We spent the last week camping.  Homeschooling is great for getting the prime campsites after Labor Day when the rest of the universe has sent the kids back to school!  We fished every single day, and I brought along our copy of The Handbook of Nature Study and we got hooked on fungi. 

We didn't even mean to look at the fungus pages, but once the kids figured out that we could look stuff up in the book they got very excited and started asking me to look up EVERYTHING they saw.  There was a little area behind the trees that was carpeted in mushrooms so we sat in the smoke from the campfire and checked out what Anna (Botsford Comstock) had to say about 'shrooms.  (If you have ever read anything from the HNS, you know that Anna, as we affectionately refer to her, can be quite entertaining.)

That was all it took.  The kids were off - riding their bikes into every single unoccupied campsite - which was nearly all of them - searching for toadstools, puffballs and bracket fungi, and remembering the difference between parasites and saprophytes.  They even drew a few pictures in their nature sketchbooks, along with some fish and caddis fly larvae.

All in all, it was quite an educational trip as well as relaxing.  Jordan caught the biggest fish and we had a fish fry one night.  Now we're back, sunburned and grimy.  I must say, camping is the most effective gentle nature study I've come across yet!

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