Signs of Spring - 2008

Charlotte Mason said that once a child gets to touch, and be in touch with nature and it becomes a habit, it will be a source of delight his entire life. (Home Education, p.61) I have always believed this to be true. Nature refreshes the senses, offers quiet with no digital distractions, allows for children (and adults) to connect with God's awesome creation. It is an integral part of my children's home education, if not the cornerstone. Nature walks are the springboard for everything we do in science and yield numerous fruits (nature pun not intended.)


I am un-apologetic about autumn being my hands down favorite season for nature walks! But, spring does rival autumn in its offering of tangible beauty. Our annual signs of spring nature walk took place this year on Grandma and Grandpa's farm through which the Flint River winds. There are 120 acres of marshes and wetlands, forest, natural spring, pasture, river and beach, deer, squirrel, beaver, fox, bats, birds, and every other woodland and river creature you could imagine. The land is teeming with life, and it is springing up everywhere right now. Yesterday was the perfect day for basking in it! We finished lessons, and loaded up for the short drive over. The dogwoods are in full bloom right now.


This is a look at the Tifton Field which is a smallish field surrounded by woods on three sides, and the bottom land on one. The bottom land is the lowest point of the property, and it is through this that the Flint River cuts its way. I have always loved the Tifton Field, to me it seems enchanted as it is a tiny opening amidst the sprawling woods. Right now it is dotted with small white flowers and many wild violets. Standing in the middle of the field is glorious right now, all of the trees are in bloom and many of them are dogwoods. We found a lot of deer tracks and the children had so much fun imagining that the deer might have been startled by something and bounded away quickly by observing how deep the tracks were engraved. Magical place.


My tree-huggers :) This is the large Beech tree that Sparkly has lovingly "adopted." I asked each of the children to adopt a tree last year. Sparkly adopted this large Beech at the edge of the woods and just at the entry into the opening of the bottom land. Sweet Pea chose a large Oak tree. Since we take a lot of our nature walks here, I thought it would be fascinating to observe the same tree throughout the seasons. We have watched them for a year. Last year was challenging for all the trees here, as we had a late frost that killed all of the new spring leaves, and a record drought. Fortunately, there is a natural spring on the land that feeds the trees here and they have been spared. It is always a joy to see them spring out with new leaves.


Peanut in particular enjoyed the walk today. He had so much freedom to roam and explore. If you look beyond him through the trees, you can just make out the little spring cutting its way though the forest.


The end of our walk, and we stopped for a short water break. I thought it would be nice to have one picture of Doodlebug on the walk - she was blissfully asleep for the entire thing, but I like to think of her enjoying the sounds of the birds and the children playing. I'm sure that wires the brain!

Baby Ducks

It is beautiful and we are outside again! On one of our walks this weekend, we discovered baby ducks in the pond down the road. The children were thrilled when the ducks came waddling as fast as they could up the hill to greet them and beg for food. Obligingly, the kids trucked up the long hill to our house, grabbed handfuls of leftover bread and ran back down to the pond to feed the ducks. The ducks are adorable, and of course the first thing out of Sparkly's mouth was, "can one of them be mine?"



The grass is tall across the street from us, and it looks like praire grass when it waves in the breeze. Many killdeer call it home and nest in there we discovered. It was interesting to watch mama killdeer fuss at us as the children (unknowingly) disturbed the birds from their nesting places. We didn't see any nests though - maybe soon.

It is always such a joy to get back out in nature after the winter thaw!

The New and Improved Nature Center

I have resisted the purchase of more shelving for the learning room for some time now thinking "surely, I can make this fit somehow!" I have not been happy however with my Nature Shelf. We used to be able to fit on one shelf - one shelf! Then, I expanded over the summer to 4 shelves. It still wasn't working. It looked cluttered, and I couldn't set up our focused nature study like I wanted to. I've been trying and trying to come up with a solution all year!

I finally decided on another set of shoe organizer shelves from Target. They're actually for a closet organizer system and I discovered them when I was looking for something shallow and fairly inexpensive for my Montessori materials. They have been working perfectly for me Montessori-wise, so I bought 3 more sets for a total of $30 to use as my nature center. Why did I resist for so long? They work perfectly there, providing easy access to nature study materials and a nice visual presentation in the room!


