Outdoor Hour Challenge Autumn Series-Jumpstart Your Winter Nature Study

The final challenge has arrived for the Autumn Series. This has been a fantastic experience and so rewarding for everyone involved. Meeting other families who value nature study and want to share their experiences here on my blog has greatly encouraged me. I hope that this series has encouraged you as well in your endeavors to get outside with your children each week.

I thought with this last of the Autumn Series Challenges we could go back to the basics. Similar to Outdoor Hour Challenge #1, you will be reading a section of the introductory pages to the Handbook of Nature Study to refresh your minds about the basic ideas of nature study. The idea for the actual challenge will be to keep a running record of anything you find of interest during your outdoor hour time or during your daily activities for the next week. My hope is that even though you do not have time to research and journal about everything on your list this week, the list will become the basis for some of your winter indoor nature study lessons. Think of it. Winter weather has set in and you are not able to go outdoors or your children are just getting over the flu and you don't want to take them outdoors. Pull out the list you made in this challenge and take the opportunity to research and study something from your list.

I did this winter work last year with my wildflower photos. I spent cold winter evenings with my photos, my nature journal, and a field guide completing journal entries from the summer before. What an enjoyable experience!

Outdoor Hour Challenge
Autumn Series #10
Field Notebook List

Inside Preparation
Read pages 1-8 of the Handbook of Nature Study. Even if you have read it recently, skim through it again to refresh your mind and heart.

"It is rejuvenation for the teacher, thus growing old, to stand ignorant as a child in the presence of one of the simplest of nature's miracles-the formation of a crystal, the evolution of the butterfly from the caterpillar, the exquisite adjustment of the silken lines in the spider's orb web."
Handbook of Nature Study, page 4

Outdoor Time
Spend your 10 to 15 minutes of outdoor time exploring your own backyard or the street you live on. Follow your child's lead and try to see your yard through their eyes. You might like to take along this week's notebook page on a clipboard and record any items of interest you find. Remember that you are not going to try to research and study everything on your list this week, but you will keep the list for future indoor nature study times over the coming winter.

Follow-Up Time
If you filled in your notebook page during your Outdoor Time, pick something from the list to discuss with your child. Do they need help identifying the object? Would they like to complete a nature journal entry for the object? Remember my formula for a simple journal entry is to make a simple sketch, a label, and a date.

Now would be the time to record your list if you did not do so during your Outdoor Time. Keep it simple and fun. If your child can only think of one thing to put on the list, do it with enthusiasm. Most children will be able to think of at least two or three things to record and one of those things can be this week's subject for nature study. Remember the most important part of any challenge is to get outside and everything else is just icing on the cake.

If you would like to download some free simple blank notebook pages, I highly recommend the ones from NotebookingPages.com. (Click Free Resources and then scroll down to lined paper and pages.)


I will be keeping the Autumn Series Squidoo Lens up for future reference. Please feel free to use any of the links and suggestions at any time.

Make sure to come back to this post and share your link on Mr. Linky.

The next Outdoor Hour Challenge will be posted on January 1, 2010! As a result of my sidebar poll, I am going to be outlining a Winter Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges. Stay tuned for more details. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the Winter Series, please email me at anytime.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

The Threads of Nature Study

"But if the child chooses the material, the subject will lack continuity: what then?

Nature is not consecutive except in her periods. She puts things together in a mosaic. She has a brook and plants and toads and insects and the weather all together. Because we have put the plants in one book, the brooks in another, and the bugs in another, we have come to think that this divorce is the logical and necessary order.

If all the things mentioned above are taught, then the life of the brook will be the thread that ties them all together. It is well to introduce the pupil to a wide range of material, in order to increase his points of contact with the world."

I think there is a lot of wisdom in the above words written by Liberty H. Bailey in The Nature-Study Idea (1909).

