Green Hour #7: Field Guide

"Nature-study cultivates in the child a love of the beautiful; it brings to him early a perception of color, form, and music. He sees whatever there is in his environment, whether it be the thunder-head piled up in the western sky, or the golden flash of the oriole in the elm; whether it be the purple of the shadows on the snow, or the azure glint on the wing of the little butterfly. Also, what there is of sound, he hears; he reads the music score of the bird orchestra, separating each part and knowing which bird sings it. An d the patter of the rain, the gurgle of the brook, the sighing of the wind in the pine, he notes and loves and becomes enriched thereby."
(Handbook of Nature Study, pg 1 and 2)

This is what I want for my children. This kind of enrichment. Anna Botsford Comstock's love of nature is so evident in her writing. It is a joy to read because it uplifts me and my children. In these few weeks that we have made a concerted effort to study nature, we have learned to be better observers and listeners. It has been a wonderful part of our school.

For last week's Green Hour we were challenged to make our own field guide. We are focusing on birds, if you haven't noticed, and so we are making a bird field guide. We have enjoyed perusing the guided that we got from the library and also the information in the Nature Study Handbook.

This week we did more bike riding than walking. I really feel like we are doing our part for the environment! -Now that I don't have a van during the day we have to either walk or bike everywhere. (I guess we could take the bus, but it is SO expensive here--plus I have a 3 year old and a 1 year old, ya know what I mean?) It's so much easier to strap them into the back of the bike trailer and just go. We were disappointed that we couldn't make it up to the Aviary for our nature walk this week. BUT it has prevented me from running to the store for a bag of chocolate chips to make peanut butter bars (which I DO NOT need).


The unfortunate part is that it is hard for me to take pictures while biking. I'm not that good. I have so much more respect for wild-life photographers. It's hard work! So you'll just have to take our word for the observations we made. We noticed that the magpies are back. Elise has been fascinated with the seagulls. While she was filling out her field guide page she noted that the seagulls habitat was Macey's (A grocery store by our house) and that their diet included crumbs and left-overs. Pretty observant, eh?

The river by our house is pretty high right now and is running very swiftly. We talked about why that is. The weather is warmer and the snow is melting in the mountains. The melted snow flows into the river. That's why we have dams along the river, and reservoirs. To stop the water from rising above the river bank and flooding our homes. We didn't see the trio of ducks that we usually see on our walk (a female and male mallard and a black duck). We hope that they are okay. In the Handbook we read,

"Being a 'dabbler' the mallard generally feeds in shallow water, but it is very adaptable as to food and environment." (Handbook of Nature Study, pg 142 )

We talked again about taxonomy as we learned the scientific names of some of the birds for our field guide. For Samuel, we started at the top with the Kingdoms. We learned this little mnemonic to remember the order, Kingdom, Phylla, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species:

King
Phillip
Crossed
Over
For
Gold and
Silver

Sam made a chart showing the taxonomy of the Rufus hummingbird.


Here are the first few pages of our field guide: