Family Outdoor Hour Challenge Archives

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Barb — 4 Comments

Our Fall Leaf Study – A Lesson in Teen Nature Study

Pressed leaves going into my nature journal (See the November Newsletter for instructions.)

We are finally starting to see some fall colors all over our neighborhood. With our autumn color words in mind, we try to challenge each other to find just the right color words as we drive around town…noticing the crimson, the indigo, the mahogany, and the bronze of the leaves. (Download your own Advanced Fall Color Activity from Hearts and Trees.)

As part of the Leaf Close-Up challenge, Mr. B was happy to come along to gather fall leaves but not too excited about doing the follow-up for this one. His teen attitude was that he knew all there was to know about leaves. I let it go for that day since we had enjoyed spending time together outside and I did not want to spoil the mood.

I waited until another day to try the advanced study work suggested in the challenge which was to make our own slides using the leaves we gathered, looking closer at them using a microscope. As much as I want my teen to continue his nature study, I know that pushing him too hard takes the joy out of it and that is the opposite of my aim in continuing nature study through high school.

It can wait.

Fall leaves with larvae.

So, even though a leaf study was not a great fit for Mr. B, I tried to finish the challenge myself this week, hoping he would join me. Well, right off the bat I needed his help with the microscope. It did not seem to be working so he took a look at it for me but he could not get it going either. That ended another day of trying to get this challenge done.

Then on Friday, Mr. A (my older son who has graduated from high school) was home and I asked him if he wanted to finish up the challenge with me. He actually was eager to participate. He brought his own leaves in and got to work. The image below is a glimpse at his notebook page from the More Nature Study ebook. He ended up using the hand lens instead to view the leaves up close.

Advanced Study notebook page from More Nature Study ebook

This challenge led to a light bulb moment for me.

Mr. B was not interested in this particular challenge but we did enjoy our time together outdoors viewing the trees and leaves. For Mr. B, that was enough.
Mr. A *was* interested in taking a closer look with me at the fall leaves even though he has graduated from homeschool.

Lesson? I am succeeding in keeping my teens interested in nature study. As always, I need to learn to be flexible and allow for personal taste and styles of learning.

For more on that topic make sure to read the article in the November edition of my Outdoor Hour Challenge Newsletter from Ellen Crandall (available to all subscribers to my blog-see the sidebar to sign up). She has a few teens in her home that she is encouraging nature study with each month.

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Barb — 1 Comment

Our October Bird List and Sparrow Study Using the Handbook of Nature Study

As part of our House Sparrow study, we kept track of the tally of birds who have visited our feeders. We have a regular contingency of sparrows but this month the numbers have greatly increased. We saw two kinds of sparrows this month.

House Sparrows

White-Crowned Sparrows

Using the More Nature Study Challenge for House sparrows, we did some research to see what other kinds of sparrows there are in our neighborhood. We did this by going to the Great Backyard Bird Count website, clicking the Explore the Results button at the top, and then entering our town name. This brings up all the statistics from the latest Bird Count – Bird species, number of birds, number of people reporting observations of a particular bird. I found this very helpful. According to the lists, in February there are lark sparrows, song sparrows, house sparrows, and golden-crowned sparrows seen in our town.

Advanced follow-up notebook page from the More Nature Study with the OHC ebook.

We decided to look those particular sparrows up in our field guide and note their field marks just in case we happen to see these three other species sometime in our area. The trouble is that the females all look very similar. We found the What’s That Sparrow? page on the Cornell website very helpful.

Here is the list of other October birds…we were not as diligent this month at recording our birds but I am going to try to keep it as a daily task for Mr. B the whole month of November. 🙂

October 2011
California towhee
Spotted towhee – first ones we have seen since spring at our feeder
White-crowned sparrows – increase in numbers
House sparrows – increase in numbers
White-breasted nuthatch
Oak titmouse
House finches
Turkey vultures – soaring overhead
Mourning doves
Western scrub jays
Lesser goldfinches
American robin
American crow
Anna’s hummingbirds – still coming in numbers to the feeders

Heard our Great horned owl and California quail
Along the road we saw Wild turkeys, Brewer’s blackbirds, pigeons, Canada geese, and a Snowy egret.
There were also several Red-tail hawks and a Cooper’s hawk on a drive to town.

Do any of you participate in the Project FeederWatch Program? It starts the second Saturday in November and I think our family is going to join in this year since we have made a habit of keeping track of our feeder birds anyway. Do you want to join up too? Click over and read all about it! Or watch a video.

We also are submitting this post to Heather’s Tweet and See link-up.

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Barb — 5 Comments

Chipmunks or Squirrels? Our Study Using the Outdoor Hour Challenge

When you spend as much time outdoors as our family does, you eventually come across squirrels and chipmunks. Squirrels are an everyday occurrence in our yard but we do not see chipmunks at all. Chipmunks sometimes find us when we are out hiking, always when you stop to eat a picnic at Yosemite. I think the Chipmunk study as part of the More Nature Study series of Outdoor Hour Challenges will be one that is on-going since we were unable this week to observe any up close.

This past summer we had an experience where we thought we had seen chipmunks but turns out they too were squirrels.

This little rodent was very curious about us as we sat on the granite rock taking a rest after a long hot hike. He was not afraid of us in the least bit, begging a bite of our granola bars. We know better than to feed wild animals but he didn’t understand that people food is not good for him and insisted that he investigate our pack from the inside out.

We thought he was a chipmunk because of the stripes but when we got home and pulled up the field guide we realized he was a Golden-mantled ground squirrel. Our book says he is “medium sized” but we thought he was rather small compared to our other squirrels that we observe in our backyard, the Western gray squirrel and the Fox squirrel.

So how can we tell in the future that what we see IS a chipmunk? They have stripes on their head and our little ground squirrel does not.

Interesting facts:

Traditional hibernator- subject of much research on hibernation.
Eats leaves and seeds of grasses, occasionally eats nuts, roots, bulbs, and other underground plant parts.
Lives in the coniferous forest at elevations of 5,200 to 12,500 feet.
It is prey for hawks, jays, foxes, bobcats, and coyote.
Has cheek pouches for carrying food.
Digs shallow burrows (up to 100 feet) with hidden openings.
Cleans itself by rolling in the dirt.

Since we don’t have chipmunks in our neighborhood but we know we see them all the time when we are at Yosemite. Sounds like a good reason to take the drive soon!

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Barb — 3 Comments

Found My Orb Web!

We were busy pulling all of the dead and brown things out of the garden when I spotted it! The most perfect spider web I have seen in a long time was right next to the hose reel. I actually touched it before I saw it and it startled me.

The sun was shining just right to see most of it in a photo so I ran inside and snapped a few images to share here on the blog. I called Mr. A and my husband over to take a look and we admired the preciseness of the web and we talked a bit about how it was constructed with a frame and then the web spun around and around.

I took the opportunity to see if the inside threads were sticky like we read about in the Handbook of Nature Study.

Isn’t that grand? I love learning new things alongside my boys….

“The radii or spokes, the guy-lines, the framework, and the center of the web are all made of inelastic silk, which does not adhere to an object that touches it. The spiral line, on the contrary, is very elastic, and adheres to any object brought in contact with it. An insect which touches one of these spirals and tries to escape become entangled in the neighboring lines and is thus held fast until the spider can reach it. If one of these elastic lines be examined with a microscope, it is a most beautiful object. There are strung upon it, like pearls, little drops of sticky fluid which render it not only elastic but adhesive.” Handbook of Nature Study, page 440.

Thanks Anna Botsford Comstock for bringing such an amazing detail to our attention. We have a heightened sense of awe over something we have overlooked our entire lives. Now I can rest our web study for the season, unless a new web presents itself.

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Barb — 2 Comments

So Many Webs – So Many Questions

No webs in this image, just a pretty flower.

Looking for spider webs can become a little obsessive. We have been hypersensitive to webs over the past few weeks in anticipation of the Fall Web Challenge, spotting them just about everywhere. Are there always this many webs and is it only because we are focusing on them right now that they seem to pop up in so many places? I guess that is a question we will answer over the next few months. We are in the middle of a huge rainstorm so I am glad that I have been snapping photos as we went along…it is very wet out there today.

We seem to see the most of this kind of web….very filmy and not at all like a web you would draw or think of when the word is mentioned. They seem disorganized and messy, that is until you get up close and really look at the structure.

There they are…the outline lines of the web. We wonder how they get from here to there and back again since the distances are quite far. We could never actually see a spider spinning a web which is now on our list of things to be on the lookout for in the months to come. We could not determine if this was truly a “filmy dome” as described in Lesson 113 of the Handbook of Nature Study.

These photos were all taken in our backyard and were mostly in the crepe myrtle bushes.

See how the web seems to almost encase the leaves and branch? We observed many of these webs in our backyard and although they were a great source of interest, we were disappointed that we didn’t see a pretty orb web. We all decided that this will be a study we save for when the opportunity presents itself, to study a web up-close and maybe, just maybe to see the spider spinning the web.

We are looking forward to this Friday’s challenge….the current rainstorm has started the leaves falling and I even spotted a few colored ones! We did have snow up the road from our house this morning but it has melted already in the rain. This is going to be an interesting autumn.

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Barb — 1 Comment

Searching for Leaf-Miners and Leaf-Rollers

We found quite a bit of leaf damage on the oaks in our backyard…nothing that really looked like leaf-miners though. We looked carefully which is part of what this challenge (More Nature Study #2 Leaf-Miners and Rollers) was all about.Taking time to really look and see the leaves opens up lots of interesting thoughts and ideas. Who caused the damage? Were they nibbled by insects or something else like the birds that frequent our yard?

The preparation work from the Handbook of Nature Study really helped us with this challenge.

We went around to the garden side of the yard and started to look at the shrubs there and we think we found several leaves that had been rolled up by insects. This one looks close to what we were looking for so we are going to assume it is our subject for this challenge. Amazing that I never noticed this leaf-rolling in our own backyard until now! What else am I missing?

Now in the front yard we have a different kind of oak and we were able to see clearly some damage done by some insect…perhaps a leaf-miner. We couldn’t find any leaves that had insects working on them currently but these looked promising enough to bring a few inside to look at under the magnifying lens.

Here is one image (through the magnifying lens) that was super pretty, almost looked like stained glass.When you hold the leaf up to the light as suggested in the Handbook of Nature Study it is even more beautiful. My husband was wondering what I was looking at and I had to share with him too. He was fascinated by our topic and since he spends lots of time outdoors as part of his job, he is going to keep an eye out for some more leaves to look at with the hand lens.

Another image up-close at what we think may be what we were looking for this week.

So there you have it…our leaf-miner and leaf-roller study in our own yard. Amazing that we could find it right under out noses. I think that is the lesson I learned from reading the entries to the Blog Carnival for this challenge from different families…..total amazement that they could even find this subject so close to home.

If you haven’t taken the time to give this challenge a try yet, there is still plenty of time to do so. Make it an investigation after reading the information in the Handbook of Nature Study. Take your magnifying glass with you outdoors to look at the suggested plants (see Lesson 77 in the HNS).

We also observed some oak galls which are covered in Lesson 79 in the Handbook of Nature Study. These are interesting to observe as well and surprising to most that they are actually signs of an insect.

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Barb — 6 Comments

Frogs of the Sierra Nevadas and the Handbook of Nature Study

I was given the opportunity to purchase a 1911 version of the Handbook of Nature Study….with all its well worn pages…all still intact and in very good shape. I jumped at the chance to have as a keepsake the volume in its original form. Thanks Anna Botsford Comstock for caring enough to write these lessons down for all of us that follow you.

My new Handbook is very similar to the current version that I use but what makes it nice is the layout….only one column on a page, original clipart, diagrams, little extra references to books and brochures that probably no longer exist. The charm of this book is how it is still relevant today…..one hundred years later.

Frog Pond

We had the chance to visit Grandpa’s pond last week and since the weather has been so dry, the creek fed pond is getting a little low. There is still a spring underneath keeping it wet enough for the critters that depend on it for water. We were surprised to see all the frog heads with bulging eyes sticking up above the water. They really do blend in except if they move….the duck weed is thick on the top and it makes the frogs look like they have beards.

Where’s the frog?

You need to move slowly or they plop under the water very fast. I was able to zoom in and get a few images of the frog heads for us to look at on the computer screen. We consulted our favorite frog and toad website: California Frogs and Toads. We are fairly sure it is an American Bullfrog…. we are going back later this week and we will take our field guide to confirm the identification.

In the Handbook of Nature Study in lesson 47, the suggestions are all things that we would need to really spend some time investigating and perhaps even catching one and taking a closer look. We decided to narrow our study down to a few things:
#3 Describe the colors and markings of the frog on the upper and on the under side. How do these protect it from observations from above? below? How do we usually discover that we are in the vicinity of a frog?
#4 Describe the frog’s ears, eyes, nostrils, and mouth.
#6 How does the frog feel to your hand? Is it easy to hold him?

Those seem like logical questions to keep in mind when we go back again next week. We will update this entry when we answer the questions.

I look forward to seeing some of your pond studies or any other nature studies you have completed this month. Make sure to submit your entries to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. You can submit your entries by following this LINK.

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Barb — 2 Comments

Dragonfly Study Using the Handbook of Nature Study

Pond study is always a great summertime activity and that is one reason I chose ponds as the theme of the August Newsletter challenges. We spend one day a week at Grandpa’s helping him with yard work and he has a small pond that is spring-fed and we enjoy investigating it when we visit.

Dragonfly in our backyard earlier this summer

We started off our dragonfly study with the dragonflies that visit our backyard everyday during the summer months….some looking like little hummingbirds and others looking like helicopters. We sometimes even have a swarm of dragonflies all at once in our yard and then they disappear.

For the August Newsletter challenge to observe some dragonflies, we visited Grandpa’s pond with the intention of expanding our dragonfly study. He has blue damselflies which are so pretty and before we knew any better, we called them dragonflies. There are some simple differences between dragonflies and damselflies.

Dragonflies land with their wings out and damselflies land with their wings in
Damselflies have wing pairs that match and dragonflies the wing pairs are dissimilar
Dragonfly eyes touch or nearly touch and damselflies have clearly separated eyes

We read in the Handbook of Nature Study about the dragonfly and made some notes on our nature notebook pages. Mr. B drew both the Bluet damselfly and the Red skimmer dragonfly and they will go side by side in his nature journal.

For more information on using the OHC to learn more about dragonflies, you can see OHC #28.

I cannot resist sharing the prettiest dragonfly I ever saw and was able to get a good image for my nature journal. This one we saw when we were in Atlanta, GA a number of years ago. I think he is magnificent!

Dragonfly Link to Lapbook Pieces on HomeschoolShare: Dragonfly Animal Study. If you have little ones you could print out the “What is the difference?”, “Dragonfly Design”, and “Dragonfly Diagram” pieces and include those in your nature journal. What could be easier?

I look forward to seeing some of your pond studies or any other nature studies you have been cooking up this month. Make sure to submit your entries to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. The link is at the top of my blog and on my sidebar.

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Barb — 4 Comments

Summer Weather Observations 2011 – Can You Say HOT?

As part of the July Newsletter Summer Weather Challenge, we looked back to the Summer Series Weather Observation Challenge from last year.

Our roses love the heat and this is our Disneyland Rose…sweet fragrance.

July weather is always hot but this year we have had alternating weeks of HOT and then cooling off to the 80’s. It makes for a nice mix of summer weather. The garden likes the heat but once the temperatures heat up we need to water our garden everyday. We don’t get much in the way of rain in the months of July and August and our heat does not bring any humidity with it.

The mullein this year is really TALL.

The nights are cool so we can expect to have cool breezes sometime in the night that are our natural air conditioning. We do most of our cooking outdoors this time of year, either on the grill or our outdoor oven. This keeps the kitchen cooler and we don’t have to run the a/c.

Front Yard Butterfly Bush and Yarrow Summer

The yarrow, lavender, and butterfly bushes are full of bees.

We decided to complete these two activities from last year’s challenge:

1. Use some of your outdoor time to take temperature readings on your thermometer at sunrise (or early morning), noon, and then again at sunset. Record these temperatures, making comparisons. You can also use your outdoor time to use the suggested observations using your senses as noted in the box above.
2. Get up early and watch the sunrise. Note the place where the sunrises by observing something on the horizon such as a tree, a building, a mountain, or something else that can serve as a landmark for the sunrise. Do the same thing at sundown, finding a landmark to note.

Here are our statistics.
6 AM 59 degrees and 76% humidity
Noon 74 degrees and 52% humidity
4 PM 83 degrees and 32% humidity

Sunrise at 5:53 AM and Sunset at 8:25 PM

Don’t forget to make your own Summer Weather Observations and submit your entry to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival.

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Barb — 4 Comments

Sunflower Garden – July Newsletter Grid Study

Our Sunflower Garden July 17, 2011

Sunflowers are the theme of our garden this year….as anticipated. We planted our seeds on May 10th and they started blooming on July 16th. That is a long time to wait but so worth the time and effort! Now with the July Newsletter focus on sunflowers using the Nature Study Grid and notebooking page, we are slowing down to do some careful observations. This is also made easy by the fact that we are participating in the Great Sunflower Project and counting bees.

Here are the first of our blooms.

Sunflower with lots of pollen!

This is actually not one of the seeds that we planted but it popped up under the birdfeeder. They are a perfect complement to our little backyard feeder garden.

From Renee’s Garden Seeds – Royal Flush. I love the watercolor like colors in this bloom.

Here is another one from Renee’s Garden – Chocolate Cherry. Amazing color in the garden!

I think this is the third seed from Renee’s Garden – Van Gogh.

We found this spider crawling on a big sunflower last week…..he sure blends in.

Here is another image from the volunteer sunflowers around the birdfeeder. If you look carefully, you can see that these are actually two different kinds of sunflowers.

Another bee favorite in our yard is the coneflower. They are rather tall this year and always full of buzzing bees. Coneflowers are on the list of bee attractive plants that you can use as part of the Great Sunflower Project this summer.

How about that bee? He is in our bee balm and loving it. I decided this is a plant that I need to add to more of my flower garden next year.

We have been busy learning some new things and making lots of detailed observations using all of our sunflowers. How about your family? Have you done your July Newsletter sunflower study? I look forward to seeing your entries in the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival.

Jami’s Tuesday Garden Party meme is open from Tuesday to Thursday so there is still time for you to jump in and participate!

Tag: Family Outdoor Hour Challenge