October 2012: Trees – Year Round This month the newsletter and Friday challenges will center on a focused study of trees. Trees are a terrific topic of nature study no matter the season….there is always something interesting to observe.
This edition of the newsletter contains loads of ideas to get you started and make it fun for your family.
October Grid Study and Bookmark with the tree theme.
Two tree study notebook pages
Special nature journal idea
Book review and study plan
Three articles from contributing writers
Show and tell photos from fellow Outdoor Hour Challenge participants
Short list of my favorite tree related links
Explanation of how the Outdoor Hour Challenge works (reprint from last month for new readers)
I have attached the newsletter download link to the bottom of my blog feed so if you are a subscriber you will receive the link to the latest newsletter at the bottom of every post for the month of October. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can still subscribe and receive the newsletter link in the next post that comes to your email box. You can subscribe to my blog by filling in your email address in the subscription box on my sidebar.
Note: You can download your newsletter from the link in two ways:
If your link is clickable, right click the link and then “save link as” to save the file on your computer.
If the link is not clickable, cut and paste the link to your browser, open, and then save your newsletter to your computer.
So how has your month gone with the Outdoor Hour Challenge focus on insects using the newsletter and weekly ideas? Our family has enjoyed the easy way we can incorporate nature study into a very busy high school week. I love having a month long focus.
Would you like an example of how one family used the Insect Study Grid, the Insect Study notebook page, and the small square study this month? Get ready to see how simple it was and how successful they were in their efforts!
Sarah from Granwood Explorers shares their entry: Outdoor Hour-Focusing on Insects. What an excellent month they had and what a great example for the rest of us!
Get ready for one fully loaded blog carnival! What a great month of nature study from all over the world!
Andrea at the Loopy Homeschooler shares their ant study with the carnival. They were actually able to identify their ants and her daughter created an awesome nature journal entry using the Insect Study notebook page from the ant challenge. Read all about it: Outdoor Hour Challenge #3.
Leah from The Making of a Mom has joined the OHC carnival for the very first time! She submits this entry: Nature Study Co-Op September (Ants) for us all to read. What a lot of happy faces and so many interesting discoveries! I really enjoyed reading about their co-op and so will you.
Shirley Ann from Under An English Sky submits their Insect Grid Study. She says, “My youngest has decided that she prefers the notebooking pages to keeping a journal, so she used her grid as a notebooking page, adding some finds to the back of the page.” It is wonderful to see families adapting the OHC to fit their style of learning. You don’t want to miss her awesome images of colored insects in this post as well.
Tricia from Hodgepodge shares How Summer Nature Study Complements High School Biology. What a wonderful entry for the carnival! Tricia shows how they have been looking for insects and pulling in their high school biology work to make a wonderful mix of fun and learning.
Bugs, Insects, Butterflies, and Creepy Crawlies-Oh My! from Cristy at Crafty Cristy documents their insect study so far using the Insect Grid Study and Insect List found in the newsletter. I learned a few things about cicadas in her entry and they are definitely learning a lot this month about insects. They have also shared their September Insect List for you to view along with images.
Rachel from All Things Bright and Beautiful has put together their month long study of insects into a gorgeous entry with images you will want your kids to see: Buggy Bugs. Which image is your favorite?
Fall Insect Walk! Angie from Petra School has submitted this wonderful example of a fall insect walk with her boys. I always appreciate their casual in-their-own-backyard nature study time and Angie’s images really tell the story. Angie and her boys would like to also share their Queen Anne’s Lace entry with carnival readers. They were able to incorporate some insect observations along with their QAL time…don’t miss the grasshopper image in their entry!
Outdoor Hour Challenge #22 is where Catherine from Grace to Abide decided to start their insect study. They were able to identify a few of their butterfly finds from a local park and then they visited a butterfly garden. I agree with her…butterfly gardens are magical!
Virginia from Livin’ Lovin’ and Learnin’ shares their entry The Grid-Sept 2012 Insects showing how their family of children of all ages has enjoyed this month’s focus. Another magnificent grasshopper photo in this entry! They also completed a study of a specific insect, the Illia Underwing Moth. What a beautiful creation to observe up close. One last entry from this family….Golden Ponds Nature Walk. They found many interesting and seasonal subjects to enjoy and share with all of you. Thanks for a glimpse into your nature study this month.
Carol shares their September Nature Notebook entry with the carnival this time around. They live in Australia where it is spring and everything is coming alive. Check out their really big stick insect! She also shares some wonderful images of other creatures they have observed this month including a Eastern water dragon!
Jenny Anne from Royal Little Lambs shares their Creepy Crawlies entry with the carnival. It must be the season for grasshoppers!
