Their eyes are remarkably keen; they can see a moving creature from a great height, and can suddenly drop upon it like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Their wonderful eyes are farsighted when they are circling in the sky, but as they drop, the focus of the eyes changes automatically with great rapidity, so that by the time they reach the earth they are nearsighted; a feat quite impossible for our eyes unless aided by glasses or telescope.”

That’s so cool! How would you like to have vision that good?!

The kids also pulled out the paints one evening (insert nervous Mom symbol here!) and gathered some rocks along the driveway, and painted nature pictures on them.

That wraps it up for us this week. Have a beautiful and blessed week. And may all your nature adventures be filled with many precious moments.

If you are interested in jumping on board with these wonderful Green Hour Challenges, head on over to Barb’s blog at The Heart of Harmony.

Despite our early Spring blizzard which resulted in near 15 inches of snow on Saturday, we still managed to complete our Green Hour Challenge this week!  Yes, today we bravely donned our winter coats, hats, and mittens and met some dear friends at a local park to have a nature walk.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me begin with Objective #1.  This week we were to read pages 10-11 and pages 13-15 of our Handbook of Nature Study.   My favorite quote was from The Field Notebook section:

“The book should be considered the personal property of the child and should never be criticized by the teacher except as a matter of encouragement; for the spirit in which the notes are made is more important than the information they cover.”

Wow, did that quote ever USED to apply with me!  I’m happy to say that through the Lord’s “gentle” training, I’ve recently been taught to allow my children to freely express themselves in their nature journals; without the fear of Mom’s evil glances.  I notice that when I back off and simply encourage my children to draw and journal about what’s important to them from our walks, and in accordance with their interests, that’s when I see their faces light up with enthusiam over their work.  I find this enthusiam naturally leads them to pursue things in more detail later.

And for Objective #2, we were to pick a nature study area to focus on for the next 6-8 weeks.  After looking through the HNS, I presented my children with a few options, and they chose to study birds.  Last year we studied birds for awhile using Apologia Science, but this will be a nice review and a chance to learn further.

After speaking with them about our plans to study birds in more detail again, Hannah immediately got busy (on her own AND on the weekend too!) looking through all my old Birds and Blooms magazines and cutting out pictures of birds that she liked.  She proceeded to paste them onto a poster board and label them with my LetraTag labeler, which I gladly lent her!

After she cut out all her pictures she realized that there were a few that we didn’t know the names of, so she had to look them up in The Backyard Bird Lover’s Field Guide.

The end product was beautiful!  Alex’s favorite was the baby robins.

Ok, on to Objective #3 – our nature walk!  For our walk this week, we were to use our chosen area of focus and spend some time on that during our walk.  As I said, we met some friends at a local park in hopes of walking on their asphalt trails and observing and listening to the birds.  Even though there was lots of snow still on the ground, it was sunny and the temps were actually not too cold.  When we got there we quickly realized that the park workers hadn’t had a chance yet to clean the snow off their paths very well!  Imagine a nature crazy Mom trying to push a stroller in the snow and ice!  But what do determined homeschool Moms do?…Improvise!

We decided to still take our walk, but we’d just have to stay on the main car paths.  At the end of the street we paused for about 10 minutes to do some general teaching about birds.  We read some of the introduction to studying birds in the HNS and had a GREAT discussion from that.

And also we focused on and read about the Northern Cardinal, which I was surprised that Ms. Comstock referred to them as “Cardinal Grosbeaks” not Northern Cardinals (made a note to look up when and why the name changed).

We were having a great dicussion about Cardinals when a male graced us with it’s appearance by flying right overhead (thank you Lord)!  After that, we had them be very quiet for a few moments to listen for birds.

On our way back to our cars we heard a bunch of birds making a ruckous and immediately identified them as Killdeer.  They are the only bird that we have that sounds like a seagull.

For Objective #4, we are supposed to follow up our walk with discussion and research in our focus area. I plan on doing further reading in the HNS and other things with the kids on their two chosen birds of interest:  the Northern Cardinal and the Red-Tailed Hawk.  And also we will begin a review discussion about feathers and flight.  And perhaps we will also complete a journal entry (Objective #5) on what they have learned this week.

Oh, my new Birds and Bloom magazine just arrived in the mail, perfect timing.  It will have to wait until after dinner is served! 

Our family is continuing to be blessed by incoporating regular nature observation into our lives!  I encourage you to participate with Barb at The Heart of Harmony.

For our assignment this week, Moms were to read pages 16-17 from the Handbook of Nature Study.  These sections were about the correlation between nature study and language arts and drawing.  My favorite quotes from these sections would be:

“Nature study should be so much a part of the child’s thought and interest that it will naturally form a thought core for other subjects quite unconsciously on his part.”

