beginning a nature study

I'm starting to follow Anna Comstock's Nature Study program with the kids, so last week when TLM asked if we could go collect wildflowers, I was really happy. When I found out that he wanted to collect them so that we could "smash them in a book and make them flat," I was more happy. Even when I found out that he got the idea from a Scooby Doo book and that's why he was interested, I was just glad that he was interested. Thanks, Scooby Doo for the great influence!

Behind our neighborhood is a giant area that is undeveloped. Well, all three sides of our neighborhood have these areas, but two of them are farmed. The third area was bought by a developer to build houses on before the housing market went down the drains. So it's just a giant field that they occasionally mow down. Right now, it's covered with wildflowers, so we walked over there to gather some specimens to "smash in a book." I don't have any photos of this part of the story, because I took the camera with me, but left the memory card at home.


As it usually is with children, they were sidetracked by our original goal by something else more exciting...roly polies. So instead of filling their buckets with wildflowers, they collected over 12 roly polies.


They only consented to pick flowers when I agreed that the roly polies would probably like them to play on. We took them back home and watched them crawl, counted how many seconds it took them to unroll out of balls, and drew circles with sidewalk chalk and counted how long it took them to crawl out of it. Good times.


Our read aloud novel right now is Freckles, by Gene Stratton Porter. I love her books, because they seem so magical. Didn't you love Girl of Limberlost when you were little? I wanted to be Eleanor. Anyways, this adventure took place the day after we started Freckles. In the first chapter, Ms. Porter describes how Freckles took a long piece of grass to beat the dirt off his clothes before his interview with McClean. I explained to the kids that Freckles was using the type of grass we had seen last year in the Kansas at the Tallgrass Prairie Reserve, but they were still skeptical. So when we went on our walk, I picked some prairie grass to remind the kids. TLM wanted me to take this photo of him cleaning the dirt off his clothes just like Freckles for Sunshine to see, since she was at school while we were off adventuring.


We did smash one wildflower in a book, but it's still being smashed. I'll let you know how that went after it's done "getting flat." =)

And these photos document how bipolar Pocket is minute by minute. These photos were taken maybe 15 seconds apart.




Have you noticed that every photo of her in a dress, she's also wearing jeans? She INSISTS on it and I'm too tired from fighting with her about everything else to fight her on this one. Perhaps when the temperature gets over 90, she'll change her mind.