Heidi from Home Schoolroom has written up their Focusing on Insects and Spiders entry for you to enjoy. They incorporated the ideas from the newsletter and OHC Challenge #4 – Finding a Focus to continue a month long study of insects and spiders. Perfect!
Nadene from Practical Pages has submitted a round-up of their September insect studies using the newsletter and challenge ideas: Nature Study and OHC September. You are in for a treat because she shares their very well done nature journals to inspire you and your children.
Lauren from Serving From Home has written up their monthly nature study entry: Our September Nature Studies-Insects and Apples. They have done a great job this month with their observations, outdoor time, and nature journals. What an encouraging entry!
Nicole from Journey to Excellence shares their month of nature study. You are welcome to read their Small Square Study and their Insect Grid experiences. She also found a pretty white plant that she thought was Queen Anne’s Lace but it turned out not to be: Queen Anne’s Lace. She would appreciate some help in identifying her mystery plant.
Sara from Garner Goings On shares their entry Saying Goodbye to Swallowtails and Cicadas for carnival readers. Check out her beautiful images and the final video of a swallowtail emerging from its chrysalis. Potpourri
Carey Jane Clark who blogs at enCouragement joins the carnival this month with her entry: Our Nature Study Backpack. She shares how they are using the newsletter study grid and a well prepared backpack to aid their nature study in China.
Michelle from Following the Footprints submits their very first two Outdoor Hour Challenges: Challenge #1 and Challenge #2. I think this quote from one of her entries sums her experience up well, “I felt so empowered by my success in identifying two plants that it changed the way I looked at nature for the rest of the week. All of a sudden, I was looking at trees in parking lots and across the street wondering what those trees were. I saw a beautiful brown and black bird in my backyard and I wondered what that was. And I am so excited to find out! Such a change in me in so little time!”
Kim from A Child’s Garden shares their unexpected nature study: Puffballs! She does a great job of explaining what they are and her images are interesting too.
Michelle has also submitted their Outdoor Hour Challenge #3 for you to read. They are humming right along with their family nature study, and this time it is in their very own backyard! One last entry from this enthusiastic family: Outdoor Hour Challenge #4. So many things to like about this entry and I think they accomplished Challenge #4 very well with their feather collections in the nature journals.
Ann from Harvest Moon By Hand has put together their Hummingbirds-Outdoor Hour Challenge entry for you to enjoy. Take a look at their Minnesota hummingbird study and be inspired! They were also able to complete their Red Birds Challenge from the Handbook of Nature Study. Ann says, “It was as if the birds that had red on them knew we were learning about them today. Such an inspiring and uplifting afternoon!” What a treat!
Makita from Academia Celestia shares their Exploring the Redwoods study with the carnival. They were able to observe two different groves of redwoods here in California and follow up with additional reading and journals. They also had some unexpected insect study: Looking for Birds, We Discovered Caterpillars. Read their Water Quality Monitoring entry to learn more about their participation in worthwhile citizen science projects.
Don’t forget to share your blog entries with the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. All entries done in October are eligible for the next edition. The deadline for entries is 10/30/12 and you can send them directly to me: harmonyfinearts@yahoo.com or submit them at the blog carnival site (link on the sidebar of my blog).
I love this little board book so much that it gets its own entry on my blog. 🙂
The Icky Bug Alphabet bookis a great way to introduce your little ones to insects without overwhelming them. This book has clear illustrations with simple text that will appeal to even young school age children.
Insects can be a little creepy and scary to some young ones so perhaps having a book that presents them in a non-threatening way they will avoid the apprehension that many of us have about creeping and flying insects.
In fact, I love this book so much that I am going to give one away! Please see the Rafflecopter gadget in this entry for more details. Act fast because the giveaway will end on October 1, 2012 at Midnight!
Please note that the giveaway is only open to US residents and I cannot ship outside the US. See the Rafflecopter gadget for the complete terms and conditions.
If you don’t have Queen Anne’s Lace to study, try the Getting Started suggestion in this post.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
This week’s Outdoor Hour Challenge is from the Archives and the beginning of a potential year-long study of Queen Anne’s Lace. Please see the following Autumn Queen Anne’s Lace challenge for suggested activities to get your started. This is a study that you can repeat in every season for a complete year to see the life cycle of this interesting plant. Here are the past resources for Queen Anne’s Lace.
Please Note:
If you are interested in connecting your insect study and your study of Queen Anne’s Lace, do some careful observations of your plant for signs of insects. Follow up your outdoor time with some time spent identifying your insects.
“Children should be encouraged to make notes about the same plants or birds for several consecutive years. Each year will bring some new things to their notice and a fuller knowledge of the ways and habits of their subject.” The Charm of Nature Study, 1930
Printable Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is another notebook page. Make four copies and use one in each of the up-coming seasons to record your Queen Anne’s Lace observations. Seasonal Observations Queen Anne’s Lace – Use this notebook page in each of the four seasons to record you careful observations. Use the suggestions in the challenges listed above to guide your study.
