We have quite a list of subjects from out Field Notebook Listto study over the next month or so. The last Autumn Series Challenge was a great way to wind up our autumn nature study and the reading reminded me of some important thoughts from Anna Botsford Comstock.
Here is our narrowed down list:
1. Wild geese – We have never studied the Canadian Geese that fly overhead and make their home in the pond and lake near-by. (section in the Handbook of Nature Study)
2. Sequoia tree – We have a sequoia tree in our yard and we have never done a complete study of it and it is high time we do so. (not in the Handbook of Nature Study)
3. Ferns -we know of at least two different ferns on our walking trail and we would like to identify and then sketch them into our nature journals. (included in the HNS)
4. Mullein – We allowed our mullein to grow in the flower bed this summer and it is very, very tall. In fact, it is still blooming in November! It will be interesting to use the Handbook of Nature Study to learn more about this plant that grows naturally in our backyard.
I think that should give us ample material to fill in on those days we cannot go outdoors for our nature study.
I thought with this last of the Autumn Series Challenges we could go back to the basics. Similar to Outdoor Hour Challenge #1, you will be reading a section of the introductory pages to the Handbook of Nature Study to refresh your minds about the basic ideas of nature study.
Keep a running list on a Field Notebook List of any topics for additional nature study during the winter months. When winter weather has set in and you are not able to go outdoors or your children are just getting over the flu, you don’t want to take them outdoors. Pull out the list you made in this challenge and take the opportunity to research and study something from your list.
I did this winter work last year with my wildflower photos. I spent cold winter evenings with my photos, my nature journal, and a field guide completing journal entries from the summer before. What an enjoyable experience!
Outdoor Hour Challenge Autumn Series #10
Field Notebook List
Inside Preparation
Read pages 1-8 of the Handbook of Nature Study. Even if you have read it recently, skim through it again to refresh your mind and heart.
“It is rejuvenation for the teacher, thus growing old, to stand ignorant as a child in the presence of one of the simplest of nature’s miracles-the formation of a crystal, the evolution of the butterfly from the caterpillar, the exquisite adjustment of the silken lines in the spider’s orb web.”
Handbook of Nature Study, page 4
Outdoor Time
Spend your 10 to 15 minutes of outdoor time exploring your own backyard or the street you live on. Follow your child’s lead and try to see your yard through their eyes. You might like to take along this week’s Field Notebook List notebook pageon a clipboard and record any items of interest you find. Remember that you are not going to try to research and study everything on your list this week, but you will keep the list for future indoor nature study times over the coming winter.
Follow-Up Time
If you filled in your notebook page during your Outdoor Time, pick something from the list to discuss with your child. Do they need help identifying the object? Would they like to complete a nature journal entry for the object? Remember my formula for a simple journal entry is to make a simple sketch, a label, and a date.
Now would be the time to record your list if you did not do so during your Outdoor Time. Keep it simple and fun. If your child can only think of one thing to put on the list, do it with enthusiasm. Most children will be able to think of at least two or three things to record and one of those things can be this week’s subject for nature study. Remember the most important part of any challenge is to get outside and everything else is just icing on the cake.
“But if the child chooses the material, the subject will lack continuity: what then?
Nature is not consecutive except in her periods. She puts things together in a mosaic. She has a brook and plants and toads and insects and the weather all together. Because we have put the plants in one book, the brooks in another, and the bugs in another, we have come to think that this divorce is the logical and necessary order.
If all the things mentioned above are taught, then the life of the brook will be the thread that ties them all together. It is well to introduce the pupil to a wide range of material, in order to increase his points of contact with the world.”
Liberty Hyde Bailey
I think there is a lot of wisdom in the above words written by Liberty H. Bailey in The Nature-Study Idea (1909).
He gives us two illustrations in order to understand the connective idea of nature study led by our children.
The first is a mosaic where the pieces are fit together to make a beautiful image.
The second is a thread, weaving our study together within some focus area.
What a wonderful way to remind ourselves of the way our children will build a love for the natural world and its Creator.
This old book can be found at Google Books: The Nature Study Idea by L.H. Bailey. Sidenote: Anna Botsford Comstock dedicated the Handbook of Nature Study to Liberty Hyde Bailey which I found very interesting.
We haven’t had much of a chance to study mushrooms up close in the last few weeks but we did over our summer break. Our trip to Oregon gave us plenty to look at and identify. Identifying mushrooms is really a difficult task.
As part of our biology course, we studied the mushroom’s life cycle and my boys made nature journal entries using some of the photos we had collected of mushrooms in our area.
