We have officially finished up on our cloud study!  Here are some miscellaneous things we’ve done recently to finish up.

Bible Devotion:

We read Matthew 17:1-8 (The Transfiguration) – again God chose to appear in a cloud.  One look in a concordance and I was amazed at how many verses there were to do with clouds; and especially God appearing in them (invisible to man, made visible through nature)

Art Studies:

We sat in front of our computer and went through Amanda's Clouds in Art Show.  First the kids picked their favorite painting from the show and filled out the notebook page; and then they put their hand to trying their version of that picture.

Alex’s Version of Lawren Harris – Clouds, Lake Superior

Hannah’s Version of Claude Monet – Water Lilies (The Clouds)

Also, Hannah and I completed another art assignment from the book Monet and the Impressionists for Kids, by C. Sabbeth called “Painting the Shimmering Sky”.  We used crayon to make cloud images in the background.  And then we painted over the background with watercolors (the wax clouds resisting the watercolor).  Also we filled in the grass with watercolor.  Then, on a separate piece of paper we sketched non-detailed images of a person of our choice and colored it in with either crayon or colored pencil, cut it out and glued it to our background.  Hannah, of course, chose Wonder Woman, well at least she put her in an elegant skirt!

Vocabulary and Science:

We have been keeping up with some cloud vocabulary, our latest focus being the word “condensation”.  I had them write the word and definition in their absolute best handwriting. 

And then we did two different quick demonstrations of how condensation happens:  1)  blew hot air from our mouths onto a cold spoon, and 2) poured an ice cold glass of lemonade and observed the glass sweating.

We have also been continuing to periodically fill out our Cloud Identification Pages.  And I’ve gotten myself in the habit of asking the kids what type of clouds are out each opportunity that I have, whether on a nature study, or even driving in the car.  Often, they've been bringing it up to me!

We read more from Take a Cloud Walk.  Most recently we read the section on hail, and completed the yummy demonstration of how hail forms using chocolate covered strawberries.

 I think this was the kid’s favorite demonstration!  I just left them for a minute, Ridiculous!!!

Math:

Alex did a math activity to reinforce grouping and counting by tens.  He took an outline of a water droplet that had 100 smaller droplets on the inside.  He first gave his estimate of how many droplets he thought were in the drop.  And then he circled groups of tens and then counted them up to see how many there actually were.

Language Arts (Creative Writing):

Hannah wrote story about her favorite type of cloud.  I got her started using the following sentence:

Once upon a time there was a (type of cloud) cloud named __________.

Photography:

And, we’ve continued to take more photos of different types of clouds to add to our nature journals.  Here are a few of our recent additions!

 This photo has numerous cloud types

(cirrus, altocumulus, and stratocumulus were the ones we could see)

Cumulus Clouds - Fair Weather!

Stratus Clouds (Fog)

To see my original post, click Clouds Unit Study.

This morning was such a simple and beautiful morning.  The air was still a bit crisp from the cool night, fog was hovering in the valleys, dew was still dripping from the grass, and the sun was just beginning to creep it's way through the trees in distance on the horizon bringing with it the promise of a stunningly beautiful day.

And little did we know, it would be more alive with nature than we've ever seen before!  First thing after breakfast, my coffee cup had barely rested on the table for a moment, when Alex, fully dressed (including gardening gloves), asked begged to me to go and observe his vegetable garden.  I managed to hold him off long enough for Mr. Sun to rise a little higher, and then we set off into the backyard to check on our little plants.

After checking on our plants, which were doing quite good (well most of them), we headed down further in our yard by the landing at the creek.  I can't quite explain it, but there was just something different out there this morning.  Two days of spring rains had made everything the most beautiful green I think I've ever seen.  And the birds seemed to be singing in perfect tune, a simply mesmerizing song.  It was quite an inspirational scene.

That's when Alex and I began looking around and noticing new things.  First we found that a newly identified wildflower was sprouting up all over.  We gathered some Philadelphia Fleabane which we brought in with us after our walk.

Then Alex, before I even knew what he was doing (I was too busy being mesmerized), turned over a rather large rock and began jumping up and down with excitement.  He had found a really large cricket, and a neat looking centipede which we later, after observation, identified as a Stone Centipede; quite commonly found under rocks in Kentucky.

Then something super neat caught our eyes.  There was a small colony of ants with their eggs that were in panic mode trying to move all their eggs.  I took a quick video on my camera.

No sooner than we had returned the rock to where it was, we noticed the cutest little Eastern Chipmunk sitting very close by on a dead tree trunk in a brush pile.  I was amazed that he let me get pretty close to take a photo before he ran off.  Click on the below image and hit full size to see the cutie closer. 

So next, two friends of mine, Cindy and Melissa, had both recently seen Baltimore Orioles.  And I was just saying how I do not ever see them around my house.  Well, you guessed it, a male and a female both landed just about directly over me in a tree for just a split second belting out their beautiful songs and then flying off.  I sure wished they would have hung around long enough for me to get a picture!  I just kept seeing flashes of orange flittering from tree to tree in the distance.  You can imagine my son was nearly waking up the rest of the neighborhood with his unbridled excitement through all of this!

