Outdoor Hour

This is week #2 for us but we are doing challenge #31 and will be working through the tree series since that is what is most readily available to us AND what the girls are interested in right now. Special thanks to Barbara for emailing me some links for our tree study when I asked for some help about starting mid-way! Thanks so much for your help and encouragement!!

This week we enjoyed more time out in our neighborhood & nearby...collecting more leaves, noticing all the varieties of trees, and enjoying being able to name some now!

We still have some work to do identifying ash & birch since they seem similar. The white birch here are easy of course, but others are tricky.

We know we have found several kinds of oak, several maples, many many pines, birch, ash, witch hazel, sumac, and maybe more. Our tree list is growing!

During our walks this week, we collected more leaves to add to our table display (see posts from earlier this week), we picked up some branches that are too hard to identify, and we enjoyed looking at several areas of browning weeds which are quite beautiful right now because the seeds can all be crumbled right out of them.

After a few days of enjoying the outdoors and identifying trees, we decided to put some in the journals and even do some leaf rubbings in colored pencil. I am hoping to learn other ways to do this and am intrigued by the "leaf prints" in the Handbook...must look into that!!

Here are some of the girls' pages...Cupcake's is on top and Sweet Pea's below. Our books are small homemade ones we made a while back and are already full! We need to either make new ones that are bigger, move to binders using the notebooking pages, or purchase something else.

Here are some of the trees near us...

This last one is in our backyard and shows both the bright red maple and one of our many towering oaks.I have learned more accurate vocabulary for discussing trees and tree parts and the girls are soaking this up.

One thing we saw this week but couldn't photograph (major digital camera crisis this week) was a young oak, about twice my height. The new growth on top hadn't developed deeply textured bark yet like the bottom, and in the middle there was a unique mix of smooth and rough bark, in patches, almost like dry skin. :)