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I haven't written a new entry for awhile because we have been very busy preparing to and traveling to China! We arrived on May 9th and will be here until June 14th. I am keeping a travel blog, but will write about some specific nature/homeschool related topics here. Last weekend, we traveled to the town of Suzhou and visited The Humble Administrator's Garden, one of the 4 top gardens in China. It was beautiful, you can see a variety of pictures of it on my travel blog. For this entry, I will focus specifically on the Bonsai section of the garden. One of the many things we learned about was the art of Bonsai. It seems that in the USA, Bonsai is always a certain type of tree and in the miniature form. Our guide told us that Bonsai is basically a potted tree - any size or type. Bonsai is the name which the Japanese use, but the art form actually originated in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). "Penjing is the art of creating a miniature landscape in a container. Not limited to small trees, the artist may use rocks and specially cultivated plants to portray a scene of natural beauty, as though it were a landscape painting." This was a 400 yr old Papaya tree, it probably stood 12-15 ft high. The leaves looked great, but the trunk looked in sad shape!
I liked this one because it looks like it should be huge, but was actually only a couple of feet high!
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This was another of my favorites - a flowering tree! 
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Well, we have had our first reminders that along with spring, beautiful flowers and green trees come ticks! I love living in a wooded area, but the ticks are certainly NOT one of the things I love! We knocked 5 off the screens on the back porch and killed them today, but I tried to get a picture of one first. These are the ticks called dog ticks. If you ever get one stuck on you, you can carefully remove them using tweezers. They attach their mouth parts to your skin, so you can slide the tweezers under them from behind and then carefully pull them straight up without squeezing the tick too hard. Leah had one last year that was attached pretty good and I had to pull some skin off with it, but that's better than leaving any part of the tick in your skin. Here's a great tick identification chart I found. Another pest that seems to always be around are webworms and tent caterpillars. Here's some information I found online, "Whether you are talking about webworms or tent caterpillar, the egg-laying adult is a moth. The webworm makes nests over the ends of branches, while the tent caterpillar makes them at tree crotches. These can be controlled by spraying with dormant oil and lame sulfur in the early spring, just before leaf-out." I took a picture of some tent caterpillars
Another insect currently in our yard is ants - always lots of ants! Did you know that supposedly for every human in the world there are one million ants! As long as they stay outside, they don't bother me. I'm even patient and allow them to enjoy my peonies before they bloom. I used to believe the tale that the ants are needed for the peonies to open, but that's not true. They like the sweet waxy coating on the buds so they feed on it. It doesn't hurt or help the flowers. Someone had given us some painted lady caterpillars to raise. We only had one survive to release, but here is a picture of it in a dogwood tree after we set it free. It was quite high up, but I love the sun shining through it's wings! |
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I have been visiting friends and family in Ohio and the weather has been very dreary, so I haven't done many nature pictures. I did bring along my April/May Birds and Blooms magazine to read. There is an article called "Photograph Your Garden" by Nancy Rotenberg. She has some great quotes that can apply to nature study in general as well as photography. "Be present in your garden and incorporate seeing with mindfulness. Vincent Van Gogh said " If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. " "Observing means incorporating all of your senses to really see." There is another article titled "Behind the Lens" by Lori Dunn. She starts her article saying " Everyone needs an outlet, a way to relax and refresh from the stressful world around us. This is precisely what photography does for me. When I pick up my camera and walk outside, I feel renewed. All the other thoughts and stresses of my day just melt away. Instead, I focus on my surroundings and tune into nature. " I feel exactly like that! I think anyone who gives nature study a good chance will learn that it is relaxing. |
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Spring is definitely here in North Carolina! There are splotches of color scattered where ever you look! Not big - but they're there. Many of these flowers are very tiny and could be missed if one wasn't paying attention as they walked. The past few times we've been out walking, I've been taking pictures of the flowers, so I've gotten quite a few collected. This afternoon, I went for a walk myself, which was supposed to be for exercise, but I made the mistake of taking my camera with me : ) At least I did walk up our drive, which is a hill, so I got a little exercise. I'll start with the tiniest flowers. I'm not positive on what this is, but I think it is Winter Cress. The next one looks similar to what I've always called buttercups, but yet seems a little different - these aren't very plentiful. It was in the open yard. The next one is also new to me, I think it is a rue anemone, I just saw a couple right at the edge of the woods. I can't leave out the bluets, I had some close-ups when we did our study on them a few weeks ago, so here is a group.  And last of all, I really liked this photo of a pine tree.  I hope you enjoy looking at my flower pictures as much as I enjoy taking them! |
We have an area where there is some phlox growing, these are the pale colored flowers, I wish I had some of the bright pink/magenta ones! 
