Welcome to the first of the September 2012 Outdoor Hour Challenges. Whether this is your first or your fortieth nature study using the Handbook of Nature Study, please know that I am so glad that you are here and that you are going to join us for a new round of nature study in your own backyard.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
This week’s challenge, which you can complete at any time that is convenient, is to take a closer look at the subject of ants using the Handbook of Nature Study. You will find the original study here on my blog by following this link: Outdoor Hour Challenge-Ants (from the Spring 2010 ebook).
Printable Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is a free printable notebook page that will give you a place to record any of your insect studies. There are two versions for you to download and use with any of the insect challenges. Please use these with any insect you decide to study this month and not just ants.
Insect Study – record your field guide notes and a sketch Insect Notes – simple page with wider lines for younger students
Getting Started Suggestion:
If you already own this ebook, this week’s ant study would be a great start to Challenge #7 – Your Own Field Guide. You could start with ants and then add more entries as you observe more insects this month. Note there is a create Your Own Field Guide notebook page in the ebook for you to use with this challenge.
Don’t forget that the Getting Started ebook has a complete selection of generic nature journal pages at the back for you to print and use with any challenge.
In the newsletter, view the printable Planning Page for the four topics for the up-coming month. If the topic is from the archives, I provide the link to the challenge on my blog and the link to the ebook it is from if applicable.This way you can prepare for the challenges ahead of time if you wish. The challenges are going to be topical and not seasonal.
If you own the applicable ebooks, you can open those and print the coordinating notebook pages to use during the month. This is not required but would supplement the current month’s work.
Print any activities from the newsletter that you wish to complete during the month.
Read my blog each Friday for additional supplementary ideas, activities, or printables that coordinate with the month’s topics. Please note that the challenges can be done at any time that is convenient for your family…even months later. For instance, the topic for September is insects but if in November you come across an interesting insect, go ahead and come back to the September challenges and complete them with your November insect.
Complete the challenges at your own pace.
Big Picture
The newsletter will focus on a specific topic of study from the Handbook of Nature Study. But, there will always be general ideas for study as well so you will find at least one challenge a month to fit any area, any season, and any age level. During months where the challenges offered fit your family’s interest and habitat, you can complete all four challenges if you desire or if you find that you can’t locate the current topic you may only complete one or two of the more general challenges. I hope that each family will find something to encourage them in their efforts to get outside as a family each month.
Resources Needed:
Monthly Newsletter so you have the topic, the challenge ideas ahead of time, and the newsletter printables.***
This is a long entry but if you have any inkling that you will be joining us for the
Outdoor Hour Challenge this year,
please take a few minutes to read about how the whole thing is going to work.
I know there are a lot of readers of this blog that read my entries and then feel like they can’t do nature study for one reason or another. I know there are families that start off great and then loose steam. I know there are moms who just are not “nature” oriented and don’t enjoy the more difficult side of nature study like the hot/cold weather, bugs, dirt, and fear that their children are going to ask them questions they don’t know the answers to.
I would like to encourage all of you to just do what you can and try to accomplish a little outdoor time each week with your children. The purpose of this blog is to encourage you with some suggested ideas, help you learn how to use the Handbook of Nature Study, and to share with you some inspiration from other families around the world who have a desire just like you do to offer the important gift of outdoor time with your children.
To help you with your family nature study, I am starting a new chapter in the Handbook of Nature Study blog adventure. We will be using the monthly newsletters, posts from the archives, and general nature study challenges to encourage everyone from beginner to veteran to try some weekly or monthly nature study. I have lots and lots of fun ideas and free printables just waiting to share with you each Friday. The newsletter will outline the main topic for the month and give you suggested challenge ideas to apply in your family (more on that in next Monday’s post).
As another new feature of the Outdoor Hour Challenge posts each Friday, I will be outlining a suggestion for using the Outdoor Hour Challenge Getting Started Ebook. I know many of you own this ebook already and perhaps started off using it in the beginning of your nature study journey but I am now going to show you how to use the resources in that book to enhance the current challenges. I will refer to specific challenges and notebook pages that you can use each week, making the Getting Started Ebook an integral part of your current nature study activities. You have it on your shelf…why not use it to your advantage?
