Nature Study: Dogwood Tree

This week, our nature study focus was our Dogwood Tree.

The bark of a Dogwood tree is quite distinctive.


We noticed that the leaves came in pairs, with one directly opposite another.


Except this one. It had three leaves.


Here's what the white blossoms look like.


Here's the center of the dogwood blossom.




Is this the fella that's eating the blossoms?


He reminds me a little of a lightning bug.

Cattails in the Springtime

This week our nature study focus was on cattails. We began our study of cattails on Monday by going to a park where I remembered having seen cattails before. Yet, once we were there, we couldn't find any.

Due to rain, we didn't get outside to look again until Friday. This time we found cattails in several places. There were some on a vacant lot at the end of our street. (For those who have read my Squidoo article about 10 Things Kids Can Do On A Vacant Lot - this was a different vacant lot than that one. The one I wrote about on Squidoo is one my son plays on all the time, so he knows pretty well what's on it and what isn't. It's up high on a hill, so it's very dry there. The vacant lot where we found cattails is at the bottom of a different hill, so I can imagine it'd have more water...although we didn't see any water there yesterday.)

When we headed over to a nearby creek to photograph a beaver dam, we found cattails there too! We also found cattails a couple of streets away near the road. Due to a fair amount of standing water (from the recent rains), it was hard to get close to these cattails.

Cattails look quite different in the spring than they do in the summer. If you don't see any of last year's stalks in the area, you might not even recognize the spring cattails! In fact, I am now wondering if some of the plants that we saw at the first park on Monday really were cattails after all! If so, someone had cleaned up all of last year's cattails, so all that was left was this year's new green shoots coming up.

This photo was taken on the vacant lot. All we saw here was stalks from last year. There didn't seem to be any new cattail growth popping up. To our surprise, we also didn't see any water in the area, so perhaps that's why cattails aren't growing there this spring. We did get to examine and touch one of these cotton like balls of seeds left over from last year. They were a little similar to rough cotton filled with seeds.





We broke a couple of the dry, brittle leaves in half and examined them too. It reminded me very much of the onion cells we looked at under the microscope a few years ago!




We spend some time studying the leaves and how they were attached to the stalk too.



Near the creek, we saw a few of last year's stalks, and made our way over for a closer look. Once we got there, we realized that those green shoots coming up from the ground near last year's cattails are this year's cattails! Notice that there was plenty of water at this location! Much of this was probably from our recent rains.






This was the group of cattails located near the road. They had standing water all around them too, and we couldn't get very close.


This was a photo we took at the park on Monday. The pond has lilly pads in it. Could those be cattails in the water, and also on the right side of the photo? At the time we were at the park, we didn't know what young spring cattail growth looked like, so perhaps there were cattails here and we just didn't recognize them!


This photo was also taken at the park. Don't you love the beautiful weeping willow branches dangling over the water? What are the plants in the front? Could they be cattails?

Now I want to go back to the park again and take a closer look!


Behind the rainbow, the mist, and the fountain,
I think there might be some cattail plants.


These aren't cattails, but we thought they were interesting. Anyone know what they are? They were located in several places in the pond.


Here's another one, along with some gold fish. The stalks of the plants went way down into the water. They reminded me a little of lilly pads, but why would lilly pads grow taller than the water?


Here's another plant we thought was interesting.


At the top of the page, I told you about going to take photos of the beaver dam. When we got to the creek, we discovered that someone had removed the dam! The water was now flowly freely, and many of the logs that the beavers had carefully carried there had been thrown onto the banks of the creek.




This is the location where the beaver dam used to be. Poor beavers. I know they worked hard!

Signs Of Spring: A Spring Scavenger Hunt

This week the Outdoor Nature Challenge was to look for signs of Spring! One option was to take a Spring Scavenger Hunt, and that's what we decided to do. Here are the things we saw, felt, heard, and smelled:

Things we saw:

New Spring Leaves


More new leaves


Two different shades of green


Tiny WildFlowers


A taller wildflower (With a bug on it!) Notice how hairy the stem and leaf are!