“Fungi, as a whole, are a great boon to the world. Without them our forests would be choked out with dead wood. Decay is simply the process by which fungi and other organisms break down dead material, so that the major part of it returns to the air in gaseous form, and the remainder, now mostly humus, mingles with the soil.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 715
I think if that is the only thing we learn about fungus/mushrooms from our study we will have accomplished a greater understanding of how the forest ecosystem works. There is great beauty in these living things and a wonderful purpose to their creation.
Our mushroom season will soon be upon us and we will be out and enjoying a whole array of fungus to observe. We will be using the diagram on page 717 to categorize the mushrooms we see as we go along. I am totally inspired by Casey’s study: Extraordinary World: Mushrooms.
Here is a set of our mushroom photos from the last year that I gathered on Flickr if you would like to see what we have in our area of California: Mushrooms
Mushrooms! Fungus! Molds! Ask my children and they will tell you that I am fascinated with these things when we find them during our outdoor time. They even call me very affectionately the “Fungus Lady”.
I found this video during our last study of mushrooms and I would love for you to watch it in order to prepare you for your study of mushrooms. This video is very well done and will help your children understand how a mushroom grows.
You will need to click over to YouTube.com to view this video. Please note: Turn down the sound if the music is too much for you. As always, please preview the video on YouTube and I do not endorse any other video that may come up after this one. There are some questionable videos about mushrooms.
If you do not think you will observe any mushrooms during your Outdoor Time, you can still complete the Inside Preparation work as a way to be ready the next time you do see a mushroom.
Outdoor Hour Challenge
Autumn Series #9 Mushrooms
(See Also Challenge #41)
Inside Preparation Work
Mushrooms and Other Fungi-read the overview starting on page 714 and continuing to page 719. Page 719 shows the parts of a mushroom with labels.
Outdoor Hour Time The ideal study of ferns, mushrooms, and fungi would be to experience them outdoors in their natural habitat. Use your 15 to 20 minutes of outdoor time this week to enjoy a search for some kind of mushroom. Your particular area may not have these subjects readily at hand but let your friends, family, and neighbors know that you are studying mushrooms and with more pairs of eyes looking you may be able to find something to study up close.
Enjoy your time outdoors whether you can find this week’s subject or not. Remember to look at the sky and comment on the weather. Take time to notice your tree from your year long tree study. Collect a few items to take inside to sketch into your nature journal. Just because the topic of this challenge is mushrooms, you do not have to limit yourself to that narrow focus during your 15 to 20 minutes of outdoor time.
Follow-Up Activity
Spend a few minutes once inside to discuss your experiences from your nature walk.Are there questions that need to be answered or items that need to be identified? Make a note of any topics that come up that you can research further in the Handbook of Nature Study or at your local library.
Make an opportunity for a nature journal entry. The diagrams on pages 695 and 719 could be sketched into the nature journal. I have created a notebook page for you to use in your nature journal to record your mushroom observations and it is listed in the free downloads section of the sidebar of my blog.
“Since mushrooms are especially good subjects for watercolor and pencil studies, it would add much to the interest of the work if each pupil, or the school as a whole, should make a portfolio of sketches of all the species found. With each drawing there should be made on a supplementary sheet a spore print of the species.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 718
Spore prints are another idea for an activity following up the mushroom study. I would only do this activity with older students who truly understand that mushrooms can be poisonous.
Here are some instructions you can download: Mushroom Spore Prints or this blog entry.
You can use the provided notebook page to sketch a mushroom that you observed during your Outdoor Time or you can use it to copy the sketch from page 719 in the Handbook of Nature Study, labeling the different parts of a mushroom.
We decided that woodpeckers are very beautiful birds. The two kinds we see most frequently are Acorn woodpeckers and White-Headed woodpeckers and although they are mostly black and white, they are truly lovely to look at.
“The clown-faced Acorn Woodpecker is a common bird of western oak forests. It lives in extended family groups, and all members of the group spend hours and hours storing thousands of acorns in carefully tended holes in trees and telephone poles.”
This tree is at my dad’s house and it has about a zillion holes in it from woodpeckers. He is plagued with woodpeckers pecking on the side of his house.
I found this old nature journal entry made for our backyard woodpecker….makes me smile.
We don’t have as much variety in our feeders or yard at this time of the year. The bird variety picks up as the winter marches on and by the time of the Great Backyard Bird Count, we are in full swing.
No woodpecker sightings this week but we enjoyed watching the birds we did have in our yard.
We have a beautiful walnut tree in our backyard and it has always given us an abundance of nuts each autumn. The photo shown here is from a few years ago and shows part of our walnut harvest. Around this time of year, we are usually gathering oodles of nuts to dry and crack to eat and save for our baking.
Not this year.
