We were busy picking flowers and taking some photos when we had a visitor. It hopped right up on my arm and it tickled. I realized I had a visitor. My son scooped him up and put him on a flower while I captured him in a few photos.
I was pretty excited until I realized that the challenge was cricket, grasshopper, and katydid….we had ourselves a praying mantis! Oh well, it was fun observing him up close anyway.
Here is his behind….way too funny huh?
He was very good at posing. It made me laugh because every time I tried to take his photo, he would move so his head was facing away from the camera. He would actually look right at me and then turn at the last minute.
One last pose…I think he only had one antennae.
We spent last week in Nevada and it was amazing to us how many grasshoppers there were in the barren landscape. I never did get a single photo of the grasshoppers but we talked about their habits quite a bit as we were out and about.They were rather small grasshoppers in comparison to the one we found near a river in Reno.
I shared this guy last week and since them we have been trying to identify him with no success. He was rather large, probably close to 2 inches long. We think it may be a two-striped grasshopper.
Since we had crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids on our minds, we have slowed down a bit to try to find some to observe. We went out several times to try to hear some crickets but they seem to be smaller in number so the volume is less than usual. It has been a crazy weather year and I am wondering if it is effecting the crickets.
Sometimes I think we might learn more when we have trouble locating our challenge subject. We definitely find more to learn about.
This could very easily be called the Summer of Queen Anne’s Lace. Our local area has been blanketed with this wildflower, lining the roads and filling the fields. It is now starting to fade as the weather is very dry and hot….still a few green patches here and there but the stems are shorter and the flower bunches not as large.
Here is a patch we see regularly…this photo was taken back in July.
This is a patch we have just across the street from our house…photo taken last weekend. We were actually on a cricket hunt at sunset but the Queen Anne’s Lace captured our attention. It is still surprisingly green while all the surrounding weeds are brown and crispy. Kona wanted to be in the photo, stickers on her nose from the surrounding weeds.
Here is what the Handbook of Nature Study calls the “fruiting cluster” or “bird’s nest”. Look at all those seeds!
Here is a side shot of the Queen Anne’s Lace and you can see the red dot in the middle very clearly in a few of the flowers.
Here is a close-up showing the red blossoms in the center of this flower. If you look in the background of this photo you can see the star thistles….ugh. Those plants are crazy wicked. We pull them up by the roots if they happen to grow in our yard.
I thought this was such a pretty shape and the seeds almost look pink. This may work its way into my nature journal when I have a few minutes.
The boys have been experts at picking out Queen Anne’s Lace. At first they were mixing it up with Cow Parsnip.
This is what the Cow Parsnip looks like from the side. See how thick the stem is?
Here is the flower cluster. The balls of flowers are different once you recognize it and the leaves are totally different. The size of the plant is much larger than the Queen Anne’s Lace. I have never seen them growing together either so that makes it another identifying feature as well.
So in our attempt to identify and learn about Queen Anne’s Lace, we have learned a lot about the Cow Parsnip as well (also yarrow but that is another post).
I think for our family having a nature study focus has given our adventures a spirit of purpose. We always enjoy getting outside to enjoy our environment. Having a few possible topics in mind as we travel has helped us glean even more from our time outside. It is sort of like seeing an old friend when we come across the particular focus like Queen Anne’s Lace or grasshoppers or bats.
As we wind up our summer studies, I feel the pull of a new set of autumn adventures. I don’t usually like autumn but this year I am ready for it with its cooler days and nights, the fall of the leaves, and the changes. I think nature study has changed me inside and I know it has changed my children.
Welcome to the Hot August Nights Edition of the Carnival! Our busy summer is winding down and autumn will soon be here. Our family did a pretty good job of completing the summer challenges although I have been slow in posting the results for the last few. I will make sure now that the Autumn ebook is finished to post our entries for you to see.
In the meantime, you will want to read what other Outdoor Hour Challenge families have accomplished in the past month. There are some fantastic entries in this carnival and I encourage you to read them for additional inspiration. This carnival is not very fancy because I have limited time this week to pull it together. The entries themselves will tell the nature study stories from August. I appreciate all the families that are willing to share their adventures and learning, it means a lot to me to be able to see how the ideas I put together are helping children all over the world become better acquainted with their own neighborhoods. Thank you.
I look forward to next month’s entries from all of you…..There is one more Summer Series Challenge that will post tomorrow and then the Autumn Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges will start on September 17th.