Getting Started Suggestion:
You can complete Challenge #2 Using Your Words and the accompanying notebook page if you have the ebook. This would be especially helpful if you do not have any Queen Anne’s Lace to observe.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
How about a Small Square Study this week? Use the directions from Challenge #9 to complete your own careful study of a square foot in your backyard or neighborhood. Look for signs of insects as you observe your square with a hand lens. Use the printable notebook page below to record your nature study or make a record in your nature journal using words and sketches.
Printable Activity Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is a free printable notebook page to go along with your square foot study.
Small Square Study – Living vs. Non-Living: As you complete your small square study, categorize the objects you find between living (or once living) and non-living. There is a place to list your items and sketch them too.
Getting Started Suggestion:
This week the challenge comes from the Getting Started ebook (Challenge #9). If you own the ebook, there are custom notebook pages to print to go along with this study.
“The teacher of nature study, like the teacher of any subject, will deny himself much if he does not go to the literature of the subject for help in his work. But there is an especial danger in such help on this subject. So soon as one takes to the book instead of to nature for questions that nature could easily answer, he loses the spirit of the work. One must be careful, therefore, to ask many questions of things themselves under the open sky, and to read with patience in nature’s book.” The Study of Nature by Samuel C. Schmucker 1908
Using the Handbook of Nature Study monthly grid study activities helps us to “read with patience in nature’s book”.
Almost every single task gets us outside with a little bit of focus but yet it is open ended. All ages can participate.
We never feel inclined to complete the whole grid at once but we read the tasks ahead of time just in case while we are going about our regular daily business we see something that relates to the grid study.
I also love that it makes a quick and easy start to a nature journal page where we can record some of our observations.
I printed our Insect Study Grids out in black and white, adding watercolor to jazz it up a bit.
So have you been able to use the grid to help your study of insects this month? I encourage you to give it a try and enjoy this relaxed form of nature study.
White-breasted nuthatch doing his upside down thing.
Scrub jay taking a bath in the lawn sprinklers.
We have had a busy week around the birdfeeders which always makes me happy. The birds are enjoying our yard, partaking in the plums, the sunflower seeds, the walnuts, the birdbaths, the sprinklers, and the various feeders. I sometimes get very distracted….especially when I pull the camera out and try to capture a few images.
We all love watching them and hearing their songs as we go about our day.
So far today, I have heard quite a few birds: American crow, California quail, Western scrub jay, White-breasted nuthatch, House finches, Anna’s hummingbirds, and our little titmouse.
The sunflowers are still going strong and my very first zinnia from the transplants my dad sent over is blooming! There is a whole row of zinnias just about to burst out in color! Doesn’t it make you happy to have colorful flowers in your garden?
I have to admit the garden is beginning to feel like autumn is coming…I have a bunch of clean up to do around the various boxes but it is still too warm to do it in the afternoon. I like to go out early and get it done while everything is still in the shade. No hurry though. Autumn will be here before we know it (matter of days!).
I managed to squeeze in another Tuesday Garden Party entry this year….
Jami’s Tuesday Garden Party meme is open from Tuesday to Thursday so there is still time for you to jump in and participate!
I finally remembered where I had seen lots of ants….on our backyard trumpet vines. This morning I had a chance to go out with Mr. A and take a closer look armed with our cameras and a desire to learn more.
After watching the ants for a few minutes, I realized they were not the only insect enjoying this colorful vine. The honeybees were buzzing right at ear level and even though I knew they were not interested much in me, I felt the need to keep getting out of their way. They were very active and in the photo above you can see there would be multiple bees in one flower. This one had four!
After coming back inside, we did some research online to reveal why the ants are on the trumpet vine. There seems to be two lines of thinking:
1. The ants are farming aphids that also live on the trumpet vine.
2. The ants are actually partaking of the nectar found in the trumpet vine blossom.
This led to more outdoor time trying to discover which it was in our case.They definitely were interested in the flowers so I think our ants were after the nectar of the flowers.
According to the USDA, the trumpet vine is a habitat to the hummingbird, the butterfly, and the ant. I thought it was interesting that the USDA also considers the trumpet vine to be an “invasive weed”. We have had trouble with it sending out its sucker roots and coming up in the lawn but we just keep mowing them down.
Of course, Kona needed a little attention when we were out looking for ants. Smile Kona!
We ended up walking around the garden and ticking off a few of our insect grid tasks…and finding two surprising insects which I will save for my grid study entry next week. I love the way we start off looking for something as simple as an ant, find ourselves asking a question that we answer with more research, investigate some more about a plant we have in our backyard, and end up really enjoy our time together. Although we had a focus in mind when we went outside, the nature study part was very relaxed and natural.
