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.