The Outdoor Hour Challenge

So it's been a little crazy around here and I haven't spent much time on my blog.  Rereading my last blog made me laugh when I realized that I was going to try to give an overview of each week.  HA!  Well, two months later, here I am...

We are beginning the Outdoor Hour Challenge and I am very excited.  I chose a peculiar day to start though.  I have been sick for 10 days and am finally on antibiotics, but still waiting for my energy to return.  Now in all fairness I have celebrated my Charity's First Communion and my nephew and sister's birthdays during that time, so I finally have tried resting to see if maybe then I can shake this thing. 

Anyway, I sent the kids into the backyard and told them to spend 15 minutes walking around to see what interested them or something new they might have noticed.  Hope got hot after about 10 minutes and came back in not very interested, however she did notice our purple flowers had bloomed.  Charity did a little experiment between two different leaves to see how they felt different.  I believe she did this because yesterday Hope took her out there to teach her that art can use all the senses to be truly appreciated.  She taught her to smell, feel, see, taste and listen to them.  She's such a great teacher!!

So our first day was without mom and didn't go all that great, but simple is good sometimes and that is definitely what it was.  Simple.  So hopefully we will spend time this week looking up what kind of flowers our purple ones are and why one of the leaves was crunchier than the other.  Thanks for coming to visit and I will update more of what we have been doing with pics later this week.  One hint...we are finally our own nation and we are beginning to travel west with a couple of fellows and their guides!

overdue update

Life has been so busy around here with soccer ending and swimteam starting, that I haven't been able to catch up on our long overdue updates. We have had many wonderful things happen and have learned so much more than we set out to learn. We have also had some sad things happen, as does with nature.

First, we still have many visitors to our feeding center. One day Brian and I were out enjoying the day and we noticed a bright orange bird in a tree in our back yard. It never came to eat, but it hung around for quite a while. We finally figured out that it was a Baltimore Oriole. We were very excited!!! The next day, we had an Indigo Bunting come to eat. We were amazed at how blue it was. We have enjoyed all these colorful creatures in our back yard.

We were very excited to realize that we have 3 nests in our yard. The swallows are back and we believe the eggs have finally been laid, because someone is hanging out in that nest all the time now. We have a mockingbird who built a nest in our front yard. Funny thing, the mockinbirds never come to eat. I guess they just eat insects. Lastly, our sparrows built a beautiful nest, right in our backyard, in our bottle brush tree. We were a little concerned because there are often cats hanging out under that tree. On Wednesday we noticed the nest, on Thursday there were eggs and on Friday we had a HUGE storm with lots of wind. We were worried about the birds and when we checked on them noticed they had found shelter on our rain gutters, right next to their nest. The next day we checked on them and noticed 3 babies!! We watched them grow and checked on them daily. We used our plastic picnic table to stand on so that we could see inside the nest. Well, we left the table too close to the nest and the cats were able to reach the nest. We were all so sad to lose our babies and have learned an important lesson about interefering with nature.

If you build it, they will come.

This is an entry that the girls wrote. These are facts that they have learned about the birds in our backyard. (or some they made up) We have also been studying birds that we haven't seen in our backyard like owls, pigeons, ducks, hawks, egrets, penguins, eagles and swans. We will post more about those birds later. By the way, our swallows are back this year and as we read about the swallows of San Juan Capistrano it makes us feel special that they chose our house again to nest. If you click on the links (you may have to copy and paste), they will take you to the song of each bird here. I also found an incredible site that has much information for "birding."
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/

Have fun reading our thoughts!




This is a mourning dove with a grackle. They are called mourning doves because of the cooing sad, song that they make. The grackles have colorful patches on their neck. They're mean. The mourning doves is why they're called mourning doves is cause they're always in the birdfeeder at morning. The mourning dove's beak is not curved.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Mourning_Dove.html#fig1

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Common_Grackle.html



This is a house wren. They only came to visit once or twice and there were several of them. Their beak is small, straight and pointed. It might be a female red winged black bird.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Wren.html


This is a cardinal. It is a male.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Northern_Cardinal.html#fig1


We think this one is a Bridled Titmouse. It eats insects and acorns. The one below is a Bridled Titmouse too.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Bridled_Titmouse.html

This is a white winged dove. It is not common in Texas.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/White-winged_Dove.html#fig1

This is a female cardinal. It has a red beak not like the many other birds. And it's light brown. And the male is red. The cardinal's voice is very good. It's feathers make a mowhawk and some don't. The cardinal's are only is special spots and you don't see them very often around town. Usually in backyards.




