Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 23 - Moths

We actually completed this Outdoor Hour Challenge back on 21st September. However, you'll see below why it's taken me so long to post this.

We started this challenge with a brainstorming session about how moths were different to butterflies. Thanks to Barbs’ handy summary on the Handbook of Nature Study page we came up with:

1)      Moths come out at night (nocturnal) but butterflies are out in the daytime (diurnal)

2)      Moths’ wings lie flat down when they’re resting, but butterflies’ wings stand upright.

3)      Moths have interesting, feathery-looking antennae, whereas butterflies have plain, thin antennae.

4)      Moths have a fat body (abdomen) but butterflies have a thin body (abdomen).

5)      Moths form a cocoon, but butterflies form a chrysalis.

We used our Collins’ ‘Butterflies of Britain and Europe’ field guide to help observe all these differences.

We had a quick hunt for moths in our entry way between the front door and the main house, where they often hang out, and came across a dead one entangled in a spider’s web (oh, dear, I really must do some cleaning out there!). It wasn’t really in a good enough condition to be drawn, but then I remembered that last year we’d succesfully observed the metamorphosis of a White Ermine Moth, so Sophie (7) drew a picture of that for our nature diary.

And then, as luck would have it, Nathaniel (3) discovered a HUGE caterpillar calmly walking along the wall by our house:

We decided this could be the caterpillar of a Pine Hawk moth, noting its abdominal horn. The guide book said it liked to make its cocoon in the soil, so we filled a glass jar with some soil, put in a few bits of grass and twigs for good measure, and popped it in. Sure enough it immediately buried into the soil. A few days later I gave the soil a bit of a shake and there was the pupa. It twitched a bit as we moved the contents of the jar, which was interesting to notice.

And so we wait for the moth to hatch! And we waited….and waited….and waited…and two and a half months later it finally decided to make an appearance! It hatched out in the evening, so we let it dry its wings out overnight. It quickly found the stick that we’d put in the jar for that purpose and hung there.

The next day we released into the garden, taking a few pictures before leaving it on the tree. It was a sunny, warm day, so we hope the moth had time to find a good home for the winter.

As you can see, it was worth the wait!

Abide in Him!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 22

We're skipping ahead a bit on the Outdoor Hour Challenges from the Handbook of Nature Study blog, partly because I wanted to spend the whole term focussing on Insects and other Invertebrates rather than trying to finish Garden Flowers.

The first challenge in this series was to do with Butterflies, which is a great place to start. After talking a little about the different stages of life a butterfly goes through (egg, larva/caterpillar, pupa/chrysalis and then adult butterfly) we headed out to the park to look primarily for butterflies but also for any other insects we might come across.

We saw three types of butterflies, took pictures and then tried to work out what they were when we got home.

This one we decided was a Small Copper

This one looks like a Small White

This one we think was a Common Blue. It looked really blue when it was flying about, but it was hard to get a photo to show that. When it was at rest on a leaf we could only see the underside of its wings. Still, they were quite pretty too.

Eventually we got a photo with its wings spread out.

When we got home, Sophie also copied out a picture of a butterfly and labelled all the different parts of its body to put in our nature diary.

Below is one of the photos I took this summer when we were on holiday in Luxembourg. We spent the afternoon at a butterfly garden. It was a magical place! As soon as you walked in there were giant butterflies, all different colours and species, flying about all around you. The children loved it, and still talk about it.

Some of the butterflies were huge - you can tell by the size of the orange slices on the plate.

We learnt lots about the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was amazing to see all the different chrysalises that had been collected and hung up in the incubator by the staff team.

Back to our nature walk last week, whilst we were in the park we came across a few ants and bugs, including this interesting brown beetle, which Charis found. We popped it into our bug jar and took it home to draw it and identify it, but we couldn't work out what it was. We wondered if it might be some kind of Chafer, but it wasn't at all hairy. Answers on a postcard please!

Abide in Him!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 14

Our pressed flowers

We've struggled a little to keep up with our nature study challenges while we've been back in the UK. I know British people moan a lot about the weather, but it REALLY has been particularly awful this year. I think officially it's been the wettest April - June period on record, and as I write this there is heavy rain and floods all over the country (I'm also wearing my fur-lined Russian boots today and considering putting the heating on - and it's JULY!) Consequently we've not been able to get outside as much as we would have liked.

