Hunting For Fall

The children and I decided to hunt for Fall by doing a Fall scavenger hunt at the park. Right off the bat we could see the first most well known sign of course LEAVES!!! Leaves everywhere and different colored at that!

While it has been cold in the mornings the afternoons have still been warm. I love this time not too hot not too cold. It is perfect outside weather. My kids and I all hate heat so in summer we are in alot lol. We were hunting for moss covered sticks, pinecones, fallen seeds and nuts anything that signals Fall has come.


I absolutely love the picture of the three of them in the river! They were so sweet crossing putting Skyler Bay in the middle in case she needed help. They can be be so sweet at times.

We also saw squirrels gathering nuts but they were not exactly posing for the camera today. We found plenty of holes and burrows and thought about all the different animals that could be living there. Of course according to Skyler the homes were all for rabbits. We tried really hard to find an abandoned nest but for some reason we just couldn't, which is pretty weird as we always find one this time of year.




They really liked all the pieces of branches that were covered in moss as well as the bracken mushrooms. My kids have a thing for bracken mushrooms. They call them steps for the animals to climb.

Well we gathered up all the goodies we found and made a We Found Fall Centerpiece for our dining room table, Skyler was in awe of the teeny tiny pinecone we found. Last year it was all about who could find the biggest this year it was all about tiny. I am sure as the season goes on they will add to this. They love finding treasures outside and displaying them. For more pics of our fun walk you can go here.

Winter Wednesday Challenge #1 Color Walk

Well I bought the new Ebook over at Handbook of nature Study Blog and it is really cute. I have never used any of the outdoor challenge books before so this is neat. It is also comes with cute little notebooking pages and ALOT of links!! So the first challenge was basically finding color on a nature walk so that is what we did. We went to our favorite park and just looked all over. Living in FL is not really a wintery state though. We are in North FL so we get cold just no snow. We did have frost a few mornings but me being an anti cold person, we hibernate when it gets frosty lol. I hate snow, I hatye cold and I think I have raised my kids the same. Most of the trees here have pretty much gotten bare except the pine trees and evergreen types. We did however find actual color besides piles of dead leaves and browned grass.






 The lonely red leaf. We saw some leaves most brown and dead but a few still had pretty colors. We also noticed the moss growing on trees was a bright bright green color now. The river water has turned a yellow brown type color,



This bright red bloom was an awesome find. Not quite sure what it is, but it was pretty. We found a whole bush full of them!!! Right above this we also found a long abandoned birds nest which my kids love for some reason. We have always loved finding any kinds of nests. If they are on the ground I will let them bring them home but if they are still in the tree I say leave them cause in the Spring another bird can use it as a home and we can visit again.  

These were on sandbags under the bridge. The kids wanted to break them off but they kept falling apart so we left them there. Maybe another bug will live in them.

 We had a really nice day hunting for colors. The kids were kinda sad about not having snow but I reminded them that in snow we can't ride bikes so they felt a bit better on that lol.

Of course we saw the sky which was a pretty blue that day.

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!

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

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.  

Nature Walks

 Well we have went on some nature walking in the past week. These are a few of the favorite pics I have taken. I am not sure why the spider pics look like this but me and the kids thought it was really neat how the lighting and all can make things change. Notice this big guy here is missing a leg WOW. I think the detail you see in the web is pretty neat as well. My son decided to tug at one end and sure enough that spider started to crawl towards it. So we saw first hand how they can sense their prey through vibrartion.

We think this is some type of burrow maybe for field mice?? We didn't try and find out cause I was none too keen on a possible snake popping out of that hole so we just left well enough alone on that.

We were trying to find animal tracks (you think it be easy) when Little Woodland Princess here decided she was just tired of walking and needed a rest. They had fun searching for tracks but were a bit disapointed when there was none to be found. But all in all they are all having fun with our new nature studies. We took tons of pictures and if you would like to see the ones that were not my all time favorite click here!