Seed week

Our seed walk collection

Nine fluffy ducklings, oh my

Cicada shells

Unexpected and delightful things happen when you spend time outdoors with children. They play, they learn, they make their own 'fairy playground' from logs, they fall in ponds, they make discoveries, they get swooped by magpies, they meet friendly magpies, and sometimes, semi-wild wallabies allow the children to pat them. All of which happened this week.

We explored the richness and variety of seeds at our local pond, following the Exploring Nature with Children curriculum. We looked at seed dispersal methods and the parts of a seed, made seed art and collected seeds to observe, discuss and draw. Our nature table is now over flowing with all kinds of beautiful, clever seeds and the children are pointing out seeds to me as we go about our days.

Pond Studies

 Eastern Sedge Frog

 Cane toad

 Miss Five's frog

 The difference between frogs and toads

 11 ducklings!

Catching guppies

Catching fish

An unusual find on a paperbark tree - an insect nest of eggs?

Sleepy possum in the rafters

Mallard duck - an introduced species

'Mosquito fish' or Gambusia

In addition to keeping a nature journal with my three children, I recently began using Lynn Seddon's 'Exploring Nature with Children', a year long nature study curriculum. It is a beautiful and inspiring guide which follows a theme each week with suggestions for nature walks, book lists, a poem, a piece of art and extension activities. It has given direction to our nature studies. Despite being based on an American calendar of seasons, we have simply ignored the months and followed the seasons in order to follow the weekly prompts.

We began with Spring and Pond studies, visiting our local pond with nets, jars and nature journals in hand. We discovered toads, a frog, a tadpole, and eleven fluffly little ducklings. On our next adventure we caught 'guppies' and brought them home to observe. However, these tiny fish that I had noticed my whole life and assumed were native actually turned out to be an introduced species now considered a pest. One truly does lean something new each day!

As a result of our pond studies, and the many books I borrowed for the library on the topic, we have been studying the life cycle of frogs, the differences between frogs and toads, and the bird life in our local pond.

If you are interested on focusing more time towards nature study, I can't recommend Lynn's curriculum enough. xx

Begin afresh

On our nature table

Recent pages from my Nature Journal

Spring is here

Australian Wood Duck

Pinned Tiger Moth

Carpenter Bee found dead on a path at Daisy Hill

Toddler and tree roots of a fallen over tree

Hello, turtle!

Nature Journal from today

The Trees - Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf 
Like something almost being said; 
The recent buds relax and spread, 
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again 
And we grow old? No, they die too, 
Their yearly trick of looking new 
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh 
In fullgrown thickness every May. 
Last year is dead, they seem to say, 
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Welcome Spring! With your warmth and renewal. With butterflies and moths on the wing. With all your promises after Winter. New life to explore. New fruit in season. New vegetables in my garden.

Welcome Spring, let us both begin afresh.