Right in our own backyard.
I am going to record the insects we saw on my insect list from the monthly newsletter, make a nature journal entry for the trumpet vine since we did all the research, and mark off several of the squares on our insect grid.
Hope you are enjoying your monthly focus on insects this month and don’t forget to send in your blog entries for the carnival.
This has been the summer that I have become the relaxed gardener. I haven’t done much but water and pick flowers. Have I missed the garden fussing? Honestly? Not at all…and it made me realize something that had not occurred to me before.
We have not been without summer veggies and it made some friends and my dad happy to share.
We have had an abundance!
My dad shared his tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, green beans, okra, strawberries, and eggplant.
My dad has quite the garden going this year and it is fun just to peek in and see what he has growing and of course pick a few things to bring home for our dining pleasure. I took the photos above earlier this morning as we toured his garden boxes together.
Apples, walnuts, figs, and grapes are all ready to eat or almost ready.
We do have lots of fruit ready or almost ready to eat. I decided relaxed gardeners can plant fruit trees and then wait ten or fifteen years and enjoy the yummy harvest almost labor free. We trim and water our trees but they pretty much take care of themselves for the better part of the year. The trick is to plant things that you like to eat, make sure they are planted in the right spot, and then harvest as soon as you see the fruit getting ripe….before birds and critters find them.
Of course we have created a garden and spaces for things besides edibles for humans….we feed a variety of creatures who happen to dwell in, under, above, and around our garden.
Birds continue to be our nature study subject of choice at this time of the summer. Our list from last month of feeder birds included: Western scrub jays, House finches, Lesser goldfinches, White-breasted nuthatches, Anna’s hummingbirds, Mourning doves, Oak titmouse, and Black-headed grosbeaks.
This video from Cornell University was in my inbox this week…it made me anxious for the annual Project Feederwatch that many of us participate in starting in November. (It also reminded me of my awesome trip to Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology last spring….which I didn’t ever blog about!) I found this video very interesting and it tells about how researchers are using common tracking technology to answer big questions about feeder birds: Tracking Backyard Birds.
This may be my last official Tuesday Garden Party entry for the season. The summer has gone by so very fast but each time I post something garden related it makes me happy. Maybe next year will be more of a gardening year for me or I may just glean my summer veggies from friends and family again.
Jami’s Tuesday Garden Party meme is open from Tuesday to Thursday so there is still time for you to jump in and participate!
Here are some additional clarifications about the Outdoor Hour Challenge, the blog carnival, and the newsletter.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
You can complete your nature study on any day of the week.
Even though we call it the Outdoor Hour Challenge, it does not need to be a complete hour of nature study. I actually encourage shorter, more frequent sessions during your week.
There are suggested notebook pages with each challenge but you can just as easily use a blank nature journal and create your own record of your Outdoor Hour Challenge. The notebook pages are not required.
Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival:
This is a monthly carnival for participants of the Outdoor Hour Challenge and not a general nature study blog carnival.
Suggested topics are in the monthly newsletter but you are welcome to submit any blog entry showing how you completed any of the Outdoor Hour Challenges from the very first one to the current one.
You may also submit blog entries showing how you using the Outdoor Hour Challenge newsletter activities like the study grid, nature journal suggestions, and other printables.
Blog entries written in the current month are eligible. (No posts from your archives are eligible.)
Monthly Study Grid from the Newsletter:
There are four topics suggested in the monthly newsletter study grid. Generally they will be offered each Friday during the month in this order: Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left, Bottom Right. For those of you who plan on sticking with the order offered on the blog that should help you out.
You are welcome to complete the topics in any order that makes sense to your family. As explained in the instructions, you can come back and complete a challenge as the opportunity arises even months later and then submit the entry to the blog carnival at that time.
In months where there are five Fridays, I will consider the last Friday as a “catch up” day and there will be no new ideas presented. You can choose to do any challenge that fits your area and interest.
Remember we are starting with a fresh outlook on nature study with this new format for the Outdoor Hour Challenge. I know many of you are determined to make nature study a regular part of your homeschool week or month and that is so very encouraging to me personally. Don’t be discouraged if your first attempts as getting outdoors are not picture perfect. Just getting the kids outside is the first step. Hopefully over time, as you gain confidence, it will get easier. Email me with any comments or questions and I will try to help as much as I can with encouragement and advice.
Have a great week looking for insects! We have already had trouble finding some ant subjects but we did have encountered some lacewings, moths, and butterflies. I think we will start some notebook pages with those insects and then keep our eyes out for some ants to observe.
is a great way to introduce your little ones to insects without overwhelming them. This book has clear illustrations with simple text that will appeal to even young school age children.
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