Nature Study
We celebrated one of our last weeks of summer with a beautiful Friday morning nature scavenger hunt. I found this printable online that had these wonderful things to find on a summer hunt. We engaged all of our senses. We found things by sight, we touched things in nature, we smelled beautiful flowers and found some surprises along the way.
I love to set out a blanket under the grove of trees in our front yard. It invites the children to sketch and sit for a while.
Our basket is ready with our nature scavenger hunt printables, magnifying glasses and binoculars.
Little sweets dressed herself this morning, hat and all!
We found this spider in our Zinnia patch. I thought it was just a common garden spider, but after some research, we learned it was a Green Lynx Spider.
It's quite beautiful with a lovely pattern on its body.
The children decided they wanted to sketch the spider in their notebooks. So, I ran inside for some field guides to learn more about it to share with the kids. We learned that the Green Lynx Spider lays her eggs during September and October. She can lay up to 600 eggs! It seems my flower patch will have lots of spiders come springtime. We also learned that the Green Lynx Spider seldom bites, but its bite is venomous. However, the bite, while painful, is not deadly and usually just leaves some swelling. The species name, viridans, is Latin for "becoming green" It seems they also hunt many crop pests, but sadly also eat honeybees.
Here is Joseph's Green Lynx spider drawing.
And Nicholas in the background enjoying the sun on his back and warm breeze.
Matthew really took his time on his nature journal entry. His spider was very detailed and quite beautiful.
Even Sweets is impressed!
A warm sunny morning spent with my children in nature is such a gift.
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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