Picking our Focus for Outdoor Hour Challenge #4

As part of the Outdoor Hour Challenge, our family will be focusing on garden plants for the next eight weeks. This does not mean that we won't be looking at anything else interesting that comes up during our nature study but rather we will keep our minds set on learning more about the garden plants that we have in our backyard. I am sure we will also take in a field trip or two to the local nursery and to our favorite place at this time of year, the Amador Flower Farm.

We got out the Handbook of Nature Study and skimmed down the garden flower selections and my son decided that he wanted to learn about pansies since we have a pot of them on the back deck. We read the introductory information together. He really enjoyed hearing how the flowers looked like human faces so that is what we decided to observe this week.


My son took this one for his nature journal.



I took this one of the center of the flower using my macro setting.

For our 10-15 minutes outside we took some time to really look deeply at the pansy. He saw the face and then we looked deeper for the little man that the book talked about. Found it! We brought one flower inside for pressing and eventually to add to his nature notebook. He had taken some photos of the pansies and those will go in too. Later this week he will put it all together into a page in his notebook.

I read the pages in the Handbook of Nature Study that talk about using scientific names and about the field notebook. We have kept nature notebooks for many years and have found them to be something we enjoy reading over many times. We use spiral notebooks with heavy paper and they have held up very well over the years, even with little hands.


Pretty yellow forsythia.

We were overwhelmed with all the garden flowers already blooming in our yard once we started looking closely.



This is our favorite and soon it will fill in a whole flower bed on the side of the house.


Violets, mmmm. Can you smell them?

Oh, and there was a little tree climbing during our nature time.



Another successful Outdoor Hour Challenge.....done in 30 minutes.