This semester we are studying Botany as part of our broader classification studies. So all of plant life and the plant world is fair game! I set up some of my most delicious books for inspiration - The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady is always open to the month at hand for inspiration in nature sketching. It inspires me anyway!

Our studies are anchored on the set of Botany Nomenclature Cards from Montessori For Everyone. We'd love the Botany cabinet, but the 3 part cards fit into our budget better this year, and they have been working fine! We also used the plant kingdom charts to help us with the big picture as we began our studies.


Then, I round out with all of the delicious books I have on my shelves! Plenty of wonderful rabbit trails spring from this study and our reading! I'm going to add a list of all of the wonderful Plant Kingdom/Botany books in my left sidebar today. How depressing that blogger won't let me capture the enticing book covers from Amazon. But, if you're interested in what we're reading - the list will be over there.


And finally, our nature studies this winter had to include a lovely basket of our favorite bird watching supplies.

Nanny and Papa bought the Bird Identiflyer with several accompanying cards for the kids for Christmas. What a wonderful gift. They've been quizzing each other by playing the bird call, and guessing the bird. Several new calls have been memorized, and it has really enhanced our bird identification as we never listened to identify the birds before. I had to set up a basket for them! I keep it near the window in the learning room where the cardinals and chickadee's love to sit and eat their seed.

I'm anxiously awaiting my copy of Backyard Birds of Winter and Discover Nature In Winter to round out our winter nature study theme. Of course, the Bird Identiflyer isn't the only thing around here really drawing us back to the birds. Take a look at what my husband has been working on since the summer...


Our new Mary pond and waterfall is located right outside our kitchen window. In the spring, with the windows open we'll be able to hear the sound of the waterfall. In the winter, it has drawn the birds to us. It has made for great winter nature study right from our kitchen windows! We'll do some landscaping and naturalizing around the pond this spring, but for now it is such a lovely addition to the sleeping garden!

Ladybug Garden

Sweet Pea has been reading in Nature Friend, and decided after several articles on keeping ladybugs as pets, that she too wanted to create a habitat for some ladybugs. She used an old mayo jar with a plastic petri dish cover for a lid. It fits just right over the opening, and Sweet Pea likes that it's clear. See her looking through the other side as I take a picture.


She went to her garden and added a little dirt to the bottom and planted two little plants in the bottom of her mayo garden. One is a morning glory, but I haven't identified the other yet. She read that ladybugs drink milk and eat carrots and apples. She used her Nature Friend and an Insects book to identify the difference between the males and females she has gathered. She also spent a lot of time studying their individual characteristics. You know the next logical step....naming them. We have, living on our kitchen counter, Bob, Mary, Betty, and Lady. Sweet Pea plans on journaling about them. We will also observe what happens when you have plants, soil, and moisture in an enclosed environment. How fun!

Make Way for Ducklings

When we arrived at co-op Monday morning we were greeted by a mother duck sitting under the bushes near the door. We could see a couple of baby ducks tucked under her.

Apparently, the wildlife people knew she had relocated herself to this area, which was not far from the park where she and the other ducks were residents. They decided to leave her until her eggs hatched. They had just hatched when we arrived Monday morning. We co-op at St. Mary of the Visitation's parish center downtown Huntsville. The building is surrounded on all sides by traffic and busy streets. I'm not sure how she got to St. Mary's from the park without being run over, but she did, and after all the babies were safely hatched she was ready to get them back to the park.

She waddled out of the bushes and 14 adorable little baby ducks obediently followed her. We mobilized! The children lined the sidewalks forming a barrier so she couldn't step out into traffic with the babies. One of the moms called someone, not sure who, but a wildlife or park person. This person, who knew mother duck came for them. As we watched, mother duck and her 14 babies were gently placed in a box and taken back to the park. Success! We all felt very good about helping mother duck, and the children (well, all of us really) had such a treat watching how mother protected those adorable baby ducklings. What a little gift of God on the last day of co-op.

We plan on reading Robert McCloskey's "Make Way for Ducklings" and Beatrix Potter's "Jemima Puddleduck" later this week, and making some lap books recording our findings on ducks and ducklings. If you've never made a lapbook before there are some good examples to give you a jumping point here. I found an extraordinary site with a lot of information about ducks and several printables for including in our lapbook here. We have a lot of questions we want to try to answer. Some very interesting things I found out were that ducks have excellent vision and see in color and developing baby ducks breathe through the tiny pores in their eggshells.