“Too much have we emphasized drawing as an art; it may be an art, if the one who draw is an artist; but if he is not an artist, he still has a right to draw if it pleases him to do so.  We might as well declare that a child should not speak unless he put his words into poetry, as to declare that he should not draw because his drawings are not artistic.”

Also for this week’s assignment we were to take another nature walk and continue to observe nature with our senses.  We decided to take our nature walk on Sunday because the weather forecast for the rest of the week here was very dismal indeed.  Because of going on the weekend, we were blessed to have my “nature lovin” Dad and Aunt join us on our outing.  This time we decided to venture out from our backyard and to a local park.  So after church, we had a lovely lunch together, and then set out on our journey.

The park that we visited is also an arboretum, so we had lots of fun walking the beautiful wooded nature trails and identifying lots and lots of trees.  Two trees that we identified for further study this week were:

Contorted Filbert

(also known as Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick or Corkscrew Hazelnut)

The kids were interested in this one because of it’s twisty vines and neat seeds.

Honeylocust

Grandpa had tales from when he was younger and would accidently step on the thorns and they would make him sick (ouch)!  Hannah was very interested in the big seed pods.

We had lots of fun listening to the sounds of lots of birds singing such as the Red-Winged Blackbird.  We saw a bunch of them strutting their stuff around a wetland area.  We read in the HNS about how the males return three weeks earlier than the females in the springtime, which explains why they were all males that we saw in the flock.  The kids giggled that they must be preparing themselves to show off for the females when they come.

As we walked along the trail Alex took special notice of lots of old nests from last year.  He wanted so badly to grab one off a tree to take home, but I informed him that birds will sometimes re-use them the next year.  But, he finally got his wish when he found one that had fallen out of the tree.

Along the trail we noticed lots of very large nesting boxes hung in the trees which Grandpa said were probably for Wood Ducks.  Also along the trail we observed many signs of Spring, which was of particular interest to me!

Emerging Daffodils

Tiny Buds

Hannah found a wild violet, of which we brought a small piece home and are currently trying to identify.  We think it may be a Long-Spurred Violet.

You may also notice in the cup that she found an uprooted young Crocus bulb that we are going to try to sprout.

Today both kids decided to do a nature journal entry of the part of our adventure that they enjoyed the most.

Alex drew a picture of a bird’s nest.

Hannah journaled about the Contorted Filbert tree.

This morning was the last “sneak peek of Spring” for a while, so I allowed the kids to start bookwork a little later in the day.  They enjoyed making their own bird nests.  Hannah made hers out of moss and mud, and Alex, well he used any natural material he could find!

Ahh, such peace and quiet.

We had SUCH a wonderful nature walk today around our backyard.  The assignments this week were:

1.  Read page 15 in the Handbook of Nature Study (The Field Excursion); and pages 23-24 (How to Use This Book).  There is a online version of the handbook now available free here.  My favorite quote from this sections that I read was the following (in relation to the teacher asking too many questions to the students during a nature lesson, and not allowing for enough time for them to be naturally inquisitive):

“To grind out answers to questions about any natural object is not nature-study, it is simply “grind,” a form of mental activity which is of greater use when applied to spelling or the mulitiplication table than to the study of nature.  The best teacher will cover the points suggested for observations with a few direct questions.”

2.  We were to take a 10-15 minute nature walk and focus on being quiet and listening to the sounds, feeling the feelings, and seeing the sights of nature.  The kids were so excited that Mom was actually outside with them in this snow, they couldn’t wait to get going!

Here are pictures of some of the things we observed:

Trickling Creek

Perfect Little Acorn

Turkey Tracks and Squirrel Tracks (right beside each other)

Here is our list of what we observed with our sight:  creek, animal footprints, birds in trees, moss on bank of creek, squirrel in tree, acorn, holes in snow where water was dripping from trees.

Here is our list of what we observed with our hearing:  creek trickling, birds chirping, church bells in the distance (playing “What a Friend we Have in Jesus”), snow crunching, melting snow dripping.

Here is our list of what we observed with our “feelings”:  cool still air (40 degrees, no wind), cold wet snow, crunching of snow beneath our feet, and wet soggy twigs.

3)  After our walk we brainstormed words to describe all of the items we observed.  The kids had to list one word describing something they heard:  Drip-drop; two words for something they saw:  pretty bird; and three words to describe something they felt:  crunchy wet snow.

4) Hannah and I decided to complete a nature journal entry for our day.

 Hannah’s colored pencil drawing using the descriptive words we brainstormed

Mom’s pen and ink with colored pencil accent drawing of an “Old Oak Tree in Winter”

This was such a wonderful teaching experience to have with the kids.  I can’t wait for the next assignment!  HAPPY NATURE ADVENTURES!!  And may there be “No Child Left Inside”.