Starting off with the Summer Series Challenges….
Summer Series #1 Mosquitoes Kelsey from Mud Puddles and her children did a study of the mosquito as part of this challenge. She gleaned some great ideas from other families just like we do.
Summer Series #2 Seasonal Tree Kelsey from Mud Puddles shares the end of their year-long tree study….they learned a lot from their careful observations this past year. Guess what? Now you get to pick a new tree!
Summer Series #5 Owls Kelsey from Mud Puddles and her children continued their owl study, complete with pellet dissection. They started off squeamish and ended up enthusiastic. I call that successful.
Summer Series #6 Frogs Tricia from HodgePodge Homeschool shares some great photos of some unexpected tadpoles as well as their family’s study for this challenge. They are now prepared for frogs when they find them in their adventures.
Summer Series #7 Cattail Study Angie and her boys from Petra School completed an awesome study of their cattails. They were able to make a second visit this season to do some comparing and more in-depth studies.
Kelsey from Mud Puddles wrote about their cattail observations and how they compared to their spring study. I really like their sketches too.
Summer Series #8 Fireflies and Moths
Just a note about this challenge: Since we do not have fireflies in California, I was not aware that there really is a season for observing them. I now know that it needs to really be a spring study or very early summer. I love learning new things. 🙂
Tricia and her children spent time not only studying but getting to know their lightning bugs this summer. I really like that they call them lightning bugs instead of fireflies and I can almost hear their Southern accent when I read the entry.
Summer Series #9 Evening Primrose and other Night Bloomers Angie from Petra Schoolwas on a quest to find an evening primrose and they finally stumbled upon one to observe….literally. Let’s just say there was joy in her heart!
Kelsey from Mud Puddles is lucky enough to have a patch of evening primrose in their yard to observe up close. They were able to see them open up after dark. Awesome!
Tricia from HodgePodge Homeschool gives us a great entry sharing their night blooming flowers. They are not evening primroses but they are awesome to look at and she even includes a video.
Summer Series #10 Crickets, Grasshoppers, and Katydids Angie from Petra School shares their entry about Bob the Cricket. This was a thorough study with some really good photos…I love reading about Angie’s boys and their adventures.
Tricia from HodePodge Homeschool shares their singing cricket study. This family is a great example of how nature study folds into your everyday life.
Summer Series #12 Raccoons (Posted early but that is totally fine with me!) Tricia writes about their raccoon study…. a little early because the opportunity came up when Tricia’s grandmother shared some photos and experiences with raccoons in her birdfeeder. Delightful entry.
Other Challenges from the Past OHC #22 Butterflies Holli from Settled in My Home shares their beautiful butterfly entry. They saw quite a variety and she was able to capture some in some lovely photos.
Tricia from HodgePodge Homeschool writes about their study of butterflies, learning about the complete life-cycle and including an art project with pastels. Lovely thorough study and entry!
Spring Series #8 Makita from Academia Celestia shares their summer snake study. I love it when opportunities arise and family’s take the initiative to spend a little time learning more about the subjects that arise. Check out their great photos.
Winter Series #6 Salt Phyllis from All Things Beautiful shares their salt study, just look at those beautiful crystals! This is an activity our boys never grow tired of completing.
Please consider submitting your Outdoor Hour Challenge entries and your Summer and Autumn Series entries to the next carnival. Deadline for submissions will be September 30th, 2010 and all entries from September are eligible. Here is the link for submissions: LINK.
Autumn Nature Study with the Outdoor Hour Challenges
The Autumn Nature Study ebook includes:
10 Outdoor Hour Challenges-7 new challenges and 3 continuing studies (Seasonal Tree, Weather, and Queen Anne’s Lace). All the Outdoor Hour Challenges in this ebook are based on the Handbook of Nature Study and include page numbers and suggested learning observations. The three on-going studies are totally revamped with an autumn focus and they will inspire you to continue in your year-long studies that you started in previous seasons.
New to this series of challenges is the focus on learning to compare and contrast using a Venn Diagram. Full instructions and a notebook page are included.
16 Outdoor Hour Challenge notebook pages and nature journal suggestions.
4 optional coloring pages.
Ideas for field trips other than your normal Outdoor Hour Challenge backyard adventures.
Links for further enrichment for many of the challenges.
Complete list of resources and instructions to get started with this ebook.