Anyway, we did go ahead and make the flower press as Barb suggested in the Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 14. We walked around the garden with Grandma, and Sophie chose 8 different flowers from the plants growing there. We placed them in the flower press and wrote down the names that Grandma told us.

Unfortunately, it's been too wet to sit outside and sketch any of the garden flowers. I think we might have to abandon the Challenge for now and resume once we're back in Russia in August.

Although they're not garden flower seeds, Sophie did plant a little cress seed box, and has been so involved with watering them every day that she even had to phone the Grandparents up to remind them to do it when we were away!

The mixed flowers seeds we planted

The pansies we planted from seed

We're only on Challenge No. 14, but I am really enjoying these challenges and am already seeing results. Whenever we're out and about the girls have such keen eyes and point out all sorts of things - slugs, snails, bugs, pretty flowers. The Grandparents commented on how observant they were, and Hubbie immediately replied that I had trained them that way, which I felt really chuffed about. I sometimes wonder if Sophie is a little too observant - she's made a habit out of spotting rubber bands on the pavement that the postman has thrown away and we now have rather a large collection 'rescued elastic bands' in our house!

Abide in Him!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 13

Flower Parts

I'm continuing with the series of challenges from Handbook of Nature Study blog. For this challenge I got the girls (7 and 4) to have a close look at the tulips, which were beginning to droop in a vase on our dining room table. We talked about 'Mummy parts' and 'Daddy parts' and about pollen and bees and things. I tried to use words such as 'anther' and 'stigma' as naturally as I could, but this is a learning process for me too!! We eventually labelled a small diagram of something vaguely representing a tulip in our nature study journal.Now I just need to remember all the terms and keep using them naturally as we look at various flowers! (Thanks Barb for the tip to practise using one new term a week and adding them in slowly).

We planted our seeds last week at Grandma's. The mixed garden flowers and the sweet pea seedlings have already started germinating. We now need to decide exactly where we're going to plant them in the garden when they're strong enough.

Grandma and Gramps had some lovely flowers already blooming in their garden - daffodils, hyacinths, polyanthuses and wall flowers. Sophie (7) chose these polyanthuses (below) as the flowers she wanted to sketch into our nature journal. Charis (5) did a lovely picture of seeds and soil.

As a bonus to our spring nature study focus, we've also been keeping an eye on the frog spawn we noticed in a nearby town pond. A couple of weeks ago there was loads of the jelly-like balls with black dots all around the pond, some in clumps, others in long strings. A few days ago we noticed that many of the black dots had got longer and several were already wiggling away freely in the water. It'll be fun to watch them gradually grow legs and turn into frogs. This particular town park also has a lot of squirrels, which are very tame and come quite close hoping for some food. They're different to our Russian squirrels, which are smaller, redder, have tufty ears and aren't quite so bold!

It's great to be doing nature study in such lovely, warm, sunny weather. England seems to be enjoying unusually warm weather at the moment, in contrast to our Russian friends who are still enduring snow.

I just wanted to finish this post with a lovely and rather appropriate poem that Sophie and I came across in our poetry reading book for this term:

                                   
                                             A Spike of Green, by Barbara Baker

When I went out the sun was hot,

It shone upon my flower pot.

And there I saw a spike of green

That no one else had ever seen!

On other days the things I see

Are mostly old except for me.

But this green spike so new and small

Had never yet been seen at all!

Abide in Him!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 12

Beginning our Focus on Garden Flowers

What wonderful timing, to start a focus on garden flowers just as we return to England in time for Spring! When we left Russia it was minus 15, and so Spring seemed very far away. But here in England the weather is warmer, and already we've been enjoying the daffodils and crocuses.

We took our nature study trip to the Garden Centre today. The kids had a wonderful time just looking around (there's nothing like this where we live in Russia!). While Nathaniel was engaged with the fish in the aquariums with Daddy, the girls and I hunted for some flower seeds and a pot of already grown flowers we could transplant. 

