We really enjoyed observing our butterflies using the Butterfly House kit Bug got for Christmas last year. I imagine we will be ordering more caterpillars in the future to repeat this project.
Fairy watching the caterpillars.
The caterpillars formed their chrysalis within a couple days and we moved them into their ‘house.’
All five of the butterflies emerged within a few hours of each other.
Here is a pretty Painted Lady Butterfly drying it’s wings (shot through the netting).
Once all the butterflies were actively flapping around in the house we took them outside to let them go in the garden. They were not in a huge hurry to move on from their sugar soaked flowers.
Our memorization piece for this week comes from First Language Lessons and happened by pure happenstance to tie in nicely with our Butterfly study.
"The Caterpillar"
by Christina G. Rossetti
Brown and fury
Caterpillar in a hurry;
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk.
My no toad spy you,
May the little birds pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.
Here are the illustrations the kids did to go with the poem.
Bug’s Caterpillar:
Fairy’s Butterfly:
This weekend we took the kids on a hike at our local nature center. We did a shorter one than our last few treks… only about a mile this time but ran into some sand hill cranes and for the first time ever, a flock of wild turkeys (unfortunately the darkness of the forest is similar to shooting indoors and my camera was useless). But what held the kids’ interest the most was this big Snapping Turtle that was hanging out by the dock near the nature center. They must have spent 30 minutes watching it swim around the giant catfish.
My brother is in town for a couple weeks and we took him on a fun hike today at the local nature center. We got to see lots of water birds… no babies yet… but nesting in action.
Sandhill Crane
Great Blue Herons
Mallard Ducks
Swan
Canadian Geese
And something that was really interesting… the local fire department was conducting a controlled burn on one of the trails. The kids wanted to check it out… how can a few birds compare with firemen? We watched them for a little bit from a safe distance.
We were finally able to participate in an Outdoor Hour Nature Study project this week… it has been awhile. This week’s focus was Cardinals, Finches and Robins… super easy assignment for us. Our feeders are filled with the first two species and the Robins have recently returned… much to the kids’ enjoyment. For awhile there with every Robin sighting in the yard, Bug would pull us away from our other activities to watch at the window.
The kids have been stalking the Robins in our yard. Watching them trying to catch one makes me laugh and remember how my grandpa had teased us as kids. He told us that if you sprinkled salt on a bird’s tail feather you could catch him. Of course now I know that the joke is if you can get close enough to shake salt on the bird you could catch it… not that there is some magical property in the salt that renders the bird flightless and therefore easier to catch… as my brothers and I thought as kids. Ha… to think of us chasing the birds with a shaker of salt. 😉
I also dug up some photos from last summer of a Robin’s nest that was housed in a crabapple tree along side my grandmother’s deck. We enjoyed watching the little guys getting bigger and eventually take off on their own. I hope we are able to find another nest in easy viewing distance again this year.
BTW-If you can get your hands on a copy of Round Robin I highly recommend it. It is hand’s down one of my kids’ favorite books.
We had a glorious weekend. It actually hit 45 today! While we enjoyed being outside for a few hours… we took some time to catch up on our Nature Studies.
Here is our entry for squirrels. This is a mammal we are able to observe daily at our feeders. We read about squirrels a couple weeks ago in the Handbook of Nature study as well as the fun book Nuts to You! We also enjoyed the You Tube videos Barb posted. After teaching the kids what to look for… searching for squirrel nests in the bare trees has become a fun game in the car. They are so easy to spot this time of year.
This weekend we were finally able to get some photos to share. Here are some squirrely photos…
Here are some photos of squirrel nests…
And here is Fairy Girl’s journal entry (that is my messy handwriting that she dictated)…
Join in the Outdoor Hour Challenge!
I don’t think any Groundhog in his right mind would be poking his head out around here yet. There must be at least 15 inches of snow on the ground… probably more. (I’m guessing Phil sees his shadow next week.)
The above photo was taken in late September. We had a groundhog who loved foraging in our compost pile. He made a daily appearance for a couple weeks before settling in for the winter. We loved watching him from the window but he was very skittish and took off the minute we tried to get a closer peek.
Today we watched the You-Tube videos Barb had posted on Handbook of Nature Study, colored one of the Groundhog coloring pages she also had listed and then read our Rookie Read-About Holidays: Groundhog’s Day book. The kids really liked the video with the wrestling Marmots… of course my TaeKwonDo kiddos argued that they were sparing not wrestling.
BRRRR! It is so cold outside right now that basically all of our Nature Studies are being done at the kitchen window. Fortunately the bird feeders really provide a lot of Nature Entertainment. When we have gotten outside over the last few weeks, we have been collecting snow track photos.
I believe the above photo shows tracks from our neighbor’s cat who likes to hunt our birds (devastated a nest this past spring) and uses our sand box (insert snarl on my part here). I tend to send the dog out when I see said cat.
One of our dog’s prints. Four toes front and back indicate canine or feline family.
The above two photos show squirrel prints from under the bird feeder. Four toes in front, five in the back indicates rodent family.
Bird prints across our deck.
The deer, rabbit and raccoons that are normally found in our yard in the warmer months… move on in the winter. I am assuming this is due mainly to the water source (pond across the street) freezing. They will definitely be back when I fruitlessly try to plant our garden this spring 😉 .
The last few days were a bit warmer and the rain we had last night melted all our snow. So today we were able to get out and look for some flowerless plants for this week’s Nature Study, BUT the temp dropped considerably today and the wind chill was pretty painful. We only lasted about 10 minutes. Fortunately we were able to find several examples to observe right in our yard. What was really amazing is the bright green moss we found on one rock… hard to believe that yesterday it was buried in snow.
Join in the Outdoor Hour Challenge #42.
Well our backyard is buried in snow atm, but the kids were fascinated with all the mushrooms popping up this past fall so we got lots of pictures and observations in then. Today we watched the video Barb posted, looked at all our photos from the fall and then the kids colored a mushroom page. Here are some mushrooms from our area. I found that mushrooms are hard to ID especially since I won’t let the kids touch them.
Some sort of Puffball Mushroom.
Another form of Puffball Mushroom.
I believe a Shaggy Mane Mushroom.
No idea on these little guys.
Join in the Outdoor Hour Challenge #41.
It is hard for us to call this an autumn weather study… since the weather around here is decidedly winter these days. Here are our few brief observations between helping Daddy shovel the driveway and full out playing in the snow.
Observations at around 3pm:
Cloudy – sky was all gray
Snowing – big, wet flakes (accumulation was less than 1″)
Windy – (I looked up later that the wind was about 13mph from W)
Temperature – right at freezing 32F
Snowman conditions… perfect. Sledding conditions… a bit sticky and slow.
Join in the Outdoor Hour Challenge #40.
