Sunday Stroll: Episcopal Church Meditation Garden

Today’s Sunday stroll took us to our local Episcopal Church where they have a beautiful meditation garden. We were working on pages 20 and 21 in The Nature Connection. Our goal was to find nature in action on this nature walk.

We definitely saw some interesting things:

Magpie found this little tiny acorn and while it doesn’t fit our parameters of nature “happening” she felt that this little guy was still doing some growing. “He’s a baby, Mom. He’s growing bigger every day.” Well, there you go!

Ants busy carrying food in and out of their home under this stepping stone.

Oleander berries

Web going up the branch of this live oak tree. We’re not sure if the web is made by an insect or a spider. Preacher Man voted insect.

Wasp building its nest or feeding young on the inside.

Storm clouds rolling in for a very long stay. It started raining right after we got back home and is still raining now at 11:00.

I tried to get a sequence of this guy changing colors. He jumped off the oleander bush bright green…

Slowly started changing to brown as he sat on the wall of the church…

Solid brown by the time he scampered off on the chain-link fence.

Wishing I could change clothes at will…it would make getting dressed much easier in the tree house,

Chelli

Sunday Stroll: Mockingbird Park

I made an executive decision today. We took our first nature walk of the school year. I’m trying to be more consistent with our nature studies this year. We had an AWESOME time, but since it’s a normal school day we could not spend as much time outside as I would have liked. So we are going to move our nature studies to Sunday afternoons while Monkey is napping. Monkey is not that great at nature study yet. He almost got stung by a red wasp today and tries to kill the nature we see instead of just observe. I think Sunday afternoons would be perfect for just wandering around the neighborhood or out in the country while working our way through The Nature Connection.

I decided this year we would work straight through the book instead of jumping around like we did last year. The first activity in the book (pages 12-13) is to take a nature walk and jot down everything you see. After taking our walk today, I understand why this is first. It really helped my kids to begin to notice what is around them, from the small things to the large things. To ask questions about what they see. To put stars by things that we want to find out more information about when we get home.

Here are some pictures of what we saw.

Magpie spotted this red wasp was in the process of killing some kind of insect larvae when we walked up to the park. Monkey scared it away because he tried to TOUCH IT! After I grabbed him and moved him away, we sat down on a nearby bench hoping it would come back. Unfortunately we discovered that the red wasp nest was actually inside the metal pipes on the bench, so we quickly moved out of their territory!

We found cicada holes all over the ground and Magpie again spotted this one who had left his exoskeleton in the hole as he crawled out after years underground.

Monkey spotted some magnolia tree seed pods that had dropped to the ground. The girls thought they were so pretty. I can’t wait until they see the flowers next spring!

Magpie, my nature walker extraordinaire, spotted some lichen on the ground growing on part of an old tree stump.

Nature study #1 is in the books!

Helping my children develop a love and curiosity of God’s creation in the tree house,

Chelli