 There were so many beautiful baskets of Spring flowers for sale, as well as interesting garden ornaments and water features and other garden decorations. I had to explain that, no, we couldn't buy the large T Rex statue or the bag full of dead maggots for the birds, since we would have a lot of explaining to do getting those through customs on our way back to Russia in August!

In the end we chose Sweet Peas, Snapdragons, Pansies, Sunflowers and a packet that had a mixture of various types of cottage garden annuals. Our potted plant was a Primula. I also couldn't resist buying some little gardening gloves and tools :-)

We're looking forward to having Grandma and Gramps so near by. They have a wonderful garden, so the plan is for much of our nature study to take place there during the next few months. We'll plant some of our seeds here in our rented house, and others over at theirs. I'm really looking forward this study, and I think it'll be so fun for the kids being able to grow their own flowers and learn how to look after them.


Abide in Him!

Link up here to the Outdoor Hour Challenges

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 11 - Tree Study

I'm actually writing this entry having come to the end of our year long tree study project. We chose trees as our family focus last year when we started doing these Outdoor Hour Challenge and followed eight trees, two in our garden and six in our town park. I think, however, that I was a bit more interested in doing the study than the girls were, but I'm hoping they'll be interested when I put all the photos together and they can see how the trees have changed in the photos.

Here are some pictures of the apple tree in our garden, which was our particular focus back in this post.

May

June

August

 

November

December

January

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 10 - Picnics

This challenge is about picnics. Maybe it's something about being British, but I've always loved picnics, whatever the weather. I remember when we first moved to our town here in Russia, a local couple took us up into the foothills of the moutains for a picnic, which involved making a fire from scratch and cutting up our own cucumbers and tomatoes there on the grass. It started to rain. "Oh, we're so sorry about this," they said. "Don't worry," we smiled, "We're British. A picnic wouldn't be a picnic without the rain!".

Anyway, for this challenge I wanted to write about two picnics we've recently taken(although perhaps not quite so recently since it's taken me a long time to get round to writing this post!). When dh's parents were here for a visit we took them to our favourite picnic spot up in the foothills (actually, that very same spot where we were taken in the rain 9 years ago). I like to do picnics English-style, i.e. have things already cut up and made beforehand. Dh prefers picnics Russian-style, where you bring everything along and cut it up and make it there and then. For a compromise I cut up the cheese and veggies at home but bring the breadboard and breadknife to make the sandwiches later. One of the things I enjoy about picnics is that the children can run around us while we stay in one spot, instead of, say, going on a walk, where I'm usually dragging one or more of them along by the end because they got 'too tired' at quite a distance from where I parked the car. Russians never picnic too far away from their car (for fear of it being stripped for parts if it's out of sight), which even means them driving over rough terrain to get as close as possible to the picnic site.

Our kids really enjoy picnics up here in the foothills. Perhaps because it's something different. Perhaps because they get to eat loads of crisps (potato chips) without me batting too much of an eyelid. But they particularly enjoy the clambering about on the rocks afterwards looking for interesting clumps of flowers or following the horses that are grazing in the area.

Looking at mountain flowers

     We nearly always find beautiful mountain flowers that I can't identify in my 'Europe' wild flower guide.




The second picnic we took in the extensive town park where we live. The kids enjoyed playing hide and seek behind the trees and running down the little slopes of grass together. On the path on the way back Sophie and Charis discovered hundreds of little striped snails on the gravel path near the man-made lake. We tried to identify which shells no longer had owners and took them home to join our nature collection box on our school-room table. The girls noticed that these snail shells were very different to to the small black snails we tend to find in our garden. This interest led to a quick looking up of some information about snails in the Handbook of Nature Study and on the internet.

Snails from the picnic spot

Small black snails from our front yard

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 9

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 9 involved marking off a square of ground in our back garden with some string and encouraging the children to look as closely as they could to see what they could see in their square. I had a notebook with me to jot down things they found. I also gave them some small trowels and forks to dig a little deeper under the grass, as well as their magnifying glasses.