He gives us two illustrations in order to understand the connective idea of nature study led by our children. The first is a mosaic where the pieces are fit together to make a beautiful image. The second is a thread, weaving our study together within some focus area.What a wonderful way to remind ourselves of the way our children will build a love for the natural world and its Creator.

This old book can be found at Google Books: The Nature Study Idea by L.H. Bailey. Sidenote: Anna Botsford Comstock dedicated the Handbook of Nature Study to Liberty Hyde Bailey which I found very interesting.

Feel free to comment on this quote and let me know how it applies in your family.

The Joy of Fungus: Our Mushroom Study

We haven't had much of a chance to study mushrooms up close in the last few weeks but we did over our summer break. Our trip to Oregon gave us plenty to look at and identify. Identifying mushrooms is really a difficult task.


As part of our biology course, we studied the mushroom's life cycle and my boys made nature journal entries using some of the photos we had collected of mushrooms in our area.

"Fungi, as a whole, are a great boon to the world. Without them our forests would be choked out with dead wood. Decay is simply the process by which fungi and other organisms break down dead material, so that the major part of it returns to the air in gaseous form, and the remainder, now mostly humus, mingles with the soil." Handbook of Nature Study, page 715

I think if that is the only thing we learn about fungus/mushrooms from our study we will have accomplished a greater understanding of how the forest ecosystem works. There is great beauty in these living things and a wonderful purpose to their creation.

Our mushroom season will soon be upon us and we will be out and enjoying a whole array of fungus to observe. We will be using the diagram on page 717 to categorize the mushrooms we see as we go along. I am totally inspired by Casey's study: Extraordinary World: Mushrooms.

Here is a set of our mushroom photos from the last year that I gathered on Flickr if you would like to see what we have in our area of California: Mushrooms

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Outdoor Hour Challenge Autumn Series-Mushrooms

Mushrooms! Fungus! Molds! Ask my children and they will tell you that I am fascinated with these things when we find them during our outdoor time. They even call me very affectionately the "Fungus Lady".

I found this video during our last study of mushrooms and I would love for you to watch it in order to prepare you for your study of mushrooms. This video is very well done and will help your children understand how a mushroom grows.

Planet Earth: Mushroom Madness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvTvaxVySlE
You will need to click over to YouTube.com to view this video. Please note: Turn down the sound if the music is too much for you. As always, please preview the video on YouTube and I do not endorse any other video that may come up after this one. There are some questionable videos about mushrooms.

If you do not think you will observe any mushrooms during your Outdoor Time, you can still complete the Inside Preparation work as a way to be ready the next time you do see a mushroom.



Outdoor Hour Challenge
Autumn Series #9 Mushrooms
(Formerly Challenge #41)

Inside Preparation Work
Mushrooms and Other Fungi-read the overview starting on page 714 and continuing to page 719. Page 719 shows the parts of a mushroom with labels.

Outdoor Hour Time
The ideal study of ferns, mushrooms, and fungi would be to experience them outdoors in their natural habitat. Use your 15 to 20 minutes of outdoor time this week to enjoy a search for some kind of mushroom. Your particular area may not have these subjects readily at hand but let your friends, family, and neighbors know that you are studying mushrooms and with more pairs of eyes looking you may be able to find something to study up close.

Enjoy your time outdoors whether you can find this week’s subject or not. Remember to look at the sky and comment on the weather. Take time to notice your tree from your year long tree study. Collect a few items to take inside to sketch into your nature journal. Just because the topic of this challenge is mushrooms, you do not have to limit yourself to that narrow focus during your 15 to 20 minutes of outdoor time.

Follow-Up Activity
Spend a few minutes once inside to discuss your experiences from your nature walk. Are there questions that need to be answered or items that need to be identified? Make a note of any topics that come up that you can research further in the Handbook of Nature Study or at your local library.