Topics include: Geese, Horses, Apple, Seasonal Tree/Leaves, Queen Anne’s Lace, Trout and Salmon, Seasonal Weather Comparison, Pine Cones, November World
You will have a complete plan at your fingertips for your autumn nature study when the opportunities arise. The ebook gives you links and resources to find most of the information online, including the Handbook of Nature Study.
Autumn Nature Study with the Outdoor Hour Challenges
Contains all the challenges, custom notebook pages, resource links, and coloring pages for nature study.
If you have any questions, please email me: harmonyfinearts@yahoo.com.
Summer Series #11
Year-Long Study: Queen Anne’s Lace
“If we look straight into the large flower-cluster, we can see that each component cluster, or umbellet, seems to have its own share in making the larger pattern; the outside blossoms of the outside clusters have the outside petals larger, thus forming a beautiful border.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 543.
Train Your Senses
Sight: How are the blossoms arranged? What is its shape? Are there insects on the flower?
Smell: Does the flower have a scent? How about the leaves?
Touch: Is the stem smooth or rough? How does the flower umbel feel?
Inside Preparation Work:
Read in the Handbook of Nature Study pages 542 to 545 (Lesson 148). Pay special attention to the suggestions in Lesson 148, perhaps choosing a few of the observations to complete when observing your Queen Anne’s Lace. Keep track of the location of your Queen Anne’s Lace so you can revisit it during the seasons to come, observing the changes in this plant over a year’s time.
Outdoor Hour Time:
Spend 15 minutes outdoors this week in your own backyard or a near-by park. The subject of this challenge is Queen Anne’s Lace but keep your eye out for any wildflowers you may observe during your outdoor time. Keep in mind your suggested observation ideas as you enjoy your time outside together. Remember to use your senses to observe your wildflowers.
Follow-Up Activities:
Discuss what you observed during your outdoor time. Try to help your children remember what they discovered using all their senses. This can be just a few words or a complete account of their thoughts. Use the notebook page included with the Summer Series ebook to record a sketch and your observations or use a blank notebook of your own. As part of a year-long study of Queen Anne’s Lace, make sure to file your notebook page away for future reference.
Wildflowers are wonderful subjects for a watercolor drawing. Try using watercolor colored pencils to sketch some Queen Anne’s Lace or any wildflower into your nature journal.
Using the notebook page in the Summer Series ebook record any observations your child has from their outdoor time.
Take a photograph of your wildflower and include it in your nature journal.
You can also use any notebook pages from the sidebar of my blog.
If you would like all the Summer Series Challenges in one place, I have an ebook gathered for you to purchase for your convenience. Here is a link to a complete description: Summer Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges
We were not even out to find any grasshoppers but guess who crossed our path? Mr. A spotted this big guy in the grass along the hiking trail! He was about three inches in length and actually kind of pretty.
Since we do not have fireflies in our part of the world, this will be the second time we have studied moths using the Outdoor Hour Challenges. During the summer of 2008 we completed a moth study while on our camping trip. Moths seem to be one of those creatures that we don’t pay too much attention to as we go about our regular business.
The Discover Nature At Sundown book gave us some really good ways to tell moths and butterflies apart, along with wonderful illustrations of the parts of a moth. We are going to continue our study of moths as we have subjects come our way.
Moth we saw on a trip to Oregon that I would love to know the name of if anyone out there has it. Hint, hint.
We have been watching for moths in our garden in the evenings but the best place to observe them is actually in the house. I many times come into the kitchen in the morning and find a few moths clinging to the bottom of the nightlight. I scoop them up and take them back outside.
We did find some signs of spiders in the garden during the day this week. There has been a return of the webs on our crepe myrtle. I was able to capture a few in photos and even one photo of the spider that I think must be making the webs. Any ideas would be appreciated.
See the spider inside the web? These are fantastic webs to look at and they are complex as well as beautiful.
So much for a firefly and moth study….we never feel defeated though. Our advance preparation seems to always pay off in one way or another. I am confident that we will someday be in a position to study fireflies up close and personal.
Sight: Look for grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets in your yard. Observe them with a hand lens. Look at a grasshopper jump.
Hearing: Listen for the chirping of a cricket or katydids and see if you can follow the direction.
