Monday, January 16, 2012

Our First Nature Challenge and A Recap of Our New Year.






  

Already a new year for several weeks and I am so behind. I literally have not had time to write so I'll give a recap of what's been going on. 

Eating birthday cake!
In Our Lives This Week: First of all Brooke turned 1 on New Year's Day. Yes, she is my New Years baby. Glenn was disappointed that she wasn't a few hours earlier so he could get the tax deduction. She was my first and only water birth. The water does help with your back pains, but once you get to the pushing part, there truly is nothing to relieve that if you are doing it naturally. All my babies were large (she was 8lbs 12 oz) so I'm sure that is part of the equation. Thankfully she is a very funny happy baby. She started walking around eleven months and has not slowed down since. I can't believe how fast the year has gone. 

In Our Homeschool This Week: We started the Nature walk challenge ( see the link above) We all really loved this. We take walks all the time, but don't really slow down and look at things. You think in the winter there is not much to see. How wrong I was. We found so many cool things that there are going to be a lot of pictures in this blog. Here are some of the cool things we found. 
A little patch of armadillo skin! 



couldn't resist getting a picture of these cute baby toes!     























I think these were a type of fungus, they were in some wet spots.


it was powdery inside!


A snail on some dead wood.
We examined things, picked them up, poked them, turned them over, and
brought things home with us!


















A little tree sap.






juniper berries
We found a few different types of berries and got to talk about the difference between bird berries and ones you can eat.



This looked like a fossil of a leaf......don't know if that's really what it was. 













The next day we did a sketch for a our nature book. It was so much fun and gave us lots to look at and talk about. We are looking forward to our next nature walk!

A Few More things We did:

This is one of Brylee's favorite things to do. 
fine motor skill exercises. 

Glue and pasta what else do you need?    
















 This about sums it up. We had a great Christmas and a great New Year. We were all glad for a break from school, but now we are back in full swing again. Bodie's even back in P.E and hasn't pulled his pants down again. So I'd say all in all we are off to a good start this year!

2 comments:

  1. Welcome to the OHC! I am so glad you were able to do some careful observing on this walk. My favorite is the armadillo skin...never ever have seen that in real life, really interesting.

    I think the object that was powdery on the inside is a puffball. If you have the Handbook of Nature Study, you can look that up in the index and then read about it to share a few things with your children about it.

    Great job on this challenge and I am really glad you got started. Thanks for sharing your link. Make sure to submit it to the OHC Blog Carnival. http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_9182.html

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  2. What a nice walk! I've been wanting to do a winter walk with the kids but it has been too cold. We had a 1 year old birthday too, his birthday was on December 30, but we just celebrated this past weekend.

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