Make an opportunity for a nature journal entry. The diagrams on pages 695 and 719 could be sketched into the nature journal. I have created a notebook page for you to use in your nature journal to record your mushroom observations:
Autumn Series: Mushroom Notebook Page

“Since mushrooms are especially good subjects for watercolor and pencil studies, it would add much to the interest of the work if each pupil, or the school as a whole, should make a portfolio of sketches of all the species found. With each drawing there should be made on a supplementary sheet a spore print of the species.”
Handbook of Nature Study, page 718

Spore prints are another idea for an activity following up the mushroom study. I would only do this activity with older students who truly understand that mushrooms can be poisonous.
Here are some instructions you can download: Mushroom Spore Prints or this blog entry.


You can use the provided notebook page to sketch a mushroom that you observed during your Outdoor Time or you can use it to copy the sketch from page 719 in the Handbook of Nature Study, labeling the different parts of a mushroom.

Do not forget that you can always catch up on the Autumn Series Challenges over on my Squidoo Lens. I periodically add additional resources and suggestions for related art and music study using the Squidoo Lens.

Make sure to come back to this post and share your link on Mr. Linky. The Outdoor Hour Community is very good at coming over to check out your study.....don't forget to read everyone else's entries and leave them a word of encouragement.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Truly Beautiful Birds: Woodpeckers

We decided that woodpeckers are very beautiful birds. The two kinds we see most frequently are Acorn woodpeckers and White-Headed woodpeckers and although they are mostly black and white, they are truly lovely to look at.

"The clown-faced Acorn Woodpecker is a common bird of western oak forests. It lives in extended family groups, and all members of the group spend hours and hours storing thousands of acorns in carefully tended holes in trees and telephone poles."

All About Birds, Acorn Woodpecker listing

This tree is at my dad's house and it has about a zillion holes in it from woodpeckers. He is plagued with woodpeckers pecking on the side of his house.


I found this old nature journal entry made for our backyard woodpecker....makes me smile.

Here is our previous entry for black and white birds which included some woodpeckers: Outdoor Hour Challenge: Black and White Birds

Here is another black and white bird that we see and it always amazes me...the magpie.

What a great tail this bird has and he makes a funny noise when he walks along.

We have been keeping track of birds in our yard this week as part of this challenge.

Here is our list:

Western bluebirds
Goldfinches
Western scrub jays
House sparrows
Anna's hummingbirds
Juncos (under the feeder)-just returned
White-crowned sparrows (under the feeder) -just returned

We heard a crow and a mockingbird as well.

We don't have as much variety in our feeders or yard at this time of the year. The bird variety picks up as the winter marches on and by the time of the Great Backyard Bird Count, we are in full swing.

No woodpecker sightings this week but we enjoyed watching the birds we did have in our yard.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Discover Nature in Winter Series and the New Winter Series Challenges Update

As a result of the sidebar poll, I will be pulling together a series of Winter Challenges in the same style as the Autumn Series. I am excited with this new format and I am really glad that you all are finding it helpful too. It keeps things fresh. I have been inspired by what you all have shared in the Autumn Series this time around.

I know there are many of you who started off strong and have now tapered off with the autumn challenges, but there is no time limit and you can complete any of the challenges at any time and post a link.

I encourage you all to at least complete the Cattail Challenge, the Autumn Tree Study, and the Autumn Weather Study if possible so you can participate in the coming seasons as well.



I wanted to make available in a easy to use way the series of Winter Wednesday challenges that I posted last year that go along with the Discover Nature in Winter book. I have posted them on the right sidebar of the blog and they will remain there for you to use as you wish. If you need some additional inspiration, please click the Mr. Linky links for each Winter Wednesday post to see how other families completed the challenges.

I will post the first new Winter Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges on January 1st and they will continue for ten weeks.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Fall Scenes: Colorful World

Red leaf, yellow leaf. Yard art squirrel made with love by my dear husband.


Sprinkles of color.


Red crepe myrtle leaf....yellow veins.


Cyclamen leaves. Shapes and patterns.

Sigh, there is something about the autumn season that is growing on me.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom