Nature

My husband took the kids, while I was still pregnant, on another visit to the Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, Washington. I have to admit that I stayed at a friend’s house while they went up there and took a nap. My husband was so kind as to take lots of photos so that I could enjoy it later. I just have to share some of these pictures with you. I’m sure you’ll have the same response to these pictures as I did, and wonder why in the world I chose to take a nap rather than enjoy these sights, but sometimes pregnant ladies choose to sacrifice all kinds of things for a little sleep.

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”  ~Claude Monet

It seems that oak trees live everywhere in the States. However different types tend to prefer different climates. We were able to actually to observe oaks in two parts of the country, some in the Pacific Northwest and some in the Midwest.

We identified the Oak tree that we saw in Kansas as the Bur Oak  We found this tree at a little park where we stopped for lunch one day. We hunted and hunted for acorns on the tree and on the ground. We found a couple of misshaped nuts. We concluded that the people in the neighborhood must have collected all of the acorns before we visited the park.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that my camera is broken, we weren’t able to get pictures of the trees that we checked out in the Pacific Northwest.  My kids, along with some of their friends, collected leaves from these oaks as well as all the other bushes and trees in the immediate area and this is one of the last pictures that I got before my camera went crazy.

We had a hard time identifying the oak that we saw in Washington state, as it matched most closely with the California Black Oak, it seems to me. However,  the furthest north that the California Black Oak grows is southern Oregon. The only oak that we could find that is supposed to grow in Western Washington is the Oregon White Oak, but our leaves and acorns did not match this oak. The lobes on the leaves of our trees came to a point and had a little barb on the end. Maybe these trees were planted and were not native to this area or maybe there is more variation to the White Oak than we saw in our field guide.

The kids both chose to illustrate the tree closer to home.

Zippy was the only one who did an illustration of the tree. Both chose to do illustrations of the leaves and acorns.

By JD Boy (age 6)

By Zippy (age 9)

I nearly forgot to say that we found a couple of excellent books on trees. The illustrations are just beautiful and the information and writing style is charming as well. They are The Big Tree and My Favorite Tree: Terrific Trees of North America (Sharing Nature With Children Book). I promise that if you have children the ages of my children, you will love both books and no matter what age you are, you’ll love the second book.

We have really enjoyed having a garden this year. This is really our first year to successfully have a garden. To a large extent this was my husband’s project, but I sure enjoyed the fruit of his labors. The kids were very involved in the whole process. They helped plant. They helped water. They helped weed. And they helped pick. Every day at lunch, I could just say, do we have any such and such in the garden, and they would race up there to see who could find what I needed the fastest. What a blessing gardens are, not just to the stomach, but also to the soul.

Here are a few pictures taken over the summer of our garden.

Our very own radishes. (They were a bit hot though. So we’re going to have to work on those a bit.)

Our first peppers! Woohoo! Maybe next year we’ll grow enough to can some salsa.

Three of our umpteen and some zucchini and yellow squash that we harvested. We ate either zucchini or yellow squash nearly every single day for a few  weeks, then we just had to have a break. But I’ve found a couple ways of fixing them that I think are absolutely delicious.

Our squash jungle about ready to swallow G’tums!

We even did some nature study in the garden. Since we were studying about garden flowers, we decided that this eggplant flower could qualify as a garden flower.

Here is our last picture from the garden season. My daughter took this picture when we were in the garden doing some nature study.

They’re in the bus and we’re in the garden. And now you know why we are–drum roll–homeschoolers!!!

We did another nature study from the Handbook of Nature Study blog. For this challenge we were to choose a tree that we are to study through the seasons for  a year. We’ve studied about some trees around our house during the last year or so, but this will be our start to studying one tree for a year. My kids spent quite a bit of time trying to decide which tree they wanted to study. (We have a lot of trees to choose from.) They finally decided that they would each do their own tree.

Besides reading from the Handbook of Nature Study , we also enjoyed looking at our trees in a few really neat books: My Favorite Tree: Terrific Trees of North America and More Fun with Nature. These are both really great books for younger kids. They have really nice illustrations and good, but simple information.

JD Boy chose to study a Ponderosa Pine.

Our Western Ponderosa Pine (Pinus benthamiana). The tallest Western Ponderosa that has been measured was 275 feet tall. Ours is quite a long ways from that.

A close-up of the needles. Ponderosa needles grow in clumps of three and 6-12 inches in length.

My little tree-hugger with his tree.

Zippy chose to study a cedar behind our house.

Our Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata). I don’t know if you can tell from this picture that this tree gets brown patches in it during the autumn.

A close-up of the bark.

Zippy climbing her tree. It makes me nervous when the kids climb this tree. If they come down, they’ll land on our fence. This is definitely their favorite climbing tree though, so I’ll try to keep being brave and watch them climb.

"A wholesome tongue is a tree of life: but perverseness therein is a breach in the spirit." Proverbs 15:4.

We decided that we definitely wanted to join in the Autumn Outdoor Hour Challenges, but we’ve been a bit behind in actually accomplishing this, so here is our first Autumn study from the challenges–cattails. Partly why we’re behind is that our first attempt to find cattails turned out to be in vain, but we did eventually find some. Actually, we found lots of them along roads that didn’t have a good shoulder to pull off on, but now that we’ve found some, we’ve found bunches. I guess, we just didn’t really pay attention to them before.

However, the ones that we took pictures of are a bit sentimental. A few days ago, I was able to take my kids back to the town I lived in when I was their age and there was a bunch of cattails that I always loved to look at when I was a kid. So I drove right to that spot to see if there were still cattails. Were there! They have definitely been very successful there and had multiplied considerably. So while I’m sure that these won’t be the same cattails that we’ll study throughout the year, it was fun to have my kids study cattails from the same place that I used be intrigued by them when I was a kid myself.

We read about cattails from two books: Handbook of Nature Study and Discover Nature in Water and Wetlands. I can’t remember which one taught us what, but we learned some interesting things about cattails. The part that seemed to be the most intriguing to the kids was that somebody somewhere found a hundred cattails all part of the same organism. Even though cattails produce seeds and can multiply by spreading their seeds, they also spread out rhizomes and send up new shoots from the bottom (like strawberries do).

We all enjoyed looking closely at the cattails and pulling them apart: looking at the seeds, the cross sections of the leaf and stem of the cattail. I remember when I was a kid, breaking apart the leaves just because they were so interesting on the inside; so different from any other leaves that I was familiar with. We even saved a piece to take home and look at under our microscope.

Here are our nature journal entries. (Even I did one this time. One of the things that I love about the Outdooor Hour Challenges is that I get to participate. It’s not just an assignment that I give my kids, but it’s something that we all do together and we all learn.  I have started to really enjoy keeping my own nature journal too.)

By Zippy (age 9)

By JD Boy (age 6)

By Me (age…you thought I would tell, didn’t you!!)

At the beginning of the summer we decided that we wanted to learn about plants and flowers. If you have followed my blog for awhile, you may remember that we decided to use the Apologia’s Botany book. Well, to make a long story short, it wasn’t for us. I think that it is geared for an older audience than what my kids are. It was too wordy or technical or something like that.

Since we were already on the flower quest and had decided to continue that for our summertime nature study, we were very thrilled when the Handbook of Nature Study blog released the ebook for studying garden flowers. This is a great and simple series of nature challenges. I highly recommend it. The ebook is very inexpensive. The depth of study was just perfect for us. Granted we didn’t learn a lot of latin terms, but we had fun playing with and learning about flowers. My kids have already decided that they want to do these challenges again next year. This is partly because, since we started them a ways into the summer, we weren’t able to do every single one. Anyway, if you’re looking to do some Botany with your family, check out the ebook here. By the way, you can find and look at the challenges for free on the Handbook of Nature Study blog, but the ebook comes with some really nice notebook pages to accompany the study.

Some of the notebook pages that we did from the Garden Flower Challenges. (One of those is from the Crop Plant Challenges.)

Of course, the favorite thing for the kids out of these challenges was to grow flowers.

A close inspection of our Geranium plant.

We had quite a lot of fun looking closely at the flowers. Even my youngest really enjoyed learning about flowers.

An exciting addition to our study was a microscope. After quite a bit of consideration and researching, I purchased this stereo microscope from Tobin’s Lab. This is one of the neatest things we’ve ever got. I was a bit afraid that the kids would bore with it quickly, so I emailed Tammy at Tobin’s Lab and asked her if my kids were too young for a microscope. She recommended this one and said that people from 3 – 93 love this one. She’s right. We keep it out and look at all kinds of things, but we really enjoyed looking at the flower parts and the pollen with the microscope.

The kids looked at the plants through the microscope over and over.

Another fun thing we did was to soak beans and look at the cotyledon. My daughter liked to look at the bean through the magnifying glass. The rest of us just used our naked eye.

Learning about pollen was fun too. As per the instructions of the Garden Flower Challenges, we took Q’tips and gathered pollen with them and then rubbed the pollen on notebook pages to have a closer look.

You can’t really see the pollen in this picture, but it’s in the upper right hand corner. We also spent some time watching the bees–the master pollinators.

Then we did one plant experiment was not part of the challenges, because we’d seen somebody else do it and my kids were very intrigued by it.

We put various amounts of food coloring in the water for these white carnations and then waited to see what happened. You can see what happened: Our carnations began changing colors. We did notice that the carnations with the higher concentration of food coloring had a bit more red in them. And as for the green food coloring, we couldn’t see any green in that carnation.

And last but not least, we just really enjoyed the flowers around our house. Here are a few of my favorite shots.

We have hydrangeas all around our house. I love that they still have flowers on them, this late in the summer.

We have a whole row of these pink rhododendrons behind our house. When they’re in bloom, it’s like our patio is on fire.

We don’t have many azaleas, but we appreciate them, because they are the flowers that announce that summer is about here.

I should have posted about our flower studies as we did them, because we did so much more and I’ve got a long post now and don’t think I should add another thing. We sure did enjoy learning about flowers and we hope to cultivate even more flowers next summer than we did this summer. And don’t forget to check out the Garden Flower Ourdoor Hour Challenges.