I have been searching and searching for why some of the baby ducks we saw were yellow, while a few were darker. I'm pretty sure they were mallard ducks, but I can't find anything yet that explains the different colors. If anybody should happen to find out let me know.

Nature Walk on the Flint River

It was time to get out for a long nature walk - we headed down "Anne Lane" to the bottomland. It was quite warm yesterday, and I had been back-packing the Peanut up the bluff already, so I wimped out and asked if we could take the gator down to the river. Everyone was agreeable, so off we went.

Isn't this view amazing??!! Shep and Butch (Rob's parent's dogs) took off after some strange dogs and people on horseback, so Rob tossed Peanut in my lap and told the kids to hold on tight. Off we went to chase the dogs. The kids were so thrilled - they screamed in our ears the whole way up the long hill and all the way through the gigantic mud puddle that we plowed through at breakneck speed. When we reached the top of the hill, the dogs were there waiting. We turned around after our little adventure and this remarkable view was in front of us. The picture doesn't really do it justice! The far right treeline borders the Flint River, and that is where we had just come from - and where we were headed back to. This all used to be cotton, but was recently bought and the owner has planted pasture grass for hay for his cows. It's certainly beautiful.

We finally made it to the dam. The water is quite low because of the drought lately, but that made it possible for us to find some great treasures - lots of little fossil rocks, some mussel shells, and lots of flint (hence the name of the river.) Everyone had a great time treasure hunting here!

The dogs were happy to plop in the river for some much needed cooling off. Here's Shep - he was really tired by this time. He just sat right down at the base of the falls and stayed there!

Treasure hunting! The falls and dam in the background were made a number of years ago to divert water to an old grist mill that was just to the left of where the kids are now standing - on the opposite side of the river from us. Sadly, the mill burned to the ground just a couple of months ago.

This is a great shot of the falls - we all climbed up that neat stepped rock formation to the top of the dam - it was a neat perspective for the kids to see the top of the dam. Down here the water moves quickly - there is the sound of the falls and the rocks are pocked and carved from years of water pounding on them. But the top of the falls was...

...so peaceful. The water seems to barely move up here. We found an area near the top here where some tree limbs and leaves had wedged themselves together and provided a very calm place within. There were a number of tiny minnows in this area - it was neat to watch. Peanut discovered them instantly and cried out "pishyies!" Translation "fishies!"

Here are Peanut and I on the rocks at the base of the falls. Rob (taking the picture) was still on the rock formation that form the dam.


After getting our feet wet in the river, we climbed back in the gator. We decided to ride down through the bottom land a little more before heading up to the house. The bottom land had been seeded earlier in the season with fescue. This land has been flooded numerous times because of its close proximity to the Flint River. These floods deposit countless nutrients in the soil here, so it is rich and offers beautiful plant life. We are always amazed at the number of flowers we find here in the rich land along the Flint. It varies from season to season. This day the children were enamored with the vast numbers of buttercups to be picked. We also saw a number of stephanotis, queen anne's lace, and some little purple harebells. We didn't see any deer or other wildlife today, but we were a little loud!

I love stephanotis! I had them decorating my wedding cake in lieu of fancy icing! It is such a pretty little plant. There were a number of these little clumps at the woods edge - always in the dappled sunshine. I am very tempted to go back soon and dig up a few and try to start them around my house. They are said to be evergreen, though I wonder if they could handle our sometimes harsh winters. Still, it would be lovely to see them climbing and flowering up the columns of my front porch.

The Anne Field

Kim and Chris really came through for me and sent me some pictures from their camera. I had to include them here. I wish I had thought to ask for them to include in the original post So Much Scope... Well, above is the Anne field as it was last Sunday. Waiting to spring forth with color, but still holding back. Actually, the Anne fields are between the two tree lines which you can see coming in on the right and left sides of the picture. Just beyond the opening there, the fields open up and start rolling. Kim says she has more pics of the Anne fields. If I can't get back home next week to take more pics, I'll try to get hers up here.

Below are some great shots that I had to include.
Is there anything more adorable.