Nature Walk Thursday

Today was the first day of Nature Walk Thursday. To recap, our summer plans include spending every even Thursday involved in nature activities. How cool, and timely also, that I stumbled upon The Outdoor Hour. Barb provides free online plans and weekly challenges that connect to The Handbook of Nature Study. I really had no idea or plan about what we were actually going to do on Nature Walk Thursday. I thought Ms. Q and I could just sorta stumble along and figure it out along the way like we usually do. Well, something better just came up! We started with the first challenge today. It was a blast!

We went to Giampeitro Park near our house. This is a favorite spot for playing on the playground so it took a little while for Ms. Q to move beyond the man-made scenery and really see what else their was. We planned for 30 minutes nature walking followed by 15-30 minutes playing, depending on Little M's mood because it would be nearing the time of his morning nap.

The ground was so soggy from the weeks and weeks of rain we have received lately that our shoes were totally wet. We really got into it though and Ms. Q was sad when the timer went off for us to stop. She was consoled however, by the fact that it was now time to go to the playground and some other children had arrived to play while we were walking.

Ms. Q was really interested in identifying the flower she picked from a bush growing near the lake and also in a strange little red mushroom she found. Neither one of us had seen a red mushroom before but we had never really looked for one either. She took a lot of pictures and pasted them into the nature journal she made two weeks ago along with her own drawings of her "specimens" and a little narrative of our "adventure walk" as she called it. M really liked feeling the barks of various trees. I asked him how the bark felt and if different tree bark felt different from others. He's thirteen months old, so he really didn't give me much of a response but it fun nonetheless.

We saw a momma goose with some babies near the lake and Ms. Q was sure to tell me that they were not goose babies but called chicks. I was surprised that she was more interested in the plants she found growing than in the wildlife. I pointed out some turtles on a log, a crane fishing, and the call of a bullfrog in the bushes but she dismissed these things and went zooming over to some flowers growing that she had never seen before. As soon as we returned home she told Fred all about our walk and showed him the things she had collected. She said she can't wait until our next walk and was begging me to give her the next outdoor hour challenge.

Here are some pictures from our nature study.