Gearing Up For School

Now that I have a break from Summer classes I am working on the finishing touches for our upcoming school year. I have a love / hate relationship with school planning lol. I love the thought of a new school year but sometimes the details can get very "boggy" and I feel like I'm in a rut. It will pass though; it always does. This year I will have a 6th grader and a 9th grader. My eldest son goes to our church school and my eldest daughter graduated last year. We will be doing lots more nature study per requests of Roosie my 11 year old. I will be posting more links on the pages here for neat sites that I find for all subjects so be sure to check them out.

While working in our flower bed last week we found an interesting  tenant under a flower pot; a black widow spider. So that will be the first subject of our nature studies.I found a great info link here BLACK WIDOWS ; its from our local university. I think you will find it very informative especially if you live in Tennessee. Also the ironweed and goldenrod is already beginning to bloom here so we will do a study on that too. Sometimes we follow the Outdoor Hour Challenge using the Handbook of Nature study but we also kind of go rogue with it sometimes and pick our own thing that catches our eye. We use different websites and things for our info too. I found a great book, ABCs of Nature at our library's book sale for a $1 and it has been a great tool.

Click to buy at Amazon

I try to find some free lapbooks or notebooking pages to use with our studies. If I can't find any ,then I make them. I encourage you as a homeschool family to buy either Microsoft Word or Print Shop software. They are both excellent tools for making worksheets.Worksheets I make I will post on my HSLaunch page. If you are not familiar with that site please go check it out. There are some really great printables there.

Do any of you have any different resources you use for nature study? tell me about them. Blessings! ~ Nikki

Our Autumn Challenge # 1 HBNS

We have been back to school since the 13th. Things are going great. We are having fun and learning alot. I will post later on what we are studying. This is actually a post for the Handbook of Nature Study Blog's Autumn Challenges.

We took a walk today to see what we could find :) I made us a worksheet for our notebooks, you can find it here : Four Signs Of Autumn , Our job today was to sketch four things we saw today that showed us that Fall is here. I took pictures of some things we found. Enjoy ! Blessings! ~ Nikki

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Persimmon"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Chestnuts"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Acorn"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Dogwood Berries"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Fallen Leaf"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Ironweed"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Spiderweb"][/caption]

Oaks And Acorns Outdoor Hour Autumn Challenge

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This is our first post for the Autumn Challenge hosted by the Outdoor Hour at the Handbook of Nature blog. We don’t have the Handbook of Nature book since we had to downgrade back to dialup until Toodles gets another job; we are using some great resource books we bought at our library book sale. The ABC’s of Nature and North American Wildlife, both by Readers Digest. All information in these posts comes from one or both of these books unless otherwise stated.

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Oaks And Acorns

Oaks are the most wide spread broadleaf tree in North America. They also have the largest number of species; 58 trees and 10 shrubs; and occupy the greatest variety of habitats. The leaves on a single oak tree can come in many shapes. Oak trees can also hybridize making identification more complex.

There are two groups of oaks; red and white. Red oaks have tiny bristles on the tips of the leaves and/or lobes. Red oak trees have bitter acorns that take two years to mature and do not fall off the tree during winter. The acorn caps are lined with woolly hairs. White oak trees have rounded lobes without bristles. White oak tree acorns are sweet and mature in six months. The acorns fall off the tree in winter.

Individual species of oak trees can identified by leaf shape and sometimes leaf color. Many birds and mammals eat the acorns of oak trees. These include squirrels, raccoons, deer, bear, turkey, woodpeckers, jays and many more. These animals help spread the oak by storing the acorns and not reclaiming them. Sprouting acorns will grow full sized leaves and unusually long roots.

We have a red oak tree in our yard. We identified it by the leaf shape and the bristles on the end of the lobes.

There are also many other types of oaks in our area. We have identified and English oak leaf but have yet to identify the other oak leaves in this picture.

We have seen some that come close but we hesitate to say they are “that” type of oak. Do any of you in blogland care to see if you can ID them? Blessings! ~ Nikki