This morning I was out in the yard for morning rounds and I noticed how many blackberries we are going to have on the vines. There are so many blossoms and when you examine the plant closely, there are tiny little berries forming already. I am in a constant battle with the blackberry vines in both my front and back yards. If left to grow, they would soon take over all the corners. We have worked for years to manage these creeping vines and I have come to accept that we will have few here and there and I will just be at peace with their beauty and their fruit. I love picking a handful of sweet berries as I roam around the yard.
There is no information on blackberries in the Handbook of Nature Study so I will need to pull out another gardening book that I have to learn more about them.
Do you see the little green berries starting there? So delicate and beautiful….and it holds the promise of a sweet treat in a few months.
Along the base of our foundation we always have sweet peas plant themselves and grow up among the bushes that border our house. This year they are pink. “The sweet pea has some of its leaflets changed to tendrils which hold it to the trellis. Its flower is like that of the clover, the upper petal forming the banner, the two side petals the wings, and the two united lower petals the keel which protects the stamens and pistil.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 589
You can clearly see all the parts of the sweet pea as described in the Handbook of Nature Study. I think we will use this flower for our Green Hour Challenge this week and try to draw it in our nature journals.
Can you believe how pretty these are? Such a pretty shade of pink.
If you have sweet peas in your neighborhood, you can use pages 588-590 to learn more about the sweet pea so you can share a few interesting facts with your children. There are also wonderful observation suggestions that you can use in your nature study.
My beautiful new Disneyland Rose that is blooming like crazy….so pretty.
The dianthus is starting to bloom in the butterfly garden. Heavenly fragrance. (also known as pinks or sweet williams or carnations)
Not technically in my garden but way too cute to leave out. My window cat…can you see the hummingbird feeder outside the window? She is going nuts with the hummers feeding today. And yes, that is a tent outside the window. My boys like to sleep outside as much as possible when the weather is warm enough. Why not?
This is an unidentified insect in Amanda’s garden on her hollyhocks which are already really, really tall. Edit: Someone identified this as a ladybug larva.
I love the color and shape of this leaf. I think this is bee balm but we will have to wait until it blooms since I can’t remember what it is for sure. I planted it two years ago and it hasn’t bloomed yet. Of course it has decided to grow right in among my green beans but we will just let them coexist for now.
I spotted these cute little mushrooms in the flower garden. I need to draw these in my nature journal. 🙂
These sunflowers came up all on their own in my garden box and they are the tallest ones we have so far.
That is just a glimpse into what is going on here in our backyard garden. I love this time of year when we are busy planting and witnessing the awakening of the seeds. It is a miracle each time one sprouts and I try to say a little prayer as I water and weed to thank the Creator of all things for the variety of colors and fragrances He has given us to enjoy here on the earth.
“The making of drawings to illustrate what is observed should be encouraged. A graphic drawing is far better than a long description of a natural object.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 13
As your family makes progress with their nature journals, you will find that there is a desire to start making things look a little more realistic. I thought we would take this week to challenge ourselves to practice drawing flowers with some help with internet tutorials.
Please remember that the nature journal is not the place to give drawing instruction but you could use the tutorials during your art time and then gently remind your children when it comes time for a nature journal that they can incorporate some of their new drawing skills if the opportunity arises.
I would suggest that if you have younger children, take a few minutes to educate yourself first and then share with them little hints as they try to draw garden flowers. This is a perfect opportunity for you to model positive behavior about your own sketches, showing how to make your nature journal an expression of what you found interesting during the Green Hour. If your children are a little older and you are comfortable with them following the tutorials on their own, the link below is perfect for them.
Make sure to bookmark this tutorial page for future reference. You could use the lessons as you progress through the next few weeks during your art or sketching time as a way of learning the techniques of drawing flowers in your nature journal. If you start with this challenge and draw at least one flower in your nature journal every week until the garden focus is over, you will have five flower sketches completed. Wouldn’t that be great? Remember no one else needs to see your drawings….we would love it if you would share but you can keep them private too.
“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.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 13
I guarantee you if you start working in your nature journal, your children will be more comfortable drawing in theirs too.