If ever there were a time to join in with the Outdoor Hour Challenge, this would be it.
It is clean slate time and we will all be starting fresh.
Discount Promo Has Ended: For the first time ever, I am offering the Outdoor Hour Challenge Getting Started Ebook at a special discounted promotional price for one week only. If you do not own this book already, now is the time to get a copy to use with our weekly challenges and then to continue using as you work your way from season to season.
Special Discounted Price – $6.95. Promo Has Ended
I will be referring to other challenges from the seasonal ebooks but the Getting Started ebook is going to take a special spot in every weekly challenge plan.
Click over to the Getting Started Page and you can take advantage of this special offer from now until the end of the month (midnight 8/31/12).
Make sure to read the post on Monday, August 27, 2012.
I will be giving you step by step instructions for the new and improved Outdoor Hour Challenge.
What You Can Do To Help Me
Now, tell me in a comment if you have a particular reason you have not started with nature study or you started off great and then let it drop. I will attempt in future posts to address your reasons and your particular situations. Plus I just like to hear your comments and get to know you all better. I loved hearing your thoughts when I did my blog survey a few months ago. You can leave an anonymous comment on this blog if you are too shy to use your name. 🙂
I don’t know about you but ever since we really learned about Fibonacci numbers in nature we have been on the lookout for the patterns and swirls. They seem to be everywhere once your eyes learn to focus on this interesting design in creation. The More Nature Study Book #4 Summer Sizzle challenge for garden flowers shares lots of ideas for getting to know about the Fibonacci sequence and the aster family.
Our Garden Flowers Study using the Handbook of Nature Study led us to discover some different kinds of asters that we have right in our own yard. The clue is the shape and arrangement of the flower petals.
The challenge was actually to study White daisies, Black-eyed Susans, and Asters. We went beyond and tried to find all the flowers in the aster family that we have in our garden. We found quite a few.
There are the dahlias. This surprised me that it was in the aster family. My son grows dahlias in his garden box for me and this year they are all shades of pink. I would like to add a few more colors next year.
We do have dahlias growing in pots on the back deck. We planted these from seeds that we purchased from Rene’s Garden. The package calls them Watercolor Silksand they live up to their name.
I bring them in and let them fully open up inside on the kitchen table.
We have lots of Echinacea in our cutting garden. We looked this flower up and it is in the aster family! Can you count the petals?
We were not sure about the Bee Balm so we looked it up on Wikipedia…no, it is not in the aster family. Knowing what makes an aster an aster, we should have known better. Sometimes it adds to the learning experience to NOT find what you are looking for because it makes you stop and take note of the different attributes of a flower like petal arrangement and the way the flower grows.
The nasturtium is also not a member of the aster family. I would love to have a whole bed of nasturtiums. I settled for four scrawny plants this year. There is a study in the Handbook of Nature Study for the nasturtium and I think our family will be following up this aster study with that one in the near future…just for fun and to record this flower in our nature journals.
Other Miscellaneous Garden Adventures from the Past Month
We have lots of Cabbage White butterflies in our garden everyday. I really love this link: Cabbage White. I learned so much by taking the time to look up this butterfly even though it was technically garden flower week. I love it when nature study subjects come to us and we slow down enough to learn a few facts. This is what makes our nature study so rich and satisfying. I think it is such a joy to know about the common everyday things in my garden. There is so much to learn.
We visited a beautiful rose garden when we were on our Oregon trip last month. Shores Acres has a garden that is so magical that you don’t know where to look and you are afraid you are going to miss something. The rose above is my absolute new favorite…it is called Hot Cocoa. It had a slight chocolate fragrance and the color was reminiscent of cocoa.
A rare sighting of me on the blog but I want you to know how much I enjoyed this rose garden. My son obliged me by taking a few photos of me as we wandered around and tried to find our favorites.
My other son decided that the bench was just too inviting and he rested awhile in the rose garden…what a great way to spend a few minutes while you wait for your mom who decided she wanted to read very sign.