There are at least four different kinds of white and purple wild violets scattered around. I really enjoy the violets, I like the fuzzy looking centers!
That's it for the really small flowers, now for the rhododendron bush - I guess I should've taken a picture of the whole bush, it's beautiful! But, I was too busy following the bees from flower to flower! 
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Many years ago we started our nature box. When we find interesting things that can be saved ( and will fit) they go into the nature box. We have many fragile things, like cicada shells and seed pods, that have to go into small plastic containers for safe keeping. When we find bird feathers, I try to put them in a plastic bag and write where and when we found them and if we know what bird they came from. There are also sweetgum balls, pinecones, "helicopters" from maple trees and acorns. Now, we just have a small tackle box, and outgrew it rather quickly, so we also have a separate insect box, shell boxes from the beach, a box of rocks and we have a few bird nests in plastic bags. Just last week when we were studying the bird feathers, I learned that it is actually illegal to have nests and feathers from songbirds! This is from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. I guess it's not really enforced these days, and we only pick up feathers laying on the ground and nests that have been abandoned and need to be moved. It is good to be aware of it though and teach our children about it. What do we do with these???? Well, they are fantastic for times when you want to do a little nature study and can't get outside. Last week, we had rain for 5 days straight. On her own, Leah got out the nature box and chose an acorn to draw. Afer she finished and showed it to me, I helped her look it up and we found hers to be from a Northern Red Oak. She added the common name and Latin name to her journal entry. So, next time you're out for a walk and the kids (or you) come home with a pocketful of treasures, find a place to keep them safe for future use, you'll be glad you did!
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We have chosen birds as our area to focus on for awhile. As we took our walk around the yard we found two different areas where something had obviously attacked some birds. There were a lot of feathers scattered around an area a couple of feet across. We picked out some of the different types of feathers. There seemed to be mainly three different kinds. We talked about the feathers and thought that since the small, downy ones had the rusty orange color that maybe they were from a robin. The larger flight feathers were gray/black. As always, after handling feathers, we carefully washed our hands after coming inside. Since we thought they were robins, we read about robins from a few different books. We have a beautiful book called Bird Egg Feather Nest by Maryjo Koch that has pictures of many bird eggs, feathers and nests - but we couldn't find anything other than the actual robin. I emailed an Audubon Society list that I'm on and others suggested that these feathers could have also come from a mourning dove, titmouse, or towhee. The next day, we looked at the feathers under the microscope, looked up some information about feathers, learned the names of the feather parts, and then used colored pencils to make our journal pages. Leah was being quite a perfectionist and wasn't happy with hers, so she did it over. I explained to her again that these journal entries did not have to look perfect, that the idea behind a nature study was learning about the object, and when we draw in our journals, we are having to pay very close attention to the details of what we're drawing and will therefore remember it the way it is, whether our pictures actually look that way or not! She decided to tape an actual feather at the bottom of her page, so I did the same.