“As soon as a child is old enough, he should keep his own nature notebook for his enjoyment. Every day’s walk will give something interesting to add-three squirrels playing in a tree, a bluejay flying across a field, a caterpillar crawling up a bush, a snail eating a cabbage leaf, a spider suddenly dropping from a thread to the ground, where he found ivy and how it was growing and what plants were growing with it, and how ivy manages to climb…..The skill of drawing may be addressed in some other way, but not in his nature notebook, that should be for him to fill as he sees fit.” Charlotte Mason volume 1, page 54-55
Outdoor Hour Challenge #15
How to Draw Lesson-Flowers
1. Read pages 13-15 in the Handbook of Nature Study-The Field Notebook. This will refresh your memory about what is the purpose and aim of the nature journal.
“Nature-study offers the best means of bridging the gap that lies between the kindergarten child who makes drawings because he loves to and is impelled to from within, and the pupil in the grades who is obliged to draw what the teacher places before him.”Handbook of Nature Study, page 17
Keep all this information in your mind as you gently go about your nature study time and then encourage journal drawing.
2. Take your 10-15 minute outdoor time to look for some garden flowers that you can draw in your nature journal. The object this week is to find something that sparks your child’s interest and that he desires to record in his journal. If it is a flower, great. If it is something else like a spider or a bird, allow them to draw that instead.
Here are a couple of my favorite how to draw flower books that you will love!
Please note these are Amazon.com affiliate links to products I have used and loved!
3. Give an opportunity for a nature journal entry, work on drawing another garden flower in your nature journal. If you are growing seeds, use this time to record their growth perhaps measuring and recording the plants height or counting the number of leaves it has so far. All of these subjects make great additions to the nature journal.
4. Add any new flowers to your list of garden flowers. If you are making field guide cards for your garden flowers, add another card this week.
5. Add any flowers you collected to your flower press. We have found you can add another sheet of paper and another cardboard sheet to the mix and you will have a multi-layer press. Check on your flowers from last week and see if they are ready to go into your nature journal. See challenge 14 for more information.
This challenge is part of my Garden Flowers ebook. This ebook has ten garden related challenges that will walk you through a study of garden flowers using the Handbook of Nature Study. In addition to the challenges already written, there will be more photos, nature journal examples, book lists, and totally new notebook pages designed to go with each of the Garden Flower Challenges.
This week’s Outdoor Hour Challenge for us was very enjoyable. Our flower garden is just bursting with color and with garden flowers as our focus we decided to read and observe a special kind of flower, the composite.
“Many plants have their flowers set close together and thus make a mass of color, like the geraniums or the clovers. But there are other plants where there are different kinds of flowers in one head, those at the center doing a certain kind of work for the production of seed, and those around the edges doing another kind of work.”
“Can you see that what you call the flower consists of many flowers set together like a beautiful mosaic? Those at the center are called disc flowers; those around the edges ray flowers.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 503
We had a great time studying these flowers and now we are going to be looking closer when we see a new flower to see if we can tell if it is a composite or not.
Here are some of our flowers that we observed.
Close up of a pink gilardia…can you see the anthers?
Yellow gilardias
Tickseed or corepesis
Pin cushion flowers where you can really see the flower parts
Pink cosmos, first one of the season
Close up of the different kinds of flowers making up the composite. Can you see the disc flowers and the ray flowers?
My son’s nature journal entry.
We then put the flowers in our press. I am planning on making a flower calendar to make a record of flowers blooming in our yard for each month of the year. This will be a beautiful way to document our flower study throughout the year by pressing some flowers blooming in each month, pressing them, and then affixing them to card stock with the month neatly labeled on each page. I will share our first month’s page when these are ready to be added.
Another great week in our garden. My son and I both learned something new and enjoyed our time outdoors with a focus and purpose.
We have so many garden flowers blooming right now that it is hard to pick one to draw for our nature journal….too many choices. Not a bad problem but still not enough time to do all that we want to.
Here is my son’s day lily drawing.
Here is my azalea drawing.
We have had fun looking closely at all the flower parts and deciding how each insect is attracted to each particular flower.
That was our formal nature study this week….we have spent parts of every afternoon in the garden watering, weeding, and putting in more seeds and seedlings. Now that the hot weather has hit, we will see them come to life. The sunflowers are growing so fast I think you could sit and watch them get taller.