“Children should be encouraged to quietly and patiently watch the bee, spider, ant, caterpillar or other wildlife that crosses their path. If this seems dull to them, they just need to watch more closely, because their alert eyes can catch the smallest ways of insects in ways that grown-ups can’t without magnifiers.” Charlotte Mason, volume 1, Outdoor Life, page 57 

 Charis started off by putting down her string square and filling it with things she found in the garden, like an apple, a blackberry.. I had to explain that you had to see what was already there and not add new stuff! After noting down things like grass, brown leaves from the apple tree, moss, dirt......Sophie suddenly found a tiny, dark brown snail, which she had a look at with her magnifying glass. She was surprised that the snail didn't seem at all 'shy' and happily crawled up her hand. We also found some clover and the stem from an apple. Unfortunately there weren't any other bugs or interesting things, although probably if we'd dug deeper (we didn't want to mess up the lawn) we would have found a worm or two.

Here's Sophie's nature study entry, again it's a bit faint, sorry!.

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 8

As we start off the new school year (OK, actually we started three weeks ago) I'm planning to continue with the outdoor hour challenges as found on the Handbook of Nature Study blog. So far we're up to challenge number 8, which is all about using magnifying lenses and microscopes.

“In elementary grades, nature study deals with objects which the children can see with the naked eye. However, a lens is a help in almost all of this work because it is such a joy to the child to gaze at the wonders it reveals.” Handbook of Nature Study page 9.

So, armed with their magnifying glasses, Sophie and Charis marched off into our garden with instructions to find something interesting to look at. It took a while to show them the proper distance you should hold between your eye and the glass and the object and the glass to see it at its best. Charis (4) lost interest fairly quickly, but Sophie (6) kept going a bit longer because I'd asked her to sketch a few things in her nature notebook.

 Sorry it's a bit faint, but you might be able to make out a dahlia flower, an empty spider's web amongst the ivy leaves and a spider in the grass.

The girls wanted to take their magnifying glasses along on our next walk around the village, although they didn't actually use them in the end, so I'm hoping that this is something that will grow on them. I'll keep the glasses in our nature study bag so they're always available. We do also have a little bug jar, which has a magnifying lens attached, but it's not very clear, especially by the time the girls have added grass, leaves and water to keep the bug happy!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 7

Nathaniel in the Park

I'm still hoping to keep up with the Outdoor Hour challenges from the Handbook of Nature Study blog, although no doubt it'll continue to be a bit sporadic over the summer. One day I'll be able to keep to my weekly schedule!

We have been spending lots of time outdoors, though, even if it hasn't been purposefully focused on Nature Study. Nathaniel and I spend a lot of time in the park while the girls are at their preschool group in town. I'm sure that's one of the reasons he's such a peaceful child!

Wild Flowers from our Neighbourhood

Even though our focus has been trees, we still love looking out for and indentifying the wild flowers we come across. The girls love picking posies too! Here's a collection of wild flowers we picked on a 20 minute walk around our neighbourhood with some local children. We found pineapple weed, and they loved crushing it between their fingers to smell the pineapple scent. We also had fun with the catkins from the walnut trees, which looked just like bit green caterpillars all over the floor.

So, off we go with Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 7. While I love the idea of the field guides, I think I'd like to wait a year or so until the children are able to fill in some of the details themselves. I'm very aware that I tend to be doing most of the input into the family nature diary at the moment! Anyway, I picked a new tree focus and dutifully read up about Apple Trees in the Handbook of Nature Study. Here's my blog post for what I learned.

Studying one of our Apple Trees

Armed with lots of information, I settled the girls outside in our garden next to one of our apple trees, and we had a really good time examining various parts of the tree.  We looked at the blossom and talked about how the apples would grow. We examined a couple of apples (from the supermarket) and could see where the calyx-cup used to be. I then cut open one apple length-wise and the other cross-wise, and the girls loved seeing the star shape in the latter.

Sophie's Drawing of Apple Blossom

We then had a go at drawing. Charis drew a picture of a girl holding an apple, and Sophie drew a picture of the apple blossom to put in our family nature diary, complete with bee coming to get the pollen.

All in all it was a really lovely nature lesson. We all learned a lot, and the girls seemed to enjoy it, so that's encouraging.