Chips off the old Block: Nature Studies right in your back yard ~homeschool #atozchallenge

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Nature Studies right in your back yard ~homeschool #atozchallenge

What can you do to learn about nature in your own yard or neighborhood? Do you think you need to haul your kids off on a fancy field trip to a nature museum to learn about nature? Nope.... Just open those blinds, open that door to your own great big beautiful world.

What might you find? Use all of your senses to help your homeschool students learn about their surroundings.

Trees: leaves, bark, twigs, roots, flowers, cones, needles, seeds, pods, nests, birds
Patch of weeds: leaves, roots, bugs, flowers perhaps
Dirt: worms, gravel, stones, seeds, mud
Sky: clouds, sun, moon, stars
Air: temperature, wind, smells, breath on a cold morning
Birds: flying, pecking, eating, chirping, hopping, shapes and colors, beaks, wings, tails, feet
Sounds: wind, frogs, rain, leaves, crickets, bees, fly buzzing, mosquitoes
Weather: rain, clouds, temperature, snow, ice, dew, wind
Flowers (garden or in a pot): petals, pollen, roots, leaves, stem, fragrance, shapes, colors, seeds
My favorite the compost pile , lots of learning in there
Our little pond is full of frogs and all sorts of activity

We love our squirrels and birds, we feed them all, let the kids help you fill the feeders and research the best foods for your area of the country. They will quickly learn what the animals in your area like and don't like. We had a little chipmunk last year also that came to drink from our pond.

I so enjoy the antics of those naughty little squirrels

as they hang from any feeder I have in the yard, most of the time they eat their food, then move to the bird feeders. These photos were taken right outside our front door with my zoom lense DSLR Sony camera. Teach your kids to take photos of the wildlife in your area, or to draw pictures in a nature journal they can keep for throughout school. Nature journaling is a great way to keep memories and learn at the same time, plus an art lesson too.

This pair of doves visit yearly and eat all the food that the squirrels drop on the ground from them. The logs seem to have a Ying and Yang symbol or the kids said they looked like continents....lol , we had our trees trimmed and one tree taken down, lots of lessons learned in those old trees.

We love to watch these garden spiders as they weave their webs right outside our sunporch. The spiders are so active at night and catch so many bad bugs.