At the Pond: Week 1

Over at Angelic Scalliwags they're doing a year long pond study. It's been showing up in my feed regularly for almost 2 months now, and the idea intrigues me. We've been doing nature study for a long time now, and we recently introduced sketch books successfully. But it's been very open-ended. We go to the park and wander around looking at pretty much anything that catches our interest. The instructions for Hero's sketch book are very simple: draw anything from nature. Something that grew, rather than was built by people. While we definitely have some places we visit regularly, it's not been anything terribly intentional. That's just the wild spaces I know about within a reasonable drive of our home.

The idea of a weekly visit to our pond is intriguing. The idea of investigating ecosystems and getting hand-on with some of the science that you could do at the pond - even just doing the "look for interesting things" that we've been doing, but in a for focused way, on a particular environment. It's an appealing idea. So we're went to the pond.

The day looked lovely. Really, it was lovely, in an Early Spring kind of way. We only stayed about 20 minutes because that wind was a great deal more brisk than I'd anticipated. It was downright chilly.

The boys threw rocks into the pond. What could be more natural? They loved throwing the rocks and seeing the splashes, hearing the thwonk of the rock hitting the water.

We had a look at the cat tails along the bank. That was fun. The boys had never touched one before, so I grabbed one that hadn't burst yet & pulled it over where they could reach. I'd forgotten how soft they are.

The silly thing burst while Dragon was touching it, and that brisk wind blew seeds all over him. Surprised us all! Enough that I forgot to take pictures, which is kind of a bummer. He was cute with cat tail seeds all over him. I think I'll have too look up cat tails in the Handbook of Nature Study and see what I can learn about them. Seems like I remember reading about them being good insulation; maybe we can do something fun with that.