Green Hour Challenge 6 and 7

We did these challenges during separate weeks, but I am just getting around to posting about them. I am excited about this weeks challenge: Up Close and Personal. With this challenge #8, we will be looking at different things with a magnifying glass. How cool is that!

We have been seeing so many things from nature our eyes weren't tuned into as before. A different shaped leaf, an unusual shaped rock, an unknown flower, an animal, and more... We have been blessed to see many different types of animal in our yard lately. Here are some highlights:

We have seen a Opossum (not dead in the middle of the road, but a real live one!) and Raccoons on our deck late at night.

The kids found two Long-Toed salamanders and they made a little habitat for him for a couple hours.

A bird is building a nest in our newspaper box. We don't get the paper, so it is fine by us. It is at a perfect height so we can see the nest building process and hopefully see some eggs and baby birdies. We saw the mom with a twig in her beak one day and we now that this bird is a Mountain Chickadee (great site with eggs in the nest). The next day after we took the picture below, it looked like someone reached their hand in and destroyed the nest. We thought this oppertunity was all over now. But a few days later it was built up again (see pictres for challenge 7). We will be sharing more pictures each weeks as we watch this birds nest.

Challenge 6: Starting a Collection

I asked the kids what things they would like to collect. I can't say we have gotten to far with this.

Holly: She has been collecting sea shells and wants to add to her collection.

Question: Would it be ok to purchase a pack of sea shells from a craft store and help her to identify them? Or would that be cheating? Or does she need to find them on her own at the beach?

Jessica wants to start a insect collection. UM... I haven't been to keen on encouraging this. Bad mommy. But I don't care much for bugs. But she does... I need to have her start gathering the bugs she would like to "kill" and get this project started. I will do better at encouraging this... I will, I will, I will...

Timmy: He doesn't know... Don't think his is interested in collecting anything. And know what... That is ok.

Jake: Pressed flowers... Now this one I like. We have already pressed a couple flowers he has plucked from the ground.

We did a Mini-Study on the salamander as well as our Green Hour Notebooking Page.

I drew a picture of a Alstroemeria in my sketch book.

Challenge 7: Your Own Field Guide

We don't have a color printer and I don't think I am up to creating our own field guide yet. Love the idea though. We do keep track of birds we see in our yard and add them to our list. Recently we added a Black-Capped Chickadee to our list.

While Jessica and Timmy were out dirt bike riding, Timmy saw a black tailed deer next to the path. He stopped his bike and the deer ran about 5 feet in front of him, crossing his path. He thought that was AMAZING! (see Weekly Report for pictures)

Holly did a sketch entry of the opossum in her nature journal.

We did a Mini-Study on the opossum and also did our Green Hour Notebooking Page.

As a extra bonus, we watched Kristen's Fairy House (this site has some neat coloring pages and other activities to do). It was a cute movie that really touched on nature studies. It was neat watching the aunt sketch in her notebook (of a tree) while her niece built a fairy house. I saw it as a wonderful example of how to sketch in our journals. These sketches were used for the aunts books. We checked out the video from our local library.

The next day Holly set off into the woods and made her own Fairy House. She had a lot of fun making it. I was really impressed at what she choose to use. She even used some shells from her sea shell collection.

Holly also was happy to find a bee with pollen on it and she wanted to keep it until dad got home so he could see the pollen on its legs.




We have had some really bazaar weather around her lately. As we were driving home one evening, the clouds above the Olympic Mountains looked amazing. There was a little light showing between 2 peeks and dark clouds all round it. When we got home, Jessica went to her nature journal and sketch what she saw.


And here is a picture of what the nest looks like as of 2 days ago:



We also went on a nature walk with the folks from Koinonia Academy and another family. What an experience this was. We got hailed on! And not just a little either. When we arrived it was nice and sunny. I took a few pictures of the clouds in the skies because I thought they looked neat. Little did I know what they were really holding in them. I should have known. LOL Enjoy some of the pictures from our walk in the slide show below. To read captions, just click on slide and scroll over the picture.

And that concludes our 2 weeks in review of our Green Hour Challenges!

~*~Have A Wonderful Week~*~