Nature Detectives Countdown!!

Nature Detectives has a really cool Advent Calendar download. This is an image of it but you have to go to the site and have them email it to you because it is interactive. You click on an ornament each day for a fun little activity most are nature based so we will most likely be joining some of these.

Skyler and her plants again

This week we read The Empty Pot by Demi. Skyler really wanted to see if she could grow a cooked seed so that is what we did. She also worked in her little plant activity book that came from a Magic School bus monthly club and we read some more in the plant chapter of Our Fathers World Science. We played a game that I made out of a bulletin board set called Plants On Your Plate and she really enjoyed that.

Here she is getting ready to put her seeds in the oven. While they cook we are going to go out behind the barn and get some dirt.

She was really cute digging for dirt. She is such a tomboy princess LOL.

Seeds turn black when you cook them, didn't know that but then again, why would I ever have cooked a seed before?

The little Plants Activity book and her Plants On Your Plate game.

Doing a page in her Our Fathers World Science. She had to draw her fave fruit and fave flower. She is really taking to drawing and coloring lately.

These are little Window Greenhouses I bought years ago and packed away and never used. Well we filled them with green bean seeds and popped them in the window of our school room. She is having so much fun with the plant study. I think starting all the nature stuff is what turned her to it. She does not miss Winterpromise Animals and Their Worlds at all. I love WP but if it is not a good fit for the kids then it is time to change it up! Of course there are tons more really cool pics on the other page if you wanna check those out.

Our Nature Escapade this week

Well we started out on the hunt for some spider webs so we could freeze them on some paper. It is a little project I found online that I knew the kids would enjoy. You take some black cardstock holding it behind a spider web while you spray with aerosol hairspray. The spider web sticks and there you have it! Sounded really neat. Sadly, due to the rain and wind we didn't find any. So our hunt for webs turned into a hunt for mushrooms! We find alot none on the ground but a ton on the trees. We found so many colorful ones and it is really funny I noticed that I could have went for a walk about a year ago and I never would have noticed. I don't know if they would have noticed either but we do now and that is all that matters! Of course we took a ton of pictures! That of course we wanna share with anyone who will look!

The kids had zero interset in trying to identify them.

They just thought they were really cool to look at LOL.

To see more pics of nature and our week 7 of school check out the pic album. They have so much fun going out and exploring. The funny thing is the nature area we usually go to is behind a park and they rarely ever ask to actually go to the park. They are more concerned with what they are going to find that day. What are they going to see and what can they bring home! Fox really wanted to bring home a tree, I said that probally wasn't gonna happen and not to mention we have about a dozen in our yard anyway. They also like to look for covered holes in the ground and wonder what could maybe be living in there? Fox and me have also started a game with each other called Where are we? We were at Walmart the other day pretending we were in the artic. You should have seen the guy in frozen food when Fox loudly stated Mom look out theres a polar bear. The dude actually looked. Never a dull day with these guys!

A cool new book I ordered

My friend found this really cool workbook type nature journal at the library and told me all about it. I did a search and read some reviews and it sounds really neat. I really wanted one for each kid but that would have been well over $30.00 so I let ebay do the search and brand new at $3.50 a piece so there you go! The review even had a testimonial from a homeschool mom so of course I was won over!! The book is by Clare Walker Leslie who also has some other nature books and journals out there. I am still reading in The Handbook Of Nature Study book by Anna Botsford Comstock which is truly a wonderful book! I am still trying to decide if I want to join the Outdoor Hour Challenge or kind of go my own way. If you have not checked out her blog you really should as it is truly wonderful. So much time and effort and she is really great. I just recently realized her daughter is the blog owner of Hearts and Trees and that is great as well. She makes really cool seasonal kits that have crafts, lapbooks, notebooking pages etc. I may have to look into buying those as Winter approaches because Fall will be soon ending.

A Cute Little Guy or Girl??

Tree Study

This is a sycamore tree. It greets us at our gate when we come in our yard. That is so awesome I have a gate. (I lived in an apt where I was lucky to have a spot close to my house so this is really cool for me lol). We decided to visit the tree this past weekend and do some rubbings, take some pics that sort of thing. They seemed to really enjoy it. We got the notebooking pages from notebookingpages.com from the nature set years ago. Had forgotten I owned them lol.

We took the leaves and used laminate sheets to put them on the notebooking pages after we pressed them out.

Here they are drawing on their notebook pages with colored pencils.

Damian really took his time here and he is not one for the draw type activity so I was pretty proud of him! Hopefully I can work on getting them a notebook/journal type thing together in the next few days!

Bird Feeder Update

Well out of our 3 pine cone bird feeders, this is the only one left! I have no clue what drug off the other 2 but they are long gone and the weird thing is we have never seen a bird in our yard! HMMMMMMM..... I don't know if it is the time of year they are just not around or what the deal is but we never see birds in our yard. Maybe it will be different in Spring? Let's hope so!