So have you completed your garden flower study for the summer yet using the Handbook of Nature Study? I would love to see your garden entries in the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival…you have until the end of the month to post your entry and send in your links.
Jami’s Tuesday Garden Party meme is open from Tuesday to Thursday so there is still time for you to jump in and participate!
Our recent trip to Oregon let us sample the different kinds of beaches there are along this section of the Pacific Coast. The coast of Southern Oregon has become our summer getaway of choice. We enjoy the break from the hot temperatures at home and we cooled off with the misty foggy days of the Oregon summer.
Would you like to see some of the beaches we visited along with some of the treasures we found to observe and record in our nature journals?
Let’s start off with the most southerly location we visited, a little gem of a beach with lots and lots of agates and pebbles, McVay Rock. This has become one of my favorite rock beaches and it has tidepools too! The boys enjoyed searching for the most colorful or interesting rocks. This was a great location to start our Outdoor Hour Challenge on Rocks. Although we didn’t examine any granite, we took advantage of the time to closely examine some other rocks.
On the other side of Brookings, Oregon we spent some time exploring Whaleshead Beach. The sun was out and we walked the sand, climbed over rocks, and watched the sea birds flying.
There were colorful flowers and grasses growing along the rocky cliffs. It hardly seems possible that this dudleya can grow right on the rocks but it does.
This is a close-up of another beach we visited at the Pistol River in Oregon. It was early morning and we had the beach to ourselves. We had to walk over sand dunes and then over a flat area to get to the shore. There were lots and lots of empty shells…the birds must feast here when the time is right.
Here is a view down the beach with the shorebirds in the distance poking their beaks in for a morning meal. We have friends that come here to go clamming but we were just on a refreshing beach walk as we traveled up the coast.
Here is another beach we camped at on our trip, Bullards Beach near Bandon, Oregon. This image is in the evening and if you look closely you can see horses in the distance and a family having a bonfire up sheltered in the pile of driftwood.
Here is another section of the beach early in the morning. Look at all that driftwood!
This is the lighthouse at Bullards Beach and you can see the sandy dunes and grasses that border the actual shore. Behind the lighthouse is the Pistol River outlet which is where all the driftwood comes from during certain parts of the year.
Farther up the coast, we visited Cape Arago and Simpson Reef. It was a wet day but we braved the rain to observe the sea life down on the rocky islands. I had my binoculars and we were able to see sea lions resting on the rocks and in the water.
Rocks and shells are rather difficult to draw in my nature journal. It is an exercise in slowing down and really looking at the object before you put your pencil or pen to the page.
We had a great time looking for rocks on this trip. Not much granite to look at but we did see many things to capture our interest and to look up in our field guides.
Just looking at these photos makes me want to turn around and go back to Oregon.
Have you seen the new product over at NotebookingPages.com? If you own a Lifetime Membership over on Debra’s website, you can log into your account on NotebookingPages.com and download your set right now. If you aren’t already a member over there, you can purchase the set separately or I would highly recommend a Lifetime Membership so you can access all of the 1000’s of notebooking pages she has to offer. ($4.95 for the setor get started with your membership with $10!)
Please note I am an affiliate for NotebookingPages.com and have used the notebooking pages with my family for years!
This is our busiest hummingbird feeder. They also like the flowers in the pots.
We love hummingbirds. I think we pay more attention to the hummingbirds in our yard than any other bird. They are constantly at our feeders, in our garden flowers, and flying around…front yard and backyard.
There are at least three in our yard at all times, competing for the feeders and flying fast. They sit in the trees and chirp at us when we eat dinner on the back deck. They are not afraid of us when we are out in the backyard and frequently will fly right up by us as we work in the yard.
They are year round residents.
What aspect did we focus on this time in our hummingbird study as part of the More Nature Study Book #4 Hummingbird Challenge? We started off asking questions about their feathers and how in a certain light they are very green and in then in another light they are bright red. What makes them iridescent? But then we got side-tracked asking why the Anna’s hummingbird chases the Black Headed Grosbeaks out of the seed feeders. I mean they are aggressively chasing them far out of the yard. Our field guide says they defend a 1/4 acre territory. We haven’t found the concrete answer to our questions yet but we have some guesses.
