Spring Hike - Interesting Discoveries

Identifying plants, butterflies, etc. is time consuming and hard to do with kids hanging on me (and computer equipment!) - some of our discoveries I have identified.  I'm working on the rest and will update as possible.  I'll number them - if you know what anything is, please (pretty please!) leave a comment.

1.  Waterleaf

Waterleaf picked for me by J. 

 2. Yarrow - I think :)

3. Lichen - A is particularly excited about Lichen and was thrilled to find this stick covered with it. Do you want to know "All About Lichen" and learn more than you thought you wanted to know?

4. My friend called this dainty blue and white flower a "Virgin Blue-Eyed Mary," but when I looked it up I didn't find any similar images under that name. 

5. Ranchman's Tiger Moth Caterpillar

6.  Starflower/Prairie Star Flower

7.  Yellow flowers are so hard to identify - there are so many of them! This flower had 7-9 flower heads per stem with 5-7 stems per plant.  I was leaning towards one certain flower, but I've lost my notes and am having a hard time finding what I thought it might be in my book again - Sagebrush Country: A Wildflower Sanctuary. 

8.  I am pretty sure this next flower is not native.  I know its some kind of tulip as I saw it at a local tulip festival, but I don't remember its name. I'm going to blame the tulip eating deer who forage throughout the city for transplanting it, but I kind of have a grudge - tomatoes last year, broccoli & cauliflower the year before.  

9. Forget-Me-Not - maybe :) I almost think it doesn't have the same look as a Forget-Me-Not, but looks enough like it that I'm not sure.

10. Mountain Dandelion

11.  The next flower is a complete mystery - I've never seen a simliar flower.  The flower blooms in the middle of the leaf - it was a remarkable looking plant.  The lower picture shows more of the plant and an unbloomed flower. 



A couple more discoveries without pictures:

Wild Onion - Not blooming yet, but that strong, unique scent is hard to miss.  It smells so wholesome and fortifying (deep breathe, sigh), and they are beautiful when they bloom.

Cactus - Prickly Pear I believe, and not necessarily a new discovery.  We do like to watch for the blooms and my kids love shrieking out warnings - "Watch out for the cactus!"

Bluebirds - I believe they were Mountain Bluebird, but they didn't wait around for me to know for sure.  However, the Western Bluebird isn't commonly known to be in our area so I can somewhat safely assume they were Mountain Bluebirds. Can you ever safely assume anything to do with nature?

Mystery Butterfly/Moth - my daughter tried to catch it as I tried to take a picture - c'est la vie.  It was dark brown, maroon, or black with a white band on the edge of the lower wings, possibly the upper wings too - is that description helpful? No? Well, I've looked at hundreds of pictures and still haven't identified it, and I'm the one who saw it! So don't feel bad.

I think we will use this hike throughout the Spring - Summer - Fall to continue discovering new things as this area changes.

Supercharged Science

If you haven't heard about Supercharged Science, you need to check it out!! Tomorrow we will be watching this class:

Free Live Science Video Tele-class!

How do airplanes fly? Why do rockets have fins instead of wings? Discover this and more in our hands-on class in the physics of flight, aerodynamics, lift and air pressure!

Plus, I'll show you step-by-step how to view the moons & rings of Saturn!

Tue. May 24 , 2011 at 12pm Pacific Time
This Interactive Video Tele-class is all about
Airplanes, Gliders and Flying!

Go to this link to register.

3 - 2 - 1 - Blast Off!

 Well, Endeavor may have needed to delay its launch, but A and N's rockets, CENTAURIAN and GEMINI-N blasted off perfectly this week. 

 We used Alka Seltzer and water in a film canister - I broke up our tablets so we could launch the rockets more than once. 

 Prepping the launch pad.

a ready audience!

Okay - so maybe I had a few complications at first. 

Endeavour’s final mission, STS-134, is scheduled to launch Monday, May 14th, at 8:56 a.m. EDT.  Watch it live on NASA-TV.

Spring Bird Study

 I'm really excited for the new May Newsletter from Handbook of Nature Study.  I *hope* it will help us get back into doing nature study.  The Spring weather already has us spending more time outside and our first nature study for this month is of a new bird visiting our birdfeeder - the Lazuli Bunting.  

Here is a not so great photo:

This bird is not in the Handbook of Nature Study book, so we used our Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Western North America and All About Birds to learn more about the Lazuli Bunting. 

Something interesting that stood out to my kids is that the Lazuli Bunting likes to live in "recent post-fire habitats" - they excitedly starting tell me we were seeing so many of them because of the fire near our city last year - my fire posts 1 and 2.  Maybe . . . and maybe its because I changed the bird seed to a songbird variety :). Whatever the reason we are having fun watching these little blue beauties. 

 I let my kids color in a bird outline from the Notebooking Nook's Nature Study - Birds - this set of notebook pages is free at CurrClick. 

N's picture



A's picture



O's picture - she decided to do another frequent visitor to our yard, the Robin :)

Post edited to add another picture of the Lazuli Bunting:

Science Experiment

We had a fun science experiment this week - making clouds. This was part of our lesson on Uranus and Neptune a few weeks ago - simulating the hot inner core and cold outside of the planets, making them gas giants (the clouds) - but we didn't have a chance to do it then. 

Austin getting ice

 Nyah getting water

 Are we ready? Jar, water, ice, matches, snacks - let's do it!

Here it is:

 We did it about 15 times. I think they liked striking the matches.

 After, watching a video about the Water Cycle at The Happy Scientist (this was so Austin could earn something for scouts and it happened to go along with our experiment)

 Coloring the Water Cycle (or filling in vocabulary).

Autumn Series 2010 - Queen Anne's Lace or Weeds

Outdoor Hour Challenge - Autumn Series #6 - Queen Anne's Lace or other Autumn Weed

A and N spent time out in the beautiful Autumn weather sketching the flowers they chose for their year-long observations.  You can see their summer pictures here:  Summer Series:  Queen Anne's Lace

N chose to observe a Delphinum plant:

 A chose to observe a Burgundy Gaillardia plant.

We also spent time looking at "weeds" and seeing how different they are now they are dead and dry.  We tried to find plants that we had looked at during the summer so we could compare them. 

Sunflowers

 Sweet gum . . . something or another.  I forget the full name, but this plant makes your hands horribly sticky, has little ball shaped yellow flowers, and millions of seeds!

 Mullein - this young plant will winter over and then bloom in the spring. 

This is a full-grown mullein

 A variety of the ever-popular tumbleweeds, or umbrellas for little girls :)

Rabbitbrush - late-bloom is the yellow on the right and end-of-bloom on the left 

 And because of the wonderfully, unseasonally warm autumn weather there were plenty of late bloomers for us to discover as well!!



Summer Series #1 - Mosquitos

Outdoor Nature Challenges - Summer Series #1 - Mosquitoes

We are getting back to our nature studies after our "new baby break." I printed out pictures of the Mosquito life cycle and anatomy for the kids to put in their journals. We read from and looked at pictures in several books we have that talk about mosquitoes -

First Animal Encyclopedia

Bugs: Discover an Amazing World (Silver Dolphin)

We found a great video at YouTube of the Mosquito Life Cycle. It looks like the poster if this video has a number of excellent insect metamorphosis videos we will be checking out for other insect studies.

And we took advantage of the wonderful studies done by other homeschool families for great pictures and videos of these little pests! Here are a few:

Pebblekeeper - Angie

Barefoot in Suburbia - Allison

All Creation Cries Out - K

I will be including our "Train Your Senses" experiences with the more current challenges as we complete them.