The Outdoor Hour Challenge #1

The Outdoor Hour ~ Challenge #1

One of the blessings of being a homeschool mom is being able to tailor and choose the studies of your children. While we give primary emphasis on those ever important 3 R's, we feel it's of equal significance for them to enjoy the beauty of God's creation through both outdoor play and nature study. While outdoor play happens almost daily, I like to carve out a bit of time at the end of our school week for nature observation. Many times this doesn't include a specific focus, as my main goal is just to enjoy our surroundings and watch the children discover and explore without limitations (except for yelling at them as they dart behind bushes and corners to watch out for poison oak, rogue snakes, food-like subtances either growing on plants or left by humans, beehives, rabid mountain lions, bats, possoms, or skunks, rust covered nails, thorns or any other dangerous object - other than all that, of course). However, having more of a focus is nice, and that's where my long, rambling post get's to the long-awaited for point, and that is where The Outdoor Hour Challenges come in.

Barb, God bless her, has kindly pulled together all of our nature studies for us this fall into nice, neat, weekly lesson plans for me. Well, not specifically for me, but nonetheless, I'm reaping the benefits of her hard work. I highly recommend her blog to any mom who is interested in adding some more nature study to their weeks!

This week, we got going on the first challenge - Cattails! Normally we do our nature studies on Fridays, but since half of our wonderful Wednesday Co-Op group was away for the week, we decided the other half of us (consisting of my dear friend Charlotte's family and us) would get together during that time and enjoy a nearby nature trail where I knew we'd find some cattails along the meandering creek.

Here are some pics of our great time:

We had a fun time, even though it was way too hot! The kids enjoyed the cattails (though I think we were supposed to tell them not to rip them off the stalks - something to work on next time). Only one child went home sporting a minor cut on the toe and so far, no one has shown any evidence of poison oak. I call that successful! ;)

We're all looking forward to learning more about cattails and the changes that they undergo each season! Thanks, Barb for pulling all these wonderful studies together ~ our family will be blessed by them!