Also, we were fascinated this week by one hummingbird in particular. We call him “Flutter”. He has a unusual sound to his flying. Most of the birds have the familiar “hum” to their wings and the Anna’s Hummingbird make a clicking sound as well. But Flutter sounds like he has a bum wing…like it is not beating like the other birds. It sounds like a fluttering instead of a humming, if that makes sense. We have yet to catch him with the camera because our thought is that if we can take a photo and take a look at his wing shape, maybe he has some sort of injury.
One last thing to relate about our hummingbirds this week. I was out in the yard using the hose to water a few of the bushes since it has been extremely hot and dry. I had the hose in a fine sort of mist and in the shape of an arc. Well, a hummingbird decided that it was the perfect place to fly in and out as he took a bath! It was amazing to watch and I am hoping I get to see it again some day. Our hummingbirds are quite comfortable with us right now and they will fly right up behind you and visit the feeder even if you are inches from them.
“Children are quick. In fifteen minutes, they will have finished with their sight-seeing exercise or imaginary picture painting. Other than that, an occasional discovery that the mother shows them with a name and maybe a dozen words about it at just the right time are all that’s needed; the children will have formed an interest in something they can continue on their own. Just one or two of these discoveries should happen in any given day.” Charlotte Mason, volume 6 page 78
We spent our fifteen minutes everyday this week outside in our own yard. Here is a short list of the things we noticed and enjoyed from our time outdoors.
There were robins in the grass after the sprinklers turned off.
For the first time this year, we observed a tattered Monarch butterfly in our garden.
Our sunflowers started blooming..some yellow, some orange, some almost brown.
We noticed the first blooming morning glories in the front container garden.
We saw Painted Lady butterflies and Western Tiger Swallowtails too. There were a few more but we had to pull out the field guide so we can identify them the next time we see them in the garden.
The zucchini is blossoming.
The Starlings are back and eating the little fruits off the tree on our fence line.Noisy birds.
Hummingbirds in the butterfly bushes and the Red Hot Pokers. Amazing to watch.
Day lilies, day lilies, day lilies!
Big black bees in the lavender…had to cut it back off the walkway.
The winds on Tuesday and Wednesday were not cool at all…hot! The breeze on Friday was cool and from a different direction.
Those are just the discoveries we brainstormed as I was typing this up. This informal everyday noticing of nature related subjects taking just a few minutes a day adds such joy to our busy lives. As my boys grow older, I love that we have established this habit of noticing the seasonal changes and the cycle of life in our own backyard. You don’t always need to do lots of talking and follow-up to make nature study meaningful. Sometimes it is just the time spent together and enjoying a moment during your day.
We truly do discovery something every time we make the effort to get outside.
Give it a try! The Outdoor Hour Challenge July Newsletter is going to have suggestions for nature study when it is hot and humid. Make sure to subscribe to this blog for your free copy of it the minute it publishes.
To subscribe to the Handbook of Nature Study, you can enter your email in the box below and you will receive each blog entry in your email inbox. Thank you so much for reading and supporting this blog!
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I am submitting this entry to the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival and if you have any entries you would like to submit, you can send them to this email address: charlottemasonblogs@gmail.com. The official blog carnival site is not working so you will need to send them directly to this email.
Every reader of the Handbook of Nature Study (the book) knows who Anna Botsford Comstock is….the esteemed author of our nature study guide and lessons. She wrote the words that have touched my personal life in such a profound way, changing how we view the world in our own backyard. She may have touched your life in a similar way through the pages of the Handbook of Nature Study as you worked through the Outdoor Hour Challenges.
When the opportunity was offered to me a few years ago to visit and actually stay at her cottage in New York outside Ithaca, I wasn’t able to make the trip at that time. It was on my mind a lot through the years so when a last minute trip involved traveling in New York came up last month, I immediately contacted the family that now owns the cottage to see if it was available during our visit. It was! We made arrangements to stay for three days in the cottage that Anna and Henry Comstock built on the shore of Lake Cayuga.
” During the fall of 1906, we were making habitable The Hermitage, our summer cottage on Cayuga Lake. We put a large window in the living room which gave us a wide view of the lake. This room was given a hardwood floor and was ceiled, to make it warm. Here we set up the wood stove that had been in my mother’s parlor when I was a child. It had a grate and in the evenings we opened up its front doors; this made it as cheerful as a fireplace.” Anna Botsford Comstock
It was just like I imagined it…set in the woods, right near the water’s edge. The birds, flowers, and trees were those that Anna wrote about in her books. It was warm and cozy and somehow familiar.
We sat on the porch and enjoyed the sounds of the woods. The lake glistened as the sunset on that first day. I climbed into bed and thought how it must have been there over a hundred years ago when the Comstocks first built the cottage.
“Harry and I spent weekends there, and on each trip he would walk the mile and a half from Taughannock Station to The Hermitage, carrying on his back a basket filled with materials for fixing the house.The labor my husband performed in and about this place was remarkable.” Anna Botsford Comstock
The next morning I was up early for a walk in the woods. I ventured out alone for the first hike and as I stepped off the porch I heard birdsong and glimpsed a young deer sneaking across the road into a thicket of bushes. The woods woke up as I hiked up the trail and my eyes were trying hard to take in all the sights.
The green of the new spring leaves, the thin trunks of the trees, the rustlings of birds and the cry of the mourning doves. These were Anna’s woods. This was the place that helped inspire her to share her love of nature with teachers and children, bringing them into a relationship with common everyday things in their world.
There was teasel by the trail…new to me in person but familiar through the pages of the Handbook of Nature Study. Advanced preparation does work…I recognized it right away and remember that she had called it ” a plant in armor”.
“He added paths and built a fine wharf and a double-decked boat house, in the upper part of which we swung our hammocks, and from which we enjoyed the glory of many sunsets. The Hermitage was always a place where work was play; we dumped our cares at the Ithaca station when we left, but they were always waiting to jump at us on our return.” Anna Botsford Comstock
I made my way back to the cottage and by this time the boys were up and ready for the day. My husband and Mr. A took out the canoe onto the morning smooth water of the lake. Exploring a new place by water…leaving their cares behind as they paddled across the surface of the lake in the early morning sunrise.
Mr. B and I decided to take another hike through the woods and this time we noticed the wildflowers. These were the wildflowers of Anna’s books…the ones we don’t have in California.
The whole weekend was filled with the opening of eyes and hearts to a magical place, gently teaching us the way of the New York woods in which we found ourselves. One day it rained and we watched the drops fall from our dry spot on the porch. The fragrance of the wet woods was delightful…different than our Northern California woods. The rain stopped and we grilled dinner on the stone fire pit down by the water. We skipped rocks, sat and watched the fisherman go by on their little boats, and we shed our cares, refreshed.
At the end of the weekend, we had made many entries into our nature journals, took lots of photos, and made some memories of our own at this lakeside cottage.
We will always remember our weekend spent on Lake Cayuga at the Comstock’s beloved Hermitage Cottage. Special thanks to Christiana and Alison who graciously opened up their family cottage to our family, making this trip to New York even more special.
I hope my readers enjoyed glimpsing our weekend….we all need to remember to build in our families a rich heritage of outdoor experiences. Who knows who it will touch in the future?
Next time I will share our day at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology and Sapsucker Woods! More connections were made to the Handbook of Nature Study.
Our world is full of vines…I never noticed how many vines there are in our neighborhood until we focused on vines for the past few weeks during our outdoor time. The vine above is a Common sulphur pea that grows wild in our area and is a native plant. I always just call them sweet peas. These are growing on our hiking trail and they don’t bloom very long since they are on the sunny dry side of the trail. They are a delight while they last.
Blackberry vines – This tangle is right alongside our walking trail. They don’t get a lot of water here on the dry side of the hill so they aren’t very sweet and plump. The wild critters benefit from these patches of blackberries.
