Last Friday we spent some time over at my parents' house down the road from our place. They have a great pond and we took the opportunity to do our nature study time there this week. As the days get shorter and the leaves begin to turn colors, I feel the need to fit in some time outdoors before the season slips away.
So we made ourselves a little "jilly jar" pond scooper (Amateur Naturalist page 146) and we dipped in to find lots of interesting things to examine. We found three little fish, a pond snail, a whirlygig beetle, and another unknown insect. My son caught a Pacific Tree frog in a jar and we took some time to look at him and enjoy his sweet little face.
Here are some of our nature journal entries for the day. We used our field guides to identify the critters we found and we even used our pond guide to identify the duckweed floating on top of the pond. We each picked a tree to identify and realized that our tree identification book wasn't as thorough as we would like so we made a note to pick up a new one the next time we were at the book store.
My son picked an oak to sketch and he also made a leaf rubbing.
Here are some more journal entries for the frog and the fish.
The boys also did some exploring in the woods and found a great spot to stake out a place to come back and observe each month. They chose a place that has a tree and some stacked wood because they thought it might include a place that a critter may live. We shall have to see and we will share our results.
If you look carefully you can see the purple yarn and tent stakes that we used to mark our square in the woods.
So that was some of our nature day from last week. I will list some of the books we used to get our ideas for the activities for the day so you can check your library for similar books. I absolutely adore the "One Small Square" series and this is the first time we used it for the pond study. I highly recommend this series to get you started with nature study.
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