handbook of nature study

We are starting a new unit/curriculum for the spring/summer.  The kids have their annual school exam next week and unless there are areas that NEED improvement, we'll be done with formal school for the spring.  Whats that you say?  Done with school in March?!  Ok, ok, we won't stop doing schoolwork, but we are going to stop the FORMAL stuff.  I'm guessing test results will show X is not super great at spelling and writing, but I'm not particularly concerned about this as our spring/summer projects will be addressing those weaknesses that I'm already aware of.  We are going to be using the Handbook of Nature Study as a spring board for starting a notebooking project.  The kids love being outside.  I love having them be outside.  So its only natural (pun intended) to go on outside!!!  I'll try to show what the notebooks look like as the kids get started on them.  But here's a little of what we did on our nature walk today.

I wasn't entirely prepared for this adventure as we had only planned on going to the children's museum, but they wanted to go to on a nature walk too at Buffalo River State Park (which is 20 or so miles from the museum) so we went there on a whim and I only had my cell phone to take pictures.


We went down to the river and just sat on the rocks for quite a while, watching the river flow, throwing in twigs to see them float, and tossing in stones to see them drop.  I did have snacks in the car for the kids, so we sat down and ate our snacks there.

We saw moss growing on the trees.

Yellow and green moss!

He says "take a picture of me pointing at the moss" (clearly, moss was an interesting highlight of our walk!)

A is showing how the grass is starting to come in on the path, we'll go back in a couple weeks to the same spot and compare what it looks like :)

And on the other side of the path the trees are bare, again, we'll go back to compare this later.