Evening Primrose Nature Study Joy!

If you have evening primroses in your backyard and you haven't watched them bloom, you must do it some day! 

I was excited when I saw the Evening Primrose Outdoor Hour Challenge in my inbox last week, because I had just spent some time drawing one in my nature journal the day before. They are fairly plentiful in our back yard, and grow to between four and five feet tall. The boys and I picked some for our teatime flower arrangement, and noticed how fragrant they are.

During the day, we often see tiny insects inside the flower, and bumblebees flying into one, then another, pollinating them. I believe their normal pollination is done at night by moths, though we've never had a chance to see that happen.

From the Handbook of Nature Study, we discovered that evening primroses bloom very quickly in the evening. I went out to watch earlier this week and discovered that the time frame here was between 8:30 and 9:00. Since that's after bedtime for my little boys, watching the flowers open was an observation that had to wait for a special occasion. The boys and I finally went out together yesterday evening. We looked at all the plants and finally settled on one that had several buds that looked like they were about to bloom. Then we settled down to watch and wait. Within about ten minutes, we noticed one of the buds beginning to open. As the petals pushed against the sepals, the sepals suddenly let go one at a time, and curled back towards the stem. After that, the petals continued to unfurl until the flower was completely open. The whole process probably took about five minutes. Meanwhile, another flower had begun to open as well, so we got to watch two of them!

I think this was one of our favourite nature study experiences so far. It was so exciting to be able to watch a flower open before our eyes.

I will be sharing this post with the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival.

Exploring a New Place

We went over to New Brunswick last weekend. While we were there, we got together with Renee and her three girls for a nature walk at Mapleton Park in Moncton. My mom came along too, and she's the one who took all these pictures. The weather was a balmy 14 or 15 degrees, gorgeous for the first day of November (We often have freezing temperatures here this time of year.). I was amazed at how big this green space was. I think I could even live in the city if my house was near enough to a trail like this.

The tamaracks were in their full glory:


The highlight of our walk for me was that we saw a Pileated Woodpecker. I don't think I'd ever seen one before. They are very large, I'd say as big as a raven. This one was drumming away at a dead tree. It looked as though the tree was ripped open in spots, and I realize now that this must have been the work of the woodpecker as he drummed for carpenter ants. His drumming was much slower than the rat-a-tat-tat I've heard before from smaller woodpeckers.


For the boys, though, I think their favourite part was feeding the Mallard ducks in the pond. There were quite a few. I wonder if there will be ducklings if we go back in the spring. We might have to try to do that!

We read Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings this week again, and JJ was quite excited to recognise the ducks in the book as the same kind he had fed last week.



We enjoyed close to 2 1/2 hours outdoors on this nature walk, and I was so glad we took advantage of the warm weather, because it has not been anywhere near that warm since!

I am linking up to Nature Study Mondays at the Fisher Academy International blog.

Highlights from our Nature Walk

Yesterday we did our first weekly Outdoor Hour Challenge of the quarter. As part of the challenge, I read pages 1-8 in the Handbook of Nature Study. I learned quite a bit about what I need to do and be as a teacher in order to cultivate an interest in nature study in my children:

- I need to cultivate my own interest in nature. My love for it will influence theirs.

- I don't need to know everything, or even very much. Nature study can be a joint exploration with my children as we search after truth and beauty in the outdoors.

- My job is not to tell them all the facts. Rather, it is to gently lead them to observe things carefully for themselves.

- I should begin with their interests, not (necessarily) mine. If they want to find out about snakes and snails, I shouldn't be forcing them to find out all about the pretty wildflowers.

- I need to remember the object of nature study:

"...more than all, nature-study gives the child a sense of companionship with life out-of-doors and an abiding love of nature."



Our nature walk was at White's Pond, which is only about three minutes by car from our house. It was a gorgeous day - probably about 20 degrees and sunny. The dragonflies were out, and we had a moment of drama when a huge one landed on JJ's arm. It even stopped long enough for me to take a picture, despite all the excited shouting that was going on. It's a challenge these days to take a steady picture with MM kicking and waving on my back, but you may be able to see that its wingspan was almost as wide as the length of JJ's forearm.

We walked to the pond and looked at the water for a while. SA asked about the water striders, and I was able to identify them for him. A startled frog jumped into the water right in front of us and swam quickly away. Then we took a short walk in the woods. The boys' attention was caught by the many, many varieties and sizes of mushrooms, some no bigger than a pinhead, and some larger than my hand.


When we came back home, SA asked me to write in our nature journal (a notebook with space on the top for pictures and on the bottom for writing.). I told him I would write if he would tell me what to write. Here's what he dictated: "We saw mushrooms on our nature walk. There were paths on our nature walk. We saw teeny-weeny mushrooms and huge mushrooms."



I took the time to look up mushrooms in the Handbook of Nature Study today. He looked over my shoulder and asked about the names of the parts of the mushroom written there. I told him. Maybe next time we see a mushroom, we can pick one and do a spore print. I didn't have much luck identifying the mushrooms, though there are guides online. It seems that there are such a terrific number of varieties out there that it's incredibly difficult to narrow it down. I know now that the yellow mushrooms are chanterelles. I was very curious about the large brown ones. Their caps seemed to have a bit of a greasy shine. I couldn't find them online.

I also looked up dragonflies for him in the Handbook, and it was neat to hear him spontaneously telling his Papa later that dragonflies eat insects and mosquitos.

I tried to interest them in leaf-rubbing, but while they were interested in watching me do it, they didn't care to try it out themselves. Some other day...

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