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It has been a fun 2 weeks of following the Iditarod. Yesterday the final musher reached Nome. He was given the Red Lantern Award to signify the end of the race. The winner this year, and for the third consecutive year, was Lance Mackey from Alaska. He finished the race in 9 days, 24 hrs and 38 minutes. The last musher in was Timothy Hunt, from Michigan. He finished the race in 15 days, 14 hours, and 6 minutes. Leah's letter, which was part of the trail mail project I mentioned in the earlier Iditarod post, was carried by Cim Smyth who finished 5th. Leah had chosen to follow Jen Seavey, who was racing a "puppy team" and finished 43rd. I was following Jeff Holt who scratched in Grayling. There were some really bad storms along the trail, and 15 of the original 67 mushers were not able to finish the race. I still look at them with GREAT respect for even getting to the point where they gave it a try! Leah made a graph of the mushers ages - very interesting! She made this graph on this website. She also made a wooden dog sled out of popsicle sticks, only since we don't have many toy dogs in our house, she turned it into a sled being pulled by cats! Leah also did a special Iditarod Reading Challenge, reading a minute for each mile of the Iditarod. She reached her goal of 1150 minutes in 14 days. Two of the books she read on her own were Adventure in Alaska by S. A. Kramer (story of Libby Riddles, the first woman to win the Iditarod) and The Mystery on Alaska's Iditarod Trail by Carole Marsh. Together we read Black Star, Bright Dawn by Scott O'Dell. We will continue studying Alaska in preparation for our trip there this summer and we will be looking forward to the 2010 Iditarod!! |
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I didn't have time to write yesterday, so I'm catching up! We had our Charlotte Mason group yesterday. We finished up our study on Johannes Vermeer by taking a closer look at the painting "Girl With a Pearl Earring." These kids amaze me with the things they "see" in the paintings we study. It is definitely a wonderful way to get kids to really "look" at things! We had our normal poetry recitation time, the kids can choose to recite a poem they've written or pick one from a book. Then we got into the nature study, which is organized by Miss Tenley. She does a GREAT job (Thanks Tenley : )) This time, she brought two different kinds of violets, enough so each child had one to study closely. They all sat on the floor in a circle and talked about the violets, sharing some information she had previously researched. Then the kids (and some moms) sat with their violets and watercolors or colored pencils to record their study in their nature journals. Some kids rush through it, others take their time, but they are all learning and showing great progress. The idea of a nature study is NOT how artistic your page looks, but that you have have learned something about that object which you will remember! After studying the object for 10-15 minutes (or however long it takes) and recording in your way the details that stand out to you, an individual is going to remember what they have studied! In Eve Anderson's Nature Study video, she says that when a child looks back at their journal entry, they will see the image of the "real" object in their minds. Here is a picture of Leah's journal page when she was almost finished. Afterwards, when the kids were having lunch, one of the moms who is an artist, gave me a lesson on blending the colored pencils (Thank you Tina!), so I'm looking forward to a chance to try what she taught me. I will write about our resluts when I can.
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I purposely plan much of our nature studies, but it's thrilling when something a little out of the ordinary happens in daily life. Friday afternoon, as we were entering a building on an errand, Leah spotted an oppossum on the walkway ahead of us. It ran along a row of bushes until it found an opening to run into. Other than the unfortunate roadkill we see, we don't see oppossums very often, so it was exciting. These are normally nocturnal animals, so I'm not sure why it was out in the afternoon. When we got inside, Leah asked for her sketch pad (I carry small ones in my purse) and sat down and made a journal entry. I am always thrilled when she does this without my asking her to! It's kind of like a pat on the back, so I thought I'd share her page. In our area, in the past week, an abundance of flowering trees have burst into bloom. They are absolutely beautiful and I don't have any in my yard, so I was wishing I could get a little closer to some to try and identify them. Well, at the same building where we saw the oppossum, they were trimming the trees and there were a bunch of branches on the ground. We picked through and found a handful to bring home. I put them in a vase and am thoroughly enjoying them! I couldn't figure out what they were from my ID books, so I got online and found out that they are Bradford Pear blossums. This is a tree in the pear family that does not bear any fruit. |
Now I'm curious what the pink ones I've seen are????|
We actually took our walk yesterday. We ventured into the woods again, checked again for the frogs, but didn't see any this time. The creek was running much better this week as we had some recent rain. We noticed some buds on the trees, which is right on time since tomorrow is the first day of spring! Near the house, we watched quite a few birds (see previous post). The yard has burst with tiny little flowers. There were five different kinds we saw. These tiny little white ones were on stems already 6 inches high. We think they might be Hairy Bittercress, but I'm not positive yet. There were quite a few dandelions already and it was really interesting looking at this picture. I love the little curlies inside! Leah chose to draw the bluets in our journals, she thinks they are really pretty and I have to agree! My mother had just been visiting and told us what these are. We didn't have time for our drawing yesterday, so we went back out today and sat on a blanket in the yard, surrounded by bluets, and drew! We read about bluets in both the Handbook of Nature Study and The Burgess Flower Book for Children. We opened up a flower to look inside for the anthers and pollen. You can see the bright yellow pollen where it was down inside of the tube. It was just a tiny speck, but as the bee in Thornton Burgess's book said " I love them for the sweetness that is in the heart of each." Lean drew quite a few different views of her: I kept mine much simpler, adding some notes from our reading. |
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Today was a beautiful day outside and I think that the birds all decided that it must be spring! We have been watching the bluebirds for a couple of weeks already. They have just been "hanging out" by the house, but in the last few days, the female started bringing nest building materials. Yesterday, another pair decided they wanted the same nest, but it seems we're back to one pair today. Last year we had a pair raise two broods in this house, but we missed seeing any of them fledge - they left early in the mornings before we were up. This birdhouse is right outside of our sunroom window where we can keep a very close eye on it. The cats love to sit on the shelf and watch also.