Skyler and her plants again

Skyler surely is the youngest of a Magic School Bus family! My older daughter started it and it followed on down and now the baby is the last to love them. We watched Magic School Bus Gets Planted and she had a blast. Telling me all about how plants can make their own food from the sun and they pull water from the dirt and she was really excited about knowing all this. Got me thinking to many years ago (too many to really mention lol) a bunch of white or maybe light yellow flowers sitting in the middle of my moms kitchen table slowly turning color day by day. My mom (God love her) she gave my brother and I the love of books from the time we were born but she was never the type to let us paint in her perfect house or GASP get messy! Little things like this were far and few between so I remember them! Plants get water by sucking it up and of you use some food coloring you can actually see it. Yeah an oldy but still a goody and great memories that I can share with my little one. Looking back wondering why did I never do it with the older three?? Life got busy I suppose and before you know it they are grown up and you think of all the things you didn't do when you had the chance. The patience you just didn't have. Anyway we started with some all white carnations. Skyler had a blast at the grocery knowing that bouquet of flowers were just for her, she is such a tomboy princess! Two glasses that have set in my china cabinet never used because well, I guess I was saving them they were special. Their dad got beautiful china trimmed in gold when my oldest was a baby and low and behold a decade or so later we found glasses trimmed in the same gold and he bought those too. They went in a china cabinet and collected dust for years now. Well until last week that is...

My beautiful glasses filled with food coloring!

One red one blue as blue is my fave and she loves pink but red was close enough she said thank goodness!! I got some really cute science experiment freebies from notebookingpages.com and decided to start her out with that.  Just simple questions, What I did, What I think will happen and boxes for their own drawings she really enjoyed it. She did think the flowers would grow but she said she bet they would change colors too so she was half right anyway!

She drew the pictures and told me what to write for her and it was hard to not make it all perfect but I tried to use her words and not mine LOL. Well about a few days and she got to see how the flowers drank. She was a bit disapointed to see that the red food coloring didn't take all that much but the blue one did quite a bit. I tried to take images of that but with a mostly white flower they came pretty bright hopefully you can tell some differences. We did find it pretty cool you could see the stem on the back actually turning red.
     She really had fun doing this and seeing it with her own eyes. She finished up her little notebooking page on What did happen so she is getting the idea how to record an actual experiment. I so need to set up their little nature/science books maybe I will get to that tomorrow??

 I so wanted to just do the notebook page all perfect but what would she have learned then??? It is hard to not do it yourself though but she is having fun making charts and all with her own little pictures and she loves that she did it herself!! Well that was our little study on how plants drinks we are gonna do more, have done more that I need to post up here sooner or later when life let's me HAHA!!!!

This is just a favorite picture and it is just so sweet. This is a major long post!!! I am kinda nostalgic tonight about the growing up of my Devlin girl and wish at times that she was the 6 year old looking at the world with wonder in her eyes and joy in learning that is seeming to slowly fade with her age.

Bracken Mushrooms

Skyler and Fox have it out for mushrooms. They really like them I have no idea where this comes from but they just think they are really awesome. Every chance they get to pick them and bring them home to dry out is a treat for them. Today I thought we would go find some different mushrooms than what they think of when someone says mushroom. Today we found bracken mushrooms. They usually grow on dead wood so the fallen tree trunk in my yard was a perfect spot and guess what?? Of course there they were!!

He really thought about breaking one off then he decided he didn't want to ruin it! What a nature boy he is

Just for fun for Fox and Skyler

Found these cute little guys on clearance and Fox and Skyler just had to have them. For whatever reason Fox removed the face on his but I guess that is how he wanted it who knows with him???

here they had to thoroughly soak them for a few

their little bodies are water cups HOW CUTE IS THAT!!!

Back in their little "greenhouse"

now they will sit in the kitchen window with other experiments!

one week update on the grassy head guy!

Well here is the little grassy head guy Skyler started one week ago today. She was so excited that he sprouted!

Skyler starting her plant study

Skyler has been using Animals and Their Worlds by Winterpromise for science but she has kinda gotten sick of animals and well along with other issues we have decided to drop it. It is just not working for us that does not mean it is bad just not a thing for us. She really has started wondering about plants and has been asking to learn about them. I was going to do this type of study in the Spring but I guess sometimes you just gotta follow where a kid wants to go. Not really important when you learn as long as you learn so we started off reading The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds. Then she started a little grass guy I guess you can call him. He has a face with eyes and all and we just water him and watch him grow. We will start measuring him when he starts sprouting. To throw in a bit of phonics we also made a little flower alphabet matching book I got from childcareland.com.