A weed...or a wildflower. Which would you call it?


A tree with blossoms. This is our Japanese Cherry tree.


A bee


A beetle (Okay, this one wasn't on the list, but we found it while looking for ants!) We did find a few ants as well, but they kept dipping in and out of the grass before my son could get the picture.

Things to feel:

A soft smooth petal (It's nice looking at how petals look up close too!)


Actually, we found a bit more than one flower petal!!


Something warm from the sun
This is our cat, Tiger. He got a little too hot and headed for some shade! (We could completely identify! We were hot in the sun too!)


Something cool in the shade.
Well, Tiger's mostly in the shade anyway! In this photo, he's standing beside our butterfly bush, which will quickly shoot up again before too long. All around Tiger are petals off of our nearby Japanese Cherry tree. The small patches of sunlight on the ground come from the sun peaking through the branches of our Japanese Cherry Tree.

Things we smelled:

The flowers of Red-tipped Photinia smell really nice!


These flowers smelled wonderfully too!

Things we heard:
Birds chirping.

Other things we noticed:

We thought these flower petals were quite interesting!


Last week I posted some photos of our Candytuff plants. They were a Mother's Day gift to me one year! When my family gave them to me, they'd already planted them in our walled garden area. As they've grown, they begun to drape delicately over the wall.


Look how much more the Candytuff flowers have filled out this week! Last week the shape was quite different!

Early Spring Flowers: A Homeschool Nature Study

This week's Nature Study Challenge was to study and learn about Early Spring Flowers. My son and I didn't have any trouble finding spring flowers to study! We have a Bradford Pear, a Japanese Cherry tree, crocuses, and several other blooming plants in our year right now.

We began our nature study by comparing the blossoms of the Bradford Pear, the Japanese Cherry tree, and an ornamental shrub. We observed the parts of the flower on each one, and also discovered that they all had five petals.

Bradford Pear Tree


Japanese Cherry Tree

I've forgotten the name of this one. I believe it's some sort of dwarf ornamental pear. Whatever it is, it's very pretty when it's blooming! Notice how it has both white and pink blossoms on the same plant.

You can see how the sepals help protect the bud!

We had quite a few bees flying from flower to flower in our yard. Luckily the bees were more interested in the flowers than they were in us, as my son had to get pretty close to the bees and stay there for quite some time as he waited for a bee to land on a flower long enough for him to snap a photo!

Next we explored some crocuses that were blooming in our yard.

We noticed that, unlike the previous flowers we'd studied that day, they did NOT have five petals. They have three petals and three sepals. The sepals are the outer "petals" which help protect the flower, especially while it's developing from a bud.

We observed that our crocuses have grasslike leaves, with a white stripe down the middle of each. In the Handbook of Nature Study, Anna Botsford Comstock explains that crocuses don't come from bulbs. They come from corms, which are thick underground stems. Bulbs have layers, like an onion, and corms do not. Roots grow down from the corm and shoots grow up from it. Each year, baby corms grow on top of the mother corms, causing the corms to be eventually be pushed out above the ground, and necessitating the need to replant them every few years. We're looking forward to planting some crocus corms in the fall, so we can see exactly what the corms look like! We did find a great image of a crocus plant, including the corm: Crocus Corm in Spring. We also found some nice images of crocuses in different stages of developing, including the corms: SRGC Bulb Log Diary



Here are some of the other flowers we found in our yard.

This is a very small flower that was growing in our grass. We noticed that, like the crocus, this one did NOT have 5 petals. It had four.

Our Candytuff didn't have 5 petals either! I found this to be a very interesting petal arrangement! The photo above was taken 4 days ago. When I looked today, the flowers had begun to fill out more.

Here's a side view of our Candytuff, taken on the same day as the photo above.

You can see the additional flowers that will soon be open. They will help make each flower cluster look more round.