We will be putting some flowers in the press this week and I will share a fun project that I found to do with them in my next Outdoor Hour post.
Here is an entry from challenge #12 that I wanted to share with you. I love this idea and I am going to be doing it in my garden over the weekend. Chocolate on My Cranium’s Challenge #12 -Focus on Flowers
Make sure to scroll down to the photo with the kids and the wheelbarrow!
This past weekend we took a hike at Yosemite National Park. The ferns were all coming to life and unrolling their new growth. I found the soft greens a delight for the eyes.
“All of the parts of the frond of a fern are tightly folded spirally within the bud and every fold of every leaflet is also folded in a spiral. But the first glance at one of these little woolly spirals gives us but small conception of its marvelous enfolding. Every part of the frond is present in that bud, even to the fruiting organs…” Handbook of Nature Study, page 698 in the section “How a Fern Bud Unfolds”
Here is a look at what the fern looks like after it unfolds. Beautiful.
“The points to be borne in mind are that children like to call things by their names because they are real names, and they also like to use “grownup” names for things; but they do not like to commit to memory names which to them are meaningless.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 456
This challenge will continue our eight week group focus on garden flowers. Please feel free to continue with your own focus if you are in the middle of something your family is enjoying. You can save the garden flower challenges for a future time if you wish.
Our family has found renewed interest in gardening this past week. We continued working on a new section in our butterfly garden and we also planted some new and interesting things in our vegetable garden. Each week I think I know what we will learn or discover with each challenge but then something new comes up and I am pleasantly surprised. There is always something new to learn about.
This week’s challenge seems simple enough and even though we already know the names of the flower parts, I am going to challenge my boys to actually use the correct labels as we spend our time in the garden.
Outdoor Hour Challenge #13
Practicing the Flower Parts
1. Continue with the eight week long focus on garden flowers. Read page 456 in the Handbook of Nature Study-How to Teach the Names of the Parts of a Flower and of the Plant.
“All the names should be taught gradually by constant unemphasized use on the part of the teacher; and if the child does not learn the names naturally then do not make him do it unnaturally.”Handbook of Nature Study, page 456
Here is a link to a diagram that you can print out showing the proper names for the flower parts. This is for you as the parent/nature guide to use to educate yourself on the flower part names. If you start to incorporate these proper labels as you observe your garden flowers, the words will gradually become part of your child’s vocabulary.
2. Take your 10-15 minute outdoor time to look for some garden flowers in your own yard or neighborhood. If you already have some of your own garden flowers blooming, pick one to identify and see if it is listed in the Handbook of Nature Study. Observe your seeds that you planted last week if you did that part of the challenge. Start to use the correct labels for the plant parts that you learned about in step one. If you learn one flower part and use it each week of the focus period, you will know most of the flower parts by the end of that time.
3. Give an opportunity for a nature journal entry. An excellent part of the entry could be the progress that your seeds are making as they start to push out of the soil. Be sure to keep watering your new seedlings as the week goes by. Careful observation with a magnifying lens will open up many interesting things to draw in the journal. If you did not plant seeds or they are not sprouting yet, work on drawing another garden flower in your nature journal.
4. Add to your list of garden flowers that you have planted in your garden or that you have seen during your outdoor time. Check the table of contents for any flower you may be able to read about after you Outdoor Hour time.
5. If you are going to make field guide cardsfor your garden flowers, add another card this week. If you make one card per week, by the end of this focus period you will have eight cards completed.
This challenge is part of my Garden Flowers ebook. This ebook has ten garden related challenges that will walk you through a study of garden flowers using the Handbook of Nature Study. In addition to the challenges already written, there will be more photos, nature journal examples, book lists, and totally new notebook pages designed to go with each of the Garden Flower Challenges.
I thought I would share a little of our family’s gardening history in our Outdoor Hour post this week. We have always been a gardening sort of family and the kids have grown up with their hands in the dirt. Each child has had their own garden box and when spring rolls around they get busy planting.
This is my youngest son working in his garden in 2001….that would have made him five years old. I think the look on his face says it all.