There are eight of these windows that stretch across the sunroom, with small trees at either end for the birds to rest in, and our feeders centered a little ways out in the yard. We love just standing at the windows and watching! Here are some other pictures I've taken in the past couple of days from the sunroom. The first is a male cardinal and a goldfinch dining together at the sunflower seed feeder.
Next is a female cardinal and a goldfinch sitting in a tree together.
I love this little chickadee!
Earlier today, I noticed our cat, Gracie, watching out the basement window. I looked to see what she was watching and realized that there was a carolina wren working on building a nest in one of our folding chairs sitting outside the door! I couldn't get a great picture, but you can see it sitting on the back of the chair with a leaf in it's beak. We watched the pair come and go for awhile, then I went out and peeked in and took this picture of the nest. Unfortunately, we had to move the chair because it was right in front of the garage door, but we kept it as close as possible, so hopefully they'll find it again. While we were watching the wrens, we noticed another pair! These were some birds I didn't recognize, but after looking in the guide books, we decided that they are Eastern phoebes. I didn't see where they were going, but they were certainly sticking around. We'll see in the next few days if they decide to also build a nest here!
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Yesterday, Leah wanted to take our walk for challenge #2 in the woods. We did good being quiet as far as not talking, but all of the leaves and sticks on the ground were very noisy as we walked through them! We heard, saw, and felt many things, but Leah chose to use "snapping" for what we heard - this was the sticks we stepped on. We saw a "winding creek" and felt "smooth, hard nuts." She spent quite a bit of time picking up the nuts, which were hickory nuts. After we came inside, we looked to see what type of hickory nuts they were, but couldn't decide for sure without knowing exactly which tree they came from (to see the bark and leaves). She surprised me with what she decided to describe for this! In my eyes we saw so much other stuff that was more interesting to me - and those things were what I took pictures of! So, I'm just going to share some other things. When we first went outside, we heard a lot of birds, and one was a red shouldered hawk, which we had learned to recognize last spring. It landed in a tree, quite high up, but I was able to get this picture which I zoomed in on. The other thing we heard was frogs - croaking very loudly from in the woods, so we followed the sound to the creek. It was so noisy walking in the leaves, that the frogs all got quiet as we approached, so we sat down and waited awhile. I finally spotted this one frog and took it's picture. He was only about an inch long. We had to email an expert for help, but it is a northern cricket frog. We need to get better at identifying things! Then we walked around the yard a little, we haven't seen any deer in the yard for quite awhile, and I was wondering where they had been, well, by looking at all of the tracks in the "new" mud near the salt lick, they've definitely been here even though we haven't actually seen them! We have many more things blooming, another kind of daffodil, some crocuses (which felt soooo velvety), hyacinths and the forsythia bush.  |
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Every other Monday we meet with our CM homeschool group for what we call Poetry in the Park. We usually have artist study, poetry recitation, nature study and Shakespeare. Today we had a guest poet/entertainer and everyone really enjoyed him. He did a little bit of everything, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", and had some of the kids act out Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky! Then he was the mc for the poetry recitation. We have been studying Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer, the Dutch artist from the 1600's, and studied his painting "The Music Lesson." We have already done 3 others, and will do one more in 2 weeks. His use of light is very interesting, if you've never seen his paintings, here is the one we studied today: http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vermeer/vermeer12.html . The instrument that the young lady is playing is called a virginal, a type of harpsichord. We didn't have nature study today since we had our guest. Since we have been meeting indoors through the cold weather, we have been studying seeds and seed sprouts.