Grey squirrels came and ate every last nut in our crop. Climbing into the tree, they would pick the nuts wrapped in their green outer coats, strip the casings off, and then proceed to crack the shells to get to the meat.
Piles and piles of shells and green casings dropped to the ground, littering the sidewalk and garden below. I thought surely they couldn’t eat them all, but they did.
I have mixed feelings about the whole situation. On one hand, I love having the furry little guys in my yard and away from my birdfeeders. On the other hand, I would have liked to have had a few nuts in my pantry for cookies and muffins and salads. This autumn will be known as the year with no nuts.
Our front yard also has a squirrel that visits quite frequently. It is a different variety of squirrel and he is FAST.
(I shared this photo a few weeks ago during our tree study…we think it is a Fox Squirrel.)
He is busy eating the seeds from the tulip tree.
Look at those feet! No wonder they can climb and jump like they do!
He nibbles and then scurries off down the street, as if he has a regular route he takes to dine at various spots in the neighborhood.
He is fun to watch as he bounds down the street and up onto the neighbor’s narrow fence top. My son, who does a lot of his schoolwork in the living room at the table by the window, calls my attention to our resident squirrel all the time. We are getting to know him quite well this year.
The other day as I was driving down a fairly busy street in town, a squirrel decided to run out in front of me. I know from experience that they usually dart out of the way at the last minute and I try not to get too excited. This one seemed to look me in the eye as he sat in my lane of traffic, a crazy game of chicken. Starting to move, he zigged and zagged a little in front of me and stood still again as I got closer. I slowed a bit and started coaching him to “Get out of the way!” At the last possible moment, he ran off to the side of the road and quickly up a tree. Why do they do that?
For the most part, we enjoy our neighborhood squirrels and find a great deal of entertainment value in this rodent. Our favorite squirrel actually walks the telephone line at a busy intersection in town. We see him probably once a week doing his tight-rope act, defying gravity and giving us something to be in awe about with this little one of God’s creation.
Here is our link to our previous squirrel study if you would like to read that one: Squirrel Study
Watch this video to see another common squirrel in our area…the California Ground Squirrel. This video was taken last spring on a hike we took not too far from our home.
We had a perfect morning for a weather study as part of the Outdoor Hour Challenge Autumn Series. The air was cold, the wind was blowing, and the leaves were raining down all around us. It *felt* like autumn. Note: This morning it was 38 degrees outside..that is cold.
There are still loads of leaves left on the sweet gum trees but as of this morning, the fall color is breaking through. Reds, oranges, burgundy, and every shade in between are all popping out on the trees.
Still a few insect friends in the flower garden…..look at his wings in the sun. Gorgeous and amazing. I think this is some kind of hoover fly.
We came back in to warm up with a bowl of soup and then our weather notebook pages were filled in and filed away in our nature journals.
I love having a specific subject for our nature study….it motivates me to spend time with the boys outdoors each week. Don’t let anyone tell you that high school age boys do not enjoy nature study.
The challenge this week is one that can be done by every participant without regard to location.
This week we will start a year long, four season weather observation study. This challenge will be to make a record of your weather during the current season. I have put together a simple Seasonal Weather Notebook Page. You can use it for your records or you can simply record the information in your a nature journal.
Read pages 790-791 in the Handbook of Nature Study which includes the sections on Thermometer Scales in Use and Distribution of the Temperature and Pressure. Read the sections with a view to finding a few facts to share with your children this week about what influences the temperature and the atmosphere around us.
“The heat received on the earth from the sun is the controlling factor in all weather conditions.”Handbook of Nature Study, page 791
It might even be a good idea to purchase an outdoor thermometer so you can record the temperatures in your own backyard.
Outdoor Time
Pick a day this week to spend 15-20 minutes outdoors observing the weather and recording the conditions using the Seasonal Weather Study notebook page. We will be completing a weather study challenge during each season in the coming year and the more detailed you get in your observations, the easier it will be to compare the weather from season to season.
Follow-Up Activity
Spend a few minutes discussing what you experienced with your children. Find out if they have any questions about the weather that you can research together this week. The Handbook of Nature Study on pages 812-814 lists numerous specific weather related activities that will help demonstrate weather concepts for your children. Please complete any of the activities that interest your family and that you have time to complete. For your nature journal this week, fill out the Seasonal Weather Observation notebook page. If you prefer to record you observations into your nature journal and not on a notebook page, look to the sample blank chart on page 807 of the Handbook of Nature Study for a basic record keeping idea.
“Let us make it a daily habit to give a thought to weather conditions; the wind directions; the presence or absence of dew during the hours of evening, night, or early morning; and the readings of the barometer, thermometer, and the weather maps if any are available.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 806
