Despite our early Spring blizzard which resulted in near 15 inches of snow on Saturday, we still managed to complete our Green Hour Challenge this week!  Yes, today we bravely donned our winter coats, hats, and mittens and met some dear friends at a local park to have a nature walk.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me begin with Objective #1.  This week we were to read pages 10-11 and pages 13-15 of our Handbook of Nature Study.   My favorite quote was from The Field Notebook section:

"The book should be considered the personal property of the child and should never be criticized by the teacher except as a matter of encouragement; for the spirit in which the notes are made is more important than the information they cover."

Wow, did that quote ever USED to apply with me!  I'm happy to say that through the Lord's "gentle" training, I've recently been taught to allow my children to freely express themselves in their nature journals; without the fear of Mom's evil glances.  I notice that when I back off and simply encourage my children to draw and journal about what's important to them from our walks, and in accordance with their interests, that's when I see their faces light up with enthusiam over their work.  I find this enthusiam naturally leads them to pursue things in more detail later.

And for Objective #2, we were to pick a nature study area to focus on for the next 6-8 weeks.  After looking through the HNS, I presented my children with a few options, and they chose to study birds.  Last year we studied birds for awhile using Apologia Science, but this will be a nice review and a chance to learn further.

After speaking with them about our plans to study birds in more detail again, Hannah immediately got busy (on her own AND on the weekend too!) looking through all my old Birds and Blooms magazines and cutting out pictures of birds that she liked.  She proceeded to paste them onto a poster board and label them with my LetraTag labeler, which I gladly lent her!

After she cut out all her pictures she realized that there were a few that we didn't know the names of, so she had to look them up in The Backyard Bird Lover's Field Guide.

The end product was beautiful!  Alex's favorite was the baby robins.

Ok, on to Objective #3 - our nature walk!  For our walk this week, we were to use our chosen area of focus and spend some time on that during our walk.  As I said, we met some friends at a local park in hopes of walking on their asphalt trails and observing and listening to the birds.  Even though there was lots of snow still on the ground, it was sunny and the temps were actually not too cold.  When we got there we quickly realized that the park workers hadn't had a chance yet to clean the snow off their paths very well!  Imagine a nature crazy Mom trying to push a stroller in the snow and ice!  But what do determined homeschool Moms do?...Improvise!

We decided to still take our walk, but we'd just have to stay on the main car paths.  At the end of the street we paused for about 10 minutes to do some general teaching about birds.  We read some of the introduction to studying birds in the HNS and had a GREAT discussion from that.

And also we focused on and read about the Northern Cardinal, which I was surprised that Ms. Comstock referred to them as "Cardinal Grosbeaks" not Northern Cardinals (made a note to look up when and why the name changed).

We were having a great dicussion about Cardinals when a male graced us with it's appearance by flying right overhead (thank you Lord)!  After that, we had them be very quiet for a few moments to listen for birds.

On our way back to our cars we heard a bunch of birds making a ruckous and immediately identified them as Killdeer.  They are the only bird that we have that sounds like a seagull.

For Objective #4, we are supposed to follow up our walk with discussion and research in our focus area. I plan on doing further reading in the HNS and other things with the kids on their two chosen birds of interest:  the Northern Cardinal and the Red-Tailed Hawk.  And also we will begin a review discussion about feathers and flight.  And perhaps we will also complete a journal entry (Objective #5) on what they have learned this week.

Oh, my new Birds and Bloom magazine just arrived in the mail, perfect timing.  It will have to wait until after dinner is served!