Our family is continuing to be blessed by incoporating regular nature observation into our lives!  I encourage you to participate with Barb at The Heart of Harmony.

For our assignment this week, Moms were to read pages 16-17 from the Handbook of Nature Study.  These sections were about the correlation between nature study and language arts and drawing.  My favorite quotes from these sections would be:

"Nature study should be so much a part of the child's thought and interest that it will naturally form a thought core for other subjects quite unconsciously on his part."

"Too much have we emphasized drawing as an art; it may be an art, if the one who draw is an artist; but if he is not an artist, he still has a right to draw if it pleases him to do so.  We might as well declare that a child should not speak unless he put his words into poetry, as to declare that he should not draw because his drawings are not artistic."

Also for this week's assignment we were to take another nature walk and continue to observe nature with our senses.  We decided to take our nature walk on Sunday because the weather forecast for the rest of the week here was very dismal indeed.  Because of going on the weekend, we were blessed to have my "nature lovin" Dad and Aunt join us on our outing.  This time we decided to venture out from our backyard and to a local park.  So after church, we had a lovely lunch together, and then set out on our journey.

The park that we visited is also an arboretum, so we had lots of fun walking the beautiful wooded nature trails and identifying lots and lots of trees.  Two trees that we identified for further study this week were:

Contorted Filbert

(also known as Harry Lauder's Walking Stick or Corkscrew Hazelnut)

The kids were interested in this one because of it's twisty vines and neat seeds.

Honeylocust

Grandpa had tales from when he was younger and would accidently step on the thorns and they would make him sick (ouch)!  Hannah was very interested in the big seed pods.

We had lots of fun listening to the sounds of lots of birds singing such as the Red-Winged Blackbird.  We saw a bunch of them strutting their stuff around a wetland area.  We read in the HNS about how the males return three weeks earlier than the females in the springtime, which explains why they were all males that we saw in the flock.  The kids giggled that they must be preparing themselves to show off for the females when they come.

As we walked along the trail Alex took special notice of lots of old nests from last year.  He wanted so badly to grab one off a tree to take home, but I informed him that birds will sometimes re-use them the next year.  But, he finally got his wish when he found one that had fallen out of the tree.

Along the trail we noticed lots of very large nesting boxes hung in the trees which Grandpa said were probably for Wood Ducks.  Also along the trail we observed many signs of Spring, which was of particular interest to me!

Emerging Daffodils

Tiny Buds

Hannah found a wild violet, of which we brought a small piece home and are currently trying to identify.  We think it may be a Long-Spurred Violet.

You may also notice in the cup that she found an uprooted young Crocus bulb that we are going to try to sprout.

Today both kids decided to do a nature journal entry of the part of our adventure that they enjoyed the most.

Alex drew a picture of a bird's nest.

Hannah journaled about the Contorted Filbert tree.

This morning was the last "sneak peek of Spring" for a while, so I allowed the kids to start bookwork a little later in the day.  They enjoyed making their own bird nests.  Hannah made hers out of moss and mud, and Alex, well he used any natural material he could find!

Ahh, such peace and quiet.