Before going on our fall fest working vacation last month, Pamela and I did two nature studies that I ran out of time to blog, and we have not done anything since until our oaks and acorns walk today.
On a gorgeous sunny fall day, we headed over to our friend Tinkerbell's house where I had spied a field of goldenrod. Before leaving, I printed out the goldenrod page from the goldenrod post at the Handbook of Nature Study blog and read up on this beautiful wildflower on pages 503 to 506 of the Comstock book. Since we have not done a study on composite flowers, we focused on other aspects of the lesson.
The handbook is for guiding the teacher, not to reading aloud to the child. On the drive, I narrated my version of the book's neighborhood story for Pamela:There are flowers which lived in villages and cities, just like people. Sometimes, we are too busy to see flower cities. We are going to find a flower village where everyone wears yellow and everyone lives in little apartment buildings with green roofs. Some families make nectar and pollen bread to fee the butterflies and bees. Others make fuzzy balloons like the dandelion seeds. Other families wave yellow flags to let the insects know where they live. Once we find the goldenrod village, let's figure out what kind of insects like to visit.
We found our golden cities, abuzz with bees, wasps, and ladybugs (or Asian beetles), but did not find any galls. We did not bother identifying the species of goldenrod because they are so numerous and hard to distinguish. Pamela quickly drew a very geometric picture of her find.
Our friend Tinkerbell and her mother saw us on their way home from school, and we wandered the neighborhood and found all sorts of lovely things:
2 comments:
This is so beautiful. I am sure Pamela was thrilled!
I really, really like the notebook page and her drawing. I think she is very artistic and has her own style.
Thanks again for sharing how you completed your nature study this week.
Barb-Harmony Art Mom
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