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Have you ever shared in the excitement of following a musher and his sled dog team across over 1100 miles of Alaskan terrain?? It's quite exciting and the 37th annual race started yesterday! If you go to www.iditarod.com, you can see what it's all about. I have followed the race with my older daughters in the past and this will be the second year following it with Leah. Last year she did her 4-H presentation on the Iditarod and we visited the kennels of Tom Roig, a musher in Ohio who has participated in the Iditarod twice. This year we are particpating in the eiditarod project, http://surfaquarium We made a large Alaska map on an old sheet and are using it as a tablecloth. We have some magnets (actually cats - but can pass as sled dogs) which we will use to keep track of where the mushers are along the trail. We also have forms we will fill out daily to track their journeys.
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The past few days we have been reading about American goldfinches and we did our nature journal pages about them today. They are also called wild canaries and thistle birds and their Latin name is Carduelis tristis. Adults can be up to 5 inches long. The males are bright yellow in the summer with a black cap on their head, black wings and tail. In the winter they look like the females, a drab yellowish brown or olive with dark wings and tail. I'm wondering if the males lose their black caps in winter? That's kind of what the info made it sound like. I will email a bird list I'm on and ask. They are usually found in small flocks and live in open areas w/shrubs & trees, farms, suburban yards and gardens. They love birdbaths or other containers of water for bathing and drinking. They like to eat thistle/niger/nyger seed, sunflower seed, dandelion seed, many other plant seeds, insects and insect larvae. I personally know they LOVE catnip seeds! Living in OH a few years ago, I had planted catnip and let it go to seed and I always had an abundance of goldfinch feeding there! I will have to look for those pictures! They don't build their nests until July, August or September (because of the food source availibility for the young). The nest is a well-built cup woven of plant fibers, including fine grasses, bark strips, moss and even caterpillar webbing. It is then lined with thistledown. The female lays 3-7 light blue eggs, incubation is 12-14 days, 11-15 days until they fledge, and they have 1 or 2 broods a year. They have a "roller coaster" flight pattern, looking as if they are flying over invisible hills, and they can fly and sing at the same time. I found a poem which I added to my journal page.
Leah wasn't in a drawing mood, so I printed her a page from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology bird coloring book. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/schoolyard/T_Resouces/color_book.html
I have been enjoying working in my nature journal using Eve Anderson's dry brush technique. The pages I've done so far have been from looking at the real object, but I decided to do my page from the picture I had taken on Monday. Compared to how I normally draw a bird - I was thrilled with how it turned out! I outlined in light yellow first, so I could make my final adjustments without them showing. I also like to write notes on my page, I included much of what I've written above.
I saw this goldfinch at the empty feeder this morning and snapped it's picture - I thought the wings were beautiful! I guess there must have been a few remaining seeds to keep it there.
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I have been wanting to start the Outdoor Hour Challenges from the Handbook of Nature Study blog for quite some time. Although we do some nature study, I want to get more regular at it, and Barb has done such a wonderful job putting this together for everyone to use! Now that I have my blog started, I figured we might as well start the challenges! We couldn't have picked a better day to start! We had our ONLY real snowstorm of the year last night. It was beautiful this morning - and we were all drawn out into it. We have been studying weather, so had to check out the sky. When we first went out, the sky was still very stormy looking. It started to clear up. By the time we were ready to come inside (2 1/2 hours later) the sky was gorgeous! There were a lot of birds at the feeders and while we were out, a goldfinch flew into the window. It sat in the snow for almost 1/2 an hour before flying to a tree, we felt bad for it, but had a great opportunity for close viewing! Once we knew the bird was OK, we decided to walk around some. We don't actually see many rabbits here, but we found tracks leading right up to the back steps! Then we went into the woods and found what I think were some deer tracks. I know them easily in the mud - but am not so sure in the snow! |
We also found tracks in the driveway -
There were a lot of bird tracks scattered around.
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I have thought about starting a blog for quite some time now and the mixture of many things has finally made it happen! I am excited! I'm doing this to have a place to record the things happening in life here in the "cove." I believe that everything we do in life is educating our children in some way. Although we have a certain time to do the "3 R's," and count official school time, I think that it is the other times in life that are even more important. These include time spent with God, family and friends, being outdoors and enjoying everything in our natural world, working together, reading good books, watching movies worthy of our time, caring for pets, making things, helping others, making learning a lifelong adventure! This is my 12th year of homeschooling, and I am constantly learning new things - and hope I will continue to until I leave this world! These are all the things I plan to share in this blog. |