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16 August 2012

Back in Nature

It's been a rough summer for nature study. We basically haven't done any. We haven't been to our favorite parks all summer. We've hardly even been to playgrounds, though we have enjoyed our own backyard.





There's a couple reasons for this. One of them is that about the time I was ready to get organized and go to the parks, I got pregnant. And started sleeping through the next three months. Then the heat came on, and with heat indexes over 100F regularly, I simply couldn't tolerate being outside, so I hid inside in our nice air conditioning.




Things have been better the  past couple of weeks, so I have been outside more. First, we took the gardens in hand a bit. They are in sad shape, but it's better than it was. Now, we're getting to the point where we are branching out to our favorite parks some more.




So, today, we went looking for frogs at one of our favorite parks. The park has a little stream, and in the fall we can usually find some good sized frogs hanging out in the water. We didn't find those today, but we did find some little bitty ones. This one was the size of my thumbnail.




We headed through the garden toward the stream, but I couldn't help pausing to take a few pictures of the flowers. Even faded a little, they were beautiful, and it was sooo nice to be looking at flowers through my camera again!



Over by the stream, we discovered some water lilies. They were beautiful. I think we must have missed their blooms last year. That's pretty believable, since we were dealing with all that water in our house and didn't do very much nature study last summer either. 




The boys were having a blast. It's amazing to me how big they're both getting. We measured Hero today; he's 4 foot 2 now. Wow.  He kept standing on stuff and wanting to know if it made him taller than me. Next month, it probably will, if he stands on the same stuff. And of course, anything that Hero can do, Dragon can do too.



The boys looked for sticks to play in the water with. I had a great time taking pictures of the flowers. But we didn't find any of the big frogs. That's OK. We found some bugs that scooted around on the surface of the water. And we found some floppy sticks that the boys loved playing with.


The stream is just a short one, and we didn't have tons of time if we were going to be on time to the appointment we had to go to, so we didn't stay long. It was a bummer. Nobody was ready to go. Nobody really wanted to move on. But Hero wanted to see the flower kaleidoscope they installed last year, so we headed to the garden area.





3 comments:

Donna said...

Beautiful! I especially love your last pic with the bee in shot!

Nature study is something that I'm forever trying to grasp. We live out in the sticks, on a flowing creek which has a stream that runs into on our property. We are naturally outdoors-y people. My boys collect tadpoles and watch them change into frogs. Yesterday, a red leaf fell just before a thunderstorm, and we ahhhhhed over it for a while. So getting to the nature is the easy part. Enjoying it is easy. Putting our hands on it is easy. BUT following up with book study, and notebooking pages alike....that's where I feel like I'm missing the mark. Surely my third grader can do some of that right? Anyway, thank you for sharing!

I'm following you from http://ajoyfulmess.blogspot.com

Roma said...

When you said: "We measured Hero today; he's 4 foot 2 now. Wow. He kept standing on stuff and wanting to know if it made him taller than me.", It reminded me of my two grandsons who were so excited to outgrow me.

Ritsumei said...

Thank you! That picture with the bee was such a happy surprise; I'd been taking pictures of the little guy, and he flew away, and that was the result.

We don't worry about doing written stuff with our nature study at this point. I'd like to see the boys do sketch books, where they draw stuff of their choice, but the fine motor skills just aren't quite there yet. But I don't anticipate ever doing anything super structured, at least not as long as looking for "cool stuff" works.

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