This week's Outdoor Hour Challenge is a continuation of our 8-week flower study. Our seeds aren't doing anything yet, but we're still eagerly anticipating the appearance of a tiny sprout! We've been spending time in our garden, and I soooooo wish I could make my blog scratch-n-sniff so you could smell my roses right now! We had some weird insect on two of my rose bushes - but we had to identify it before deciding if it was beneficial or detrimental to our plants. Many Google searches later, and after it squirted fluid at me, I finally did identify it as a type of stink bug; based on what I read, I was fortunate that it did not squirt me in the eye. The funky liquid is an acid that will eat through a Styrofoam cup and can cause eye damage. So we took anti-stink bug action. Interesting, yes, but not the MAIN nature study this week...Learning about flower parts was our focus this week, so that we can refer to them by their "real" names. All that information drifted out of my head years ago (since I had to learn it on paper and had no interest in real flowers back then), so I've been trying to learn them as well! We chose a purple pincushion flower from our garden as our focus flower.
The official name, as far as I know, is butterfly scabiosa, but I think it is the same flower that in the Handbook of Nature Study, is called a cornflower. Even if it's not exactly the same flower, it's obviously very closely related. We learned that this is a composite flower, with more than one type of flower on the same flower head. Daisies and asters are among the many other composite flowers.Kathryn must have listened more carefully than I realized when I read a bit to her from the Handbook of Nature Study while she was working on drawing the flower. She asked for a little spelling help on a few words, but wrote quite a thorough explanation of our little flower! This is a wonderful addition to her nature journal.
She also began a list of our garden flowers, and even without going outside, she was able to name off at least ten of our flowers; that shows me she really is paying attention when I ramble about the flowers in our garden as she's out helping me weed and learning how to prune the flowers! I just LOVE it when I get validation like that because it proves that learning does happens best outside of a textbook. She would not already know these things if she hadn't experienced this first hand. I think that gal Charlotte Mason was onto something good.