Inside Preparation Work:
1.Read in the Handbook of Nature Study pages 338-350 (Lessons 80-82). This a lot of information so you might want to break this challenge up over several weeks so you can read, choose some of the suggestions for observation, spend your time outdoors, and then move onto the next insect.
Most of us have heard crickets in the evenings and children will be very interested to learn more about these insects that play music with their legs for us to enjoy. Here is a link to a YouTube.com video that shows what a cricket looks like when he is singing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E6q9W8Ur2k
2. Read in Discover Nature at Sundown pages 174-188. There are many suggestions for exploring the hopper’s world and you may wish to choose one or two to try with your family. You can collect a grasshopper and keep it for a few hours to observe it up close. Use your hand lens to complete the “Closer Look” activity on page 183.
Outdoor Hour Time:
Try to spend some of your outdoor time in the evening air. Our family likes to sit on our deck and watch as the stars come out after sunset. This is a perfect activity to couple with listening for crickets because it is just about at the same time that you will begin to hear crickets singing their evening songs. You can also spend fifteen minutes looking for grasshoppers or crickets in your yard or a near-by park. This challenge can be split up into two weeks if you want to really study each insect.
Follow-Up Activity:
After your observations and outdoor time, have your child tell you some of the things he remembers about the nature study. After you have your outdoor time, provide an opportunity for working on a nature journal entry. Use the Handbook of Nature Study or a library book to find an illustration or photo of an actual cricket to draw in your journal. Have your child label the entry with a title, the date, and the place that you made your observation. Parents can always help the child with this part if needed.
There are also coloring pages included in the Summer Series ebook for the cricket, the grasshopper, and the katydid.
If you would like all the Summer Series Challenges in one place, I have an ebook gathered for you to purchase for your convenience. Here is a link to a complete description: Summer Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges
This challenge was truly a challenge as we pushed ourselves to find a subject to study in our local area. We could not get our Four O’Clocks or Moonflowers to grow this year in our garden. We are going to try a different spot next year to see if it makes a difference.
In the meantime, we did the reading in the Handbook of Nature Study and went out in our yard in the evenings looking for flowers that attract moths. We didn’t observe much except maybe that the star jasmine has a more intense fragrance at night and it really stands out in the garden because of its white flowers.
We also noticed that the Dusty Millers were sort of glowing in the evenings too with their silvery soft hairs on the stems and leaves.
Sometimes the subject just appears and because you are prepared you can take advantage of the opportunity. This situation happened to us on a recent hike. We were hiking at our favorite spot and came down to the beach at the lake’s edge.
Wow! We couldn’t believe our eyes. We were greeted with a beach covered in wildflowers. The two most predominant flowers were the lupine and what we identified using our field guide….Hooker’s Evening Primrose! Can you believe it? We had never seen this beach covered with these flowers before and we had never seen evening primroses in the wild. The field guide says that these flowers are nocturnal and are fragrant at night.
Here are some photos….courtesy of my oldest son. He has become such a wonderful photographer and being able to share a passion with a child is such a gift.
The beach was a blaze with color, more awesome than even the photo shows.
Isn’t this the most lovely flower? The mix of the purple lupines and the yellow of this flower was stunning. It was a moment to be remembered forever.
This has been another great Outdoor Hour Challenge…thanks to the Handbook of Nature Study and Anna Botsford Comstock’s desire for us to learn about the things we have all around us.
This post has been a long time coming. We worked on this last week and the week before that knowing we had a frog study as part of the Outdoor Hour Challenge. We must be having an unusual year because we have not seen a single frog this summer except when we were at Yosemite on our camping trip. We saw a Pacific Tree frog but did not photo because he hopped right up to my foot and I was actually trying to catch him but he got away. He sure could jump!
On a normal summer evening we can sit out on our back deck and hear frogs in the evening as they croak and rib-bit. We took a walk around our neighborhood and found out that the little wetland area at the end of the school soccer field that usually has cattails and frogs this time of year was dried up. They must have come up with a way to drain the area and it is now not fit for cattails and frogs. I am a little sad.
So did we learn something during this challenge even though we never found any frogs? We benefited from two complete walks looking for frogs in our neighborhood and although we were not “successful”, we did learn more about our local frogs. We took some time to research exactly what kind of frogs we should be looking for in our area. We found that there is a species of frog that is endangered, the California red-legged frog.(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
We enjoyed learning some more information about frogs from the Handbook of Nature Study too and some of the facts are now filed away for future reference.