This is a red winged black bird. It has a little bit of yellow on his wings. He's about 4 inches tall. His beak is pointed and not curved. We see it sometimes in our backyard. The female is more dark brown and is not black or red.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Red-winged_Blackbird.html



This is a house sparrow. It can be 5-6 inches tall. They blend in with trees. They live in cities and suburbs, and farms.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Sparrow.html


This is a goldfinch. These are very obvious, but they blend in very well with the magnolia tree. This is a male. The female's colors are duller. They're just about darker. They look like the color of a flower.They sometimes come to our backyard and they eat in the birdfeeder and they don't fly away, but then a grackle comes and it scares them away. They nest in mid summer. They kind of look like the lemon fish in our fish tank.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/American_Goldfinch.html
This is a house finch. The house finch has a red head and a brown body and the female has just a plain brown body. They are very common around the United States.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Finch.html

Our first nature walk!

With all this new info I have acquired over the last few months, nature studies have intrigued me the most. I love to explore nature, I remember running through creeks, fields, and just leaving for hours and coming home at dark when I was a child. However, now as an adult, I think of snakes, spiders and other creatures that also live in nature and I'm not sure I want to front that alone, so...my cool idea was to ask for friends to come along! The Littles thought this was a great idea and so off we went after our Mom's meeting at church.

We went to a nearby park located on Cypress Creek. We went down to the shore and tried to find something unusual and we did. Seashells. I have no idea how those got there. We saw a lot of trash and were able to have a good talk about why that can hurt the wildlife around. Once we were through there, we headed back up the hill and onto the path. The kids immediately started seeing things that they normally would have just walked right by. The pulled out their sketch pads and started sketching.

We traveled further and saw the creek from so many angles. The kids found an old stump and decided to count the rings to see how old it was. It was 26 years old. We found trees with diseases (or so we thought).

We also found a tree that would make a very good home for an animal, and we found a centipede.

Thank you Littles for coming with us and making our first nature walk so much fun!!!

Ocean study

Since we went on vacation to the beach in February, I decided to do a beach study in the winter. Crazy, I know, but it's working. All three girls have worked it into their studies. Faith is doing a whole unit on the food chain for science and Hope and Charity are loving all the "living books" I found on Amazon and in ALL the gift shops we went into. Even Love is listening to our stories. It is wonderful to see them learn in this whole new wonderful way. They are living what they're learning and so they have a relationship that will last so much longer than if I had just read them something from a textbook. I feel like I have been given the greatest gift from Charlotte Mason and all the others since who have helped expose this wonderful way of learning to me. Thank you all for I am eternally grateful!

Wonderful Week

Wow! We had so much fun and the learning was amazing...and the kids actually learned something too. lol While reading Little House on Plum Creek, my dd#2 asked what a dew drop was so I explained it to her and told her that if she went out early enough in the morning she might find dew on the grass, or plants. So during breakfast the next morning, she remembered and she and dd#3 went running out with their new backpacks full and ready to explore. I don't know if they ever found dew drops, but they found something even more rare for us down south...ICE! They had more fun exploring the ice and figuring out why it was on some items, but not on others. They also found out that if a piece is big enough it will shatter, but the small ones won't. They spent 20 minutes coming up with all kinds of ideas and loving every minute of it. After they came back in, they sketched in their books, and then gave me a narration about their exploration. This was definitely one of those special moments that can only happen when one is open to being flexible and not being too regimented on a "schedule." I am finding some of us are going to learn most by being flexible and following the rabbit trails when they are presented.

How blessed am I!!