Our family made great memories together one year while noticing and studying Queen Anne’s lace throughout the seasons. Enjoy this beautiful Queen Anne’s lace nature study for your homeschool and see what you notice in each season too!
If you don’t have any Queen Anne’s Lace to observe in person, choose two other neighborhood weeds to study and compare using the ideas in the challenge.
Homeschool Nature Study members will find the suggestions in this challenge a great help in learning about this common wildflower. (Some call it a weed, but I prefer to think of it as a wildflower!) Members: Find this challenge in your Summer Continues Outdoor Hour Challenge curriculum ebook.
Queen Anne’s Lace Nature Study
I suppose it’s the new awareness we have from last year’s summer study of Queen Anne’s lace. Or it could be recent rains. Or it could be that we didn’t really start looking for Queen Anne’s lace until late August of last year. Or it could be a combination of all those factors. Which, likely, it is.
It’s abundant. We point and yell, “Look!” everywhere we drive. Lace lines the roadsides to the north Georgia mountains where we trekked last week. Lacey patches are right across the street – almost as tall as Middle Girl.
“Nature study cultivates in the child a love of the beautiful…”
~ Anna Botsford Comstock, The Teaching of Nature Study
(Above photos of her taken with my phone when we quick pulled off the road).
And Queen Anne’s lace thrilled us in the usual spot we checked back in spring. When we went on a family walk that Sunday night before Memorial Day – there it was!
We scooped a few blooms and brought them home to study up close. To sketch.
We also found a beautiful robin’s egg, right in the middle of the grass, while on our walk. We figured the recent winds and storms may have blown it out of its nest.
Our up close studies helped us appreciate. As I sketched my flower, I noticed the hundreds of little, tiny flowers…
…the umbrella looking underneath, the pink tinges of a young blossom.
The children appreciated the certain color of green, the hairy stems, the dot in the center.
“The chief aim of this volume is to encourage investigation rather than to give information.”
~ Handbook of Nature Study
During sketching we noticed that the outside flower clusters open first, just as the Handbook of Nature Study says.
Queen Anne’s lace makes this mama happy. It reminds me of childhood.
Homeschool Nature Study for Your Family
Join us this summer! Enjoy some deliberate delight with nature walks and simple, joyful learning.
How about you? Is Queen Anne’s lace lining your roadsides?
Tricia and her family fell in love with the Handbook of Nature Study and the accompanying Outdoor Hour Challenges early in their homeschooling. The simplicity and ease of the weekly outdoor hour challenges brought joy to their homeschool and opened their eyes to the world right out their own back door! She shares the art and heart of homeschooling at You ARE an ARTiST and Your Best Homeschool plus her favorite curricula at The Curriculum Choice.
I have listed an linked below many of the summer seasonal studies to get you started. You can start now if wish or you can continue a study you have already begun in a previous season. Many of the challenges have free printable notebook pages for you to use in your nature journal!
