The Nature Book For Our Travelers

For the cover we used a flower my son is holding. This is a little book we have made for our traveler friends for geography. You can see that blog here. We used things from our yard and things we gathered to make a little nature book. The pages are made from baggies and include leaves, bark rubbings some sand etc. The kids liked gathering things for these and enjoyed putting them together. We have had alot of fun with our travelers and enjoying sharing the nature of our area with them.  

A little nature project for our geography swaps.

This was a little nature idea to add to our geography swaps. You can check all that out on our travelin blog. We are taking different stuff, putting them into baggies with labels and are turning them into little books for our swap partners. Kids will enjoy making this and hopefully the person who gets them likes them too.

How Old Is That Tree Mommy????

They have slowly turned the outside table into their display area for all their finds. I have cow bones, bracken mushrooms that are white which we have never seen before. Bird feeders and thanks to the nice Lowe's guy we have tree cut offs. Thought it be a nice time to show them how to count the rings. Since this pic was taken I have an almost complete spinal cord, legs, and skull from a deer. They begged to bring home the dead owl but I was too scared of what it would attract as it was all meaty and not bone. We also found a dead alligator they wanted to drag outta the river and put on the porch. I can't even say, oh well that is a boy for ya cause my little Princess Skyler came away in tears at leaving that gator!!! I just hope everyone who reads this knows my children are BIG TIME animal lovers and would never even harm a bug. They love dead things though. They love bones and guts and anything like that. They feel sad for any animal that has died and I used to have to bury everything. I stress everything including the 23 tadpoles that died one year. I have buried fish, crabs, little birds we found etc etc. They outgrew that but they loves to see bones and all. They love to see how it all works I guess. Curiosity is a good thing! Maybe I will raise a few doctors or vets!!

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.

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!

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!

PUMPKINS!!!!!

 Today we carved pumpkins. It was pretty fun to see them try and not make a mess. Skyler was really into trying to get every single seed to bake. I let them draw their own faces and the boys cut their own while I did Skylers. I think her little guy is adorable! Damian was not happy his mouth came out so big and Fox thought it was all good. For Fox he gets to be outside make a mess and be silly so of course it is all good!We found a sprout inside Damians pumpkin which was pretty cool because I had never seen nothing like that before. Come dark we will stick in the lights and have Jack O Lanterns!!

Our Nature Skeletons

Well here are our skeletons made from stuff in nature!! They had fun I am sure. The idea came from The Nature Detectives which is a really neat site. They really liked these and talked alot about the human body bones and organs while making them.

Skylers skeleton she wanted him to wave. She also wanted him to look just like the picture which you know is so hard to do LOL

Damians skeleton he wanted his to have organs as you see the "heart and lungs"

This is Foxs little kid he called it

Today we hunted for stuff

Using the Halloween nature stuff from Nature Detectives we started on a hunt tonight for body parts! Out of their little project booklets we are going to make a skeleton of the human body. Spooky, fun, educational I LOVE IT!!! My kids love Halloween and nature and the body so it is right on spot for us! Here are a few of our pics of tonight and here is a few more.

This is the Halloween activity booklet. (yes I love these little bags)!

The page with the skeleton project (lot's of cute little projects in here)



Here goes the bug boy not even out the door pickin stuff to use!



All the stuff we gathered. We will hopefully do these tomorrow cause it started to get late and well cranky tired kids are NO FUN!!!

Our Nature Activity Today (well almost)

Even the best laid plans will fall apart! (sigh) We made these cute little leaf bags and a leaf idial from Naure Detectives. They were so cute and easy to make after all just print and cut. Simple but adorable. After making these I should have laminated before putting them together they will not hold up long but oh well, live and learn! So the assignment or activity today was basically a Fall Season scavenger hunt with a check off list and collect leafs. Well the children had other plans and I decided to let "nature" take it's course so to speak. We had a great picnic, started off down some trails, they were so cute with their clip boards! I showed them how to use a crayon to make a rubbing and well that is all she wrote. For the next two hours the boys made bark rubbings of every tree they could possibly could get close to. They were having so much fun I just had no heart to say "no we have to collect leaves". Skyler was content picking out trees but didn't want to to the rubbings herself. The boys once again take care of their baby and her wants by making some for her too. It was a great day maybe we will gather leaves another day I am just happy they enjoyed themselves doing something other than a video game and I got to see all the happy "wow mom look at that smiles". If you would like to see more wonderful pictures of our day please go here.  

Today's Activity APPLE TASTING

Today we did some apple tasting! The kids adored this. We started with 9 different apples, the kids all picked 2 to compare and contrast and then we made a graph for which apples were liked the best. Jonagold was a favorite among all of them. Fuji and Red Del. came up after that one. We used Washington, Granny Smith, Jonagold, Mcintosh. Empire, Golden Del. Red Del. Fuji and Rome. It was really fun to see the different reactions when they tasted one that was a bit on the tart sour side. My son Damian was not picky he liked them all. I saw this idea on the Handbook of Nature Study blog. She uses the Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Comstock as her guide and she has these Outdoor Hour challenges on her blog. I have yet to research or read this book so I am not yet certain I will be joining in on her Challenges everytime but the apple tasting sounded really fun so I did that one. I really wish we had an apple orchard or something around here but sadly we don't so Walmart had to do! For a few more pictures please go here.

Todays Activity!!

We took some normal pinecones and let the mess begin LOL.

 We smothered them in peanutbutter. If you do this wear gloves it is MESSY!!!!

Then we covered them in birdseed added strings made of yarn and TA- DA Instant birdfeeders. Even my son who can't stand messy stuff enjoyed this as long as he could use his gloves.

Here is all three feeders hanging on one of our MANY MANY trees!

We also bought a few feeders from Walmart such as this small hummingbird feeder. The bottom is called a seed and suet feeder. You can make this but it ivolves adding some fat from meat or whatever that you cook and I can't stand the smell of left over grease so that was not gonna work for me at all. The bought feeders were not expensive for them and the food I payed like 7-8 dollars and my kids truly are looking forward to birds visiting the yard so hopefully they will. For some extra pics of todays mess go here.

Our First Nature Activity

Well, not literally our first, but the first time I am bothering to actually make it an actual nature activity and the first post on my new blog! Today we collected fallen leaves and made crowns. My daughter is The Woodland Princess and my son calls himself The Warrior. My older son passed on this activity. I was informed by my little boy here that warriors do not wear shirts. He will always look for a reason to be partially dressed. All in all it was a great day I would say. I am going to attempt to have an activity as often as we can. Playing in nature sure is better than TV and video games and hopefully they will learn alot along the way. I plan on putting together nature notebooks as well, so hopefully this will be something we all look forward to on a regular basis!!  For a few more pics of this go here.