As I said in my last post, we were very privileged to spend a whole week at Glacier last week. My parents and my three youngest siblings also went with us. We had hoped to do some backpacking while we were there, but we ended up doing car camping and day hikes. We discovered that there are enough day hikes there to keep a person busy for weeks, we weren’t shorted a bit. Our longest hike was on Tuesday and most of us hiked 12 miles. A few went more. I nick named my brothers on this hike. One was Race Horse, because he talked Zippy and my sister to go an extra 4 miles with him. (Okay, I’m a bit proud of my 9 year old daughter for hiking 16 miles with quite a lot of elevation change, all in one day.) My other brother, I nick-named Pack Horse, because he took on the very honorable job of carrying G’tums on his shoulder for probably 4 miles, my husband carried him a couple more of the miles. G’tums walked around 7 miles of the hike–not bad for a three year old. The name of the trail was the Highline Trail. Here are a few pictures.

That was a tiring day, but we all thought it was awesome. It ended up exciting for Zippy and JD Boy and my siblings and my dad as they came face to face with a bear at the end of the trail.

The next day some of us got to go on another trail. (I stayed with G’tums and gave him a nap.) It was a 9 mile hike (roundtrip) to the Iceberg Lake. It was no less stunning. Here’s the lake.

Zippy hiked around 35 miles last week and JD Boy 30+ miles. Not to bad for a couple of youngsters, and both did quite a bit better than I did! There was lots of beauty from the road side too. There whole park  had wildflowers galore and vistas that would take your breath away. Here are few more shots from around the park.

Upper Two Medicines at Sunrise–This was where we camped the last half of the week.

Wild Goose Island–close to where we camped the first half of the week.

A beautiful waterfall!

We also got to see quite a bit of fun wildlife. Unfortunately the birds were a bit sparse, but we saw bear, deer, mountain goats, long-horned sheep, marmots, ground squirrels and more. Here are a few of some of the animals.

The kids watching Mountain Goats.

An adorable Columbia Ground Squirrel eating wildflowers. (This might be my favorite shot of the trip.)

And last, but not least–The Natives!!

There are many, many more pictures that I’ve posted on Flickr (around 60). Some of them are outstanding too, so I hope you’ll stop by my album and check them all out. Here’s the link.

We made a very short trip to Mt. Rainier just because we were sure that we would get to see some wildflowers.

The one picture of the mountain that we managed to take. This picture is thanks to my daughter. I forgot to take pictures of Mt. Rainier, because I was so busy studying flowers. We identified several; here are a few pictures.

Giant Red or Orange Paintbrush (or several other names) Castilleja miniata

Subalpine Lupine Lupinus articus subsp. subalpinus

More wildflowers.

The main meadow at Paradise that I thought would be covered with flowers was not. All of these shots were taken roadside. I’m kind of hoping that I can sneak back there again and see if the meadow blossoms one of these days. We’ll see, I do have to get ready to start back to school one of these days too!

One of the interesting things that we learned when working on identifying the flowers in our pictures is that Paintbrushes are mostly parasites. Because of this, it is very difficult to transplant them or to plant them from their seeds. They latch onto roots of other plants and live off of them. I’ve always loved Paintbrushes, but I think being a parasite is rude; so now I don’t know what to think.

Maybe you get the idea that I’m just not feeling very verbose lately. It’s not that we don’t have things going on. It’s that we have lots going on. We have been taking pictures though and I’d love to share some of the pictures that my husband took on one of our recent nature walks. We hiked on the Snow Lake trail. Unfortunately we got started a bit late, and took quite a few pauses to take pictures, so we never made it to the lake. Next time. We did really enjoy the waterfalls and the many wildflowers on the trail though.

Here are my favorite pictures of the day.

Field full of wildflowers.

Red Columbine Aquilegia formosa

Coumbine covering the rocks.

Columbia Tiger Lily Lilium columbianum

We recently took a very enjoyable nature walk and just enjoyed what we saw. We saw a few things that we are studying a little further, so will post about that later, but we saw several things that were just fun to see. We walked through McCurdy Park on Lake Washington.

We went in hopes of seeing Buffleheads, but we missed them. We did get to watch and observe several Mallard families and their antics. They were quite entertaining. When they were swimming around in the duckweed, it looked like they were swimming in grass, because it was so thick.

The little duckings just followed their mother, wherever she went, like playing follow the leader. So moms, if you ever feel like you can’t get a second to yourself, know that your not the only mother that deals with that.

Caption for that picture is "I finally, got all my ducks in a row."

As you already know, flowers is our quest right now and we saw a few beauties.

Wild Iris

Marsh Forget-Me-Nots (This picture is larger than life size.)

Water Lily

We also got to observe a little insect study, quite a little actually. This goes with learning about flowers though. The bees were very busy pollinating all the flowers.

This one is pollinating a blackberry.

We also enjoyed the watching the sail boats, canoes and kayaks that were on the water. I know that’s not really nature study, but it was beautiful.

"Dad, we want to go on that…"