I think these are Himalayan blackberries and are an invasive species in our part of the world. I have them in my yard…creeping in wherever I don’t whack them back or chomp them down. I keep a very small manageable patch in my front yard for the birds and for my own early morning picking pleasure in the summer. Nothing like a freshly picked, sun-warmed blackberry for your breakfast.
Sweet peas – These are the purple-pink sweet peas that grow wild alongside the walking trail. They come back year after year. I am cultivating a nice patch of them in my backyard, hoping they will fill in a spot with their brightly colored flowers. We read in the Handbook of Nature Study that studying the sweet pea should be a garden lesson so we will save it for the summer. (We did a previous sweet pea study and you can read it here along with my little video.)
English ivy – This is a vine that grows over and through our fence from our neighbor’s yard. We spend quite a bit of time cutting it back since we really don’t want ivy taking over our yard. It is pretty and green but that is about all I can say nice about it.
Hedge bind weed – We have this growing under our birdfeeder. We are watching it grow and then in a few weeks after it has bloomed we will pull it all out. (I am keeping just a few of the hedge bindweed plants on the advice of a fellow gardener who told me it could quickly take over.) We did a previous study of this plant here: Hedge Bindweed if you want to take a look.
Vetch – This was the plant that led to a complete afternoon of study. We actually have two varieties of vetch along our hiking trail. The one above is Hairy vetch and then we also have Spring vetch.
The spring vetch almost looks like a small sweet pea (same family, different genus). It took some time to find information on these two vetches because neither plant was in our wildflowers field guide. I presume this is because they are non-native plants. We found this interesting because these two plants are seen everywhere in our area. I have started keeping track in my nature journal of native vs. non-native plants…interesting exercise.
We decided we needed to keep this as an on-going nature study and we will be watching as the hedge bindweed and sweet peas in our garden as they mature over the next few weeks. We have had fun noticing if plants twine in clockwise or counter clockwise directions. It becomes sort of an obsession. Keeping a focus always adds an enjoyable layer to our outdoor time and nature study.
Don’t forget to share your Outdoor Hour Challenge blog entries with the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. All entries done in May are eligible for the next edition. The deadline for entries is 5/30/12 and you can send them directly to me: harmonyfinearts@yahoo.com.
More Nature Study Book 3 Vine Study – Sweet peas, Hedge bindweed, and Dodder
Vines: Plants that have the habit of climbing upon other plants or upon sides of houses. Stems of vines are not strong enough to stand alone, seeking support to help get their leaves up into the life-giving sunlight. Some vines climb by twisting their stems around the support plant while others have special “holders” which are called tendrils.
Inside Preparation Work:
Read these pages in the Handbook of Nature Study to prepare you for this week’s challenge. 1. Sweet Pea: 588-590 (Lesson 164) *vines with tendrils. 2. Hedge Bindweed: 518-520 (Lesson 137) *twining vines. 3. The Dodder or Love Vine: 520-522 (Lesson 138) *tendrils with sucker.
If you would like to start your sweet peas from seed, follow the instructions in Lesson 164. This study could then continue into the summer months and end in a study of the sweet pea flower using Lesson 164.
Use your outdoor time for this challenge to explore your yard and neighborhood looking for vines of any kind. Don’t worry if you can’t find a sweet pea, dodder, or hedge bindweed but apply your knowledge and vocabulary to any vines you do find.
Make sure to observe closely how the vine climbs. If the vine is a twining vine, note which direction the vine wraps itself around the support plant. If the vine has tendrils, note their color, size, and direction.
Optional: Plant sweet pea or morning glory seeds for your own vines to observe over the next few months.
Follow-Up Activity:
Follow up your outdoor time with the opportunity to record an entry in your nature journal with your vine observations. Ebook Users: You can use the vocabulary found on the chart in the ebook.
Advanced study: Research more vines and how they climb (How Plants Climb). Summarize your information in your nature journal.
Advanced study: Make your own time lapse video of a vine twining or using its tendrils.
If you planted sweet pea or morning glory seeds, continue to record their growth over the next few months in your nature journal.
and they live up to their name.
. It had a slight chocolate fragrance and the color was reminiscent of cocoa.