This year he has planted a zuchinni, some spinach, and is now going to add some dill and some violoas to his box. He has herbs from last year growing…chives, oregano, and basil I think.
We went to Home Depot to look for some new things and he wanted something colorful and he wanted seeds so we found some on this really big rack of seed packets. He also picked out a pepper called “garden salsa” and this one he wanted as a seedling. I picked up some morning glories after being inspired by Jenn and I also picked out some coleus seeds for my pot on my back deck.
Our nature study this week has been filled with observing each morning the signs of a skunk in our backyard. Here is what it looks like. They make swirly holes looking for grubs and other tasty treats. I am so glad they are doing this in the unlandscaped side of our yard and not in the grass….yet.
Can you believe how busy these guys are looking for things to eat? Here is my son’s drawing for his nature journal of a striped skunk.
We had another relaxed Outdoor Hour week with a little time each day in the garden and observing birds and reptiles in our backyard. We did have one really sad incident. The baby blue jays that we had in a nest near our window were taken by some bird and then the nest was damaged so there are no longer any babies for us to observe. It has been hard on everyone to watch the “circle of life” drama this week.
I hope that everyone else has an enjoyable week for their Outdoor Hour. Remember, you do not have to focus on garden flowers if you are into another focus or you have something else in mind for your family.
Trail with poppies-it is a steep hike but very rewarding
It was a family hike day down our near-by trail. We just discovered this trail over the winter and have now been hiking it for the last few months regularly. We are finding that every time we venture down it, we find something new and exciting waiting for us.
This afternoon we found lots of new wildflowers blooming, some familiar and some new to us. We also saw at least three different kinds of butterflies and heard a new bird but never discovered who it was…..shy bird with a lovely call. We need to come back with binoculars and spend some time quietly sitting and waiting with a field guide.
“Everyone should have the privilege of enjoying the natural beauty of the countryside. Such enjoyment is impossible if a relatively small number of people insist on picking and destroying native plants for their own selfish interests.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 460-461
Here are some of the beauties we saw on this particular hike.
Some kind of pea flowering on a vine.
California Indian Pink….showy color and you couldn’t miss it!
Purple Chinese Houses
These are some of my favorite wildflowers. Not only are they purple but they are really big. On this trail they line both sides as you walk the upper part.
White Globe Lily or as we call them Fairy Lanterns. They are also know as Snowdrops, Indian Bells and Satin Bells. Whatever you call them, so pretty.
This is a new flower to us. I love the little purple dot on each petal and the yellow center. The interesting stems and leaves make this unusual shape. They were all over the trail…in the center as well as the edge. I have not identified this wildflower yet….any ideas?
This was so sweet smelling as we hiked along…deer bush, California lilac, or wild lilac. The bees loved it.
This was a wonderful way to spend our Outdoor Hour this weekend. So many families have thanked me for starting the Outdoor Hour Challenges but the reality is that this whole process has blessed me more than you can imagine. I have renewed zeal for finding ways of weaving nature study into our life too. It has been a mutually beneficial experience. 🙂 So thank you to all you families who are participating.
For this challenge we were to choose a tree to study for a year, observing it in each season to notice the changes. My son and I used the Tree Study sheet to prompt our observations but in the Handbook of Nature Study on page 625 there is a section on “Spring Work” to use with your own tree.
My son has suddenly taken an interest in basketball and is bouncing a ball in every spare moment. I tore him away yesterday afternoon to have him to pick his tree and do a quick observation. He picked one of the sweet gum trees that we have growing just off our back deck. We have four of these trees planted as a shade break for the hot summer afternoons. They are perfect for shading us for the late summer sun and then they loose all their leaves in the winter and allow the sun to hit our house in the winter to make it light and cheery. They also turn the most magnificent colors in the autumn and make the view out our back windows very colorful and enjoyable to look at….I can see them as I wash dishes at the kitchen sink. they are not native to our area but they are very popular as tree plantings in neighborhoods and in yards for shade and their beauty.
So here is a copy of his notebook page for his journal. I am going to slip it into a sheet protector and hopefully the leaf will survive for the year that we have ahead. At least we will have the scan of the page so we can compare on the computer if we need to.