And the ultimate icing on the cake of the morning, was when we headed back inside to upload our photos and videos, I was looking out our side window at the edge of the woods and saw what I thought was a medium to small-sized dog standing there.  Well, I was wrong, upon closer observation, look what it was!!!

A Red Fox!!  I only saw him at a distance, but oh how cute!  Without realizing that the window was opened I screamed for the kids to come see.  Well, evidently he's got pretty good hearing because he took off quite quickly before anyone else had a chance to see.  This was the first time I was the one responsible for scaring off nature and not my kids!  And this is the first time I've seen one of these, but I now know they live back here in the woods.

My husband was at that point, from all the noise, thinking somebody must be hurt! LOL  I simply said, "Nature is alive this morning!"

Update on Spore Prints!  5/10/08 - They are so cool!  Those are thousands of tiny spore particles that the mushroom shed from their gills overnight!  We did spray them with a clear polyurethane and that worked quite well too.  You can rub right over them and they are preserved.  We are adding them to our nature journals.

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 Original Post:

Once again, God's creation allured us into study.  After two days of rainy, wet and cool weather, the mushrooms have made their grand appearance in and about and all around the outside of our house.  This morning, my son exclaimed "Cool, look at all the musrooms!"   And so toadstool school commenced.  This photo is just a small portion of them in our landscaping.

We found them around and under rocks, around and under the drain pipe, and playing "peek-a-boo" from under the concrete by our front porch.

It was simply amazing how many there were.  I think they are so neat looking.

So of course we were obliged to slip on our gardening gloves and gather a handful for study!

The Handbook of Nature Study has an absolutely wonderful and full of great information section on mushrooms.  We learned folklore about mushrooms:  toads love to sit on them (toadstools) which of course was very fitting for our up and coming toads, and that fairies use them as umbrellas.  While observing them, we learned the different shapes and types of mushrooms and identified these as convex, we learned the different parts of mushrooms from the cap to the gills to the stem and to the Mycelium (roots).  We learned that spores, which mushrooms produce by dropping out of their gills, are like their "seeds" which are carried away on the wind to create new mushrooms.

We saw that some of them had a filmy white covering over the gills.  And got a giggle out of this family of five, just like us!

Then the kids first choose out a special one they would use for journaling, and then the fun part that my son just could barely wait for.....dissection!

We took some and split them right down the middle to observe.

Then we set about to try a really neat project of making Spore Prints.  We took two flatter looking mushrooms (ones that the gills were nice and flat), cut the stems off, and placed them on pieces of white cardstock.

We covered them with bowls and set them on our nature table to sit overnight.

If all goes well, in the morning we should have nice little spore prints from where the mushrooms have deposited them on the paper.  You would normally need a compound microscope to see most spore features but spore color can be seen by the naked eye with the help of a spore print!  If they turn out well, I read somewhere that you could take a clear polyurethane spray to preserve them for your journals.  If they work well, I will add a photo to this post in the morning.  Oh, and we found two more mushrooms in our back yard that were a different kind, plane shaped, so we cut the stems from them and added them to our spore sheet too.

And last but not least a Plant Journal page was filled out, noting the size, parts and characteristics of the mushroom.

Helpful Websites:

What is a Mushroom?

Mushroom Identification

Mushroom Diagram

We also finished up our Clouds Unit Study today!  I'll hopefully be able to pull that final post together for this weekend.

In all places then and in all seasons,

Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings,

Teaching us by most persuasive reasons,

How akin they are to human things.

- Longfellow

The above passage, which was quoted in The Handbook of Nature Study, gave such inspiration to me when I read it.  I know this week's Green Hour Challenge was to begin focus on garden flowers, and I'll get to that too, but if I may, I'd like to take a small detour first.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been spending much time exploring in our backyard and around the edge of the woods and finding and identifying wildflowers.  This was a new nature subject area for us, something we'd never taken such careful notice of.  But with the onset of spring, and with new eyes, my children and I have been seeing them emerging and bursting forth as if carrying a message of hope from their Creator for a new season.

Wild Blue Phlox - Backyard by Creek

"The only right way to begin plant study with young children is through awakening their interest in and love for flowers."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 453

Being in nature continues to provide beautiful moments for my children and I.  Even this evening, my son with wide-eyes and excitement, came carrying a newly found wildflower for us to observe and attempt identification. "Quick Mom, it's a new wildflower, do you know it's name?" he asked.

"The points to be borne in mind are that children like to call things by their names because they are real names, and they also like to use "grownup" names for things; but they do not like to commit to memory names which to them are meaningless."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 456

I believe that if I had just handed my children a list of wildflowers with their photos and names and asked them to carve them into memory, I would have surely been disappointed with their lack of interest and their lack of abilities to remember any of them.

But by learning them one by one "on the hunt", smelling and feeling the petals, observing their beauty, using our guides to identify them, and collecting some of them for pressing, my children can tell you the names of each of the 7 so far that we have identified without any help from me.  And I wasn't even attempting for them to memorize them!  Just the other night, driving home, my daughter excitedly piped out "Mom, look at all that beautiful Field Mustard, the whole huge field is yellow!"  Yes, she remembered and she noticed!

Field Mustard - Backyard by Creek

To see more of our wildflower photos click Nature Photos ~ Spring's Beauty.

Ok, back to our main focus for this week's Green Hour Challenge.  When I think of garden flowers, I'm immediately transported in my mind to my parent's house.  So that's exactly where we took our garden flowers outside time of observing.  I jokingly call my parents "The King and Queen of Flowers"!  They have a simply beautiful property full of dozens of different kinds of garden flowers.  I think both of my parents were born with green thumbs.  We took over 50 photos!  But I'll only share a handful here!  Here are some of the beautiful flowers we observed:

"...every child should feel that every seed planted is a living thing and that it is struggling to grow..."

- Handbook of Nature Study, pg. 455

Bleeding Hearts

 Iris

Tulips (they have multiple varieties of these, but only a few have their blooms still)

Blue Forget-Me-Nots

Some type of special tulip (I can't remember the name right now which seems quite funny that the last flower was a forget-me-not! lol)

Blue Phlox

And my personal favorite garden flower!:

Lily of the Valley - Could there be any sweeter smell in the world!

See the tiny bells?!

Here are some other things we observed:

My parent's beautiful walkway with arbor

Purple Martin House - they were flying all overhead but wouldn't stay still enough for a photo! My Dad was talking to us about how social of a bird they are.  They would swoop down almost like they wanted to land on us.

 My Dad's Barlett Pear tree, this is one of many fruit trees he raises.  For all my childhood I remember my Dad's love of growing fruit trees.  I remember camping out under the starlight in the middle of his mini orchards!

 See the tiny pears forming?

More wildflowers we found there.  We've identified the yellow as some type of wild strawberry, we were unable to identify the purple one yet.

For our challenge we were to pick a flower to focus on.  Today, on the school agenda we will look at all our photos and pick a flower, read a small bit from the Handbook and observe more closely the photos we took and then make a journal entry as well.

Also this last week, we built and planted our raised garden beds, you can read about our experience  with that at Gardening ~ Raised Beds and Perennials.  And finally, Hannah started some perennial seeds indoors and we are anxiously awaiting being able to plant them outdoors!  They are doing quite well.  Almost all of them have sprouted.

Thank you for joining me for my Green Hour Challenge!  Please inspire yourself and your children by joining in on the nature adventures with Barb at Handbook of Nature Study.

I've been taking so many nature photos lately I just have to stop and make one post full of some of my favorites!

Our first male Ruby-Throated Hummingbird of the season

 (click and hit full-size for a better view of this little fella)

The landing in our backyard by the creek donning is lovely spring green!

Wildflower: Blue Phlox

~ These are so amazing beautiful and have the most sweet smell.

Wildflower: Purple Dead Nettle

~ The absolute most abundant in our backyard.

Wildflower: Spring Beauty

~ Lining the bottom of the woods floor.  Named so appropriately, they are truly delicate and beautiful.

Wildflower:  Field Mustard

~ Quite frequently seen in great numbers painting whole fields yellow.

Wildflower: Garlic Mustard

~ Also quite common.  Take the leaves and rub them in your hands and smell and you'll find out why it's called garlic!

Wildflower: Common Blue Violet

~  Dotting the earth with little purple dainty beauties.

Close-up of Common Blue Violet

We have been busy pressing every new wildflower we find.  They are currently still in their books now!  When they are finished we will be adding them to our nature journals complete with labeling.

Pressing Violets and Garlic Mustard

American Robin's nest with one little "robin-egg" blue egg.

Magnificent old oak (on my parent's property)

Wildflower:  Dandelion

My favorite "flower"

Garden Flower:  Purple Phlox

~ Champion spreader!

Beautiful creek after a spring rainfall.

Wildflowers of Kentucky:

Kentucky Wildflowers

Wildflowers of Kentucky

Our little toad tadpoles are still growing like crazy!  We can now see the little gills on the sides of their bodies that will later be feet.

Here you can see their size in comparison to a dime.

I just checked out a great book from the library:

Toad by the Road, by J. Ryder

~ A Year in the Life of These Amazing Amphibians

It put the life cycle of a toad through the four seasons into beautiful and sometimes funny poetry verse, giving facts at the bottom of the pages.  Great!

For all my posts on our toad eggs and tadpoles click Amphibian Study.

This is a really neat and fun experiment that my daughter asked to do today.  She remembered it from a library program she attended a couple of years ago.  I decided to let her get a little "in front of the camera" experience and walk us through the experiment.  After all she's the one who knew how to do it!

For detailed instructions and the how and whys of the experiment go to Tie-Dyed Milk Experiment.

We are also doing the fun experiment to find out how plants and flowers give themselves a drink of water, by putting white daisies into water tinted with food colors.  If it works, in a day or so we should have red, blue, yellow and green daisies!