NEW! Botany Notebooking Pages for Fall...

[Re-blogged from Books and Blooms]

Right now, in New England, we've pretty much finished picking strawberries, and are now heading into blueberry season. It will be a minute before we will be out collecting bags of apples.

But I noticed at Wal-Mart the other day, that there are shelves and shelves of notebooks and lunchboxes on display, and I just got my son's school supply list from his fourth grade teacher, so can September be too far off?

For those of you preparing curriculum for the fall, come see my new science journaling pages.

"An Apple a Day" is the first in a series of science journaling pages that follows the  apple tree throughout the year. This first set focuses on the formation of the apple fruit from the flower.

The next set will focus on the fall colors of fruits and leaves.

For more information, see the Store at Simple Science Strategies.

See Simple Science Strategies for details!

Our March Bark Walk on the Nipmuck Trail-- and a Nasty Old Friend

I don't know what the weather is like there, but our month of summer weather, long nights under starlit skies, and shorts gave way to more realistic March weather for New England -- a dusting of wet, sloppy snow today.  Although it's not the 3" they were warning us about, and it really isn't cold, the snow was a reminder that we are, in fact, still in March, when just about any type of weather is possible.

A couple of weeks ago, we all took advantage of a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and took a family walk down to the Nipmuck Trail, part of the "blue-blazed" trail system established in many states. Because it  was too early for a lot of other spring changes, we referred to this walk as a "bark walk," and we took the time to quiz one another's plant ID skills based on buds and bark, alone.
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 The Nipmuck Trail, Willington, Connecticut

Mr. B and I have decided that, being over 50, we need to be a little more assertive with our exercise program. Living so close to a well-marked trail system has distinct benefits. Hubby is recovering from a winter ankle sprain (I told him to tell folks he was Irish step-dancing or he had a rough landing while paragliding, but he simply missed a step while walking downstairs, and sat on his own foot -- being a rather large fellow, this was not a good thing). In my efforts to wait on him in the early days of his recovery, I, in turn, stubbed a pinky toe that I had broken about 4 years ago, rebreaking it. So putting on shoes, let alone hiking, was a big accomplishment on this day!

The blue trail head is clearly marked on our, and the volunteer parks and recreation crew (of which our eldest son, Evan, is a member) does a nice job of keeping the trail passable with minimal disturbance to the environment. The trail, itself, is clearly marked. You can expect to see a variety of spring wildlife in a normal spring -- our dry weather has seriously reduced the availability of vernal pools for migrating waterfowl and spring peepers.



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An Unusual Spring...

The warm weather has caused all the buds to swell. All they need is a few days of wet weather, and they will just about burst.  The local daffodil festivals are worried about the earliness of warm weather, and suspect that the festivals will occur, without the flowers for which they are named, as most daffodils have been in bloom for quite awhile now.

The saucer magnolia at our house, which normally reaches full bloom mid-April, is already in full bloom.

We normally hike along the woodland trails more extensively, but Mr. B was terribly worried about stumbling on a rock or root, and undoing the fine progress that all of his hill climbing has done toward healing his injured ankle. We saved more rough terrain for another hike, and stuck to more level or paved paths for that day.

The Connecticut Forest and Parks Association has a website on the development, location and characteristics of the various trails in Connecticut's Blue-blazed Trail System. Our nearby trail also extends into Massachusetts. The majority of these trails are well documented, and you can find very specific descriptions of markers, paths, grade and intensity level for most of them. Our closest trail is ideal for families with small children, as it has little grade change, and, with the exception of a few climbs over fallen trees, is easy walking.

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A Prehistoric Princess, and a Scientific Thought

The forest floor was carpeted with Princess-Pine, an evergreen plant which isn't really a pine at all, but is actually a clubmoss, a group of ancient plants that were around in the days of the dinosaurs. The cool, deciduous forests of Connecticut suit the needs of this plant very nicely, and it is a welcome bit of green-ness for early spring hikers, like us.

We just take pictures of most things we see as we hike. Princess-Pine grows from rhizomes, root-like underground stems, so attempts to pluck a sprig may end up uprooting an entire patch.

Folklore has it that lichens and moss favor the north side of a tree. I am not sure if this lichen was on the north face of the tree trunk, or not, but that sounds like a great experiment to do.


H(0): Lichens and mosses are equally abundant on the north, south, east and west sides of a tree trunk.

H(a): Lichens and mosses are more abundant on the north face of a tree trunk.

We would have to choose one kind of tree to study: remember, you want to control everything but the dependent variable (the abundance of lichens and moss). Likewise, it would be best to study in just one location.


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The Bark Walk (and a Poisonous Surprise)

We had fun with this tree. My husband, who is learning a lot about plants, living with so many horticulturists in the family, recognized this as resembling a birch tree, and, in fact, he was right, as this is a gray birch (the shiny gray cousin to the more familiar paper birch, which is also prevalent in our forests here). My grandfather used to surprise us as children by going off into the woods with his pocketknife, to get special sticks for us when we used to toast marshmallows at camp. He always brought back these delicious, wintergreen-smelling wonders, which I now know came from the gray birch.

He used to also bake these little pies out of buttered bread and apple slices, in a special press that he held over the fire. When he passed away, it was one of the treasures that was passed along to me. I can't wait to use it this summer with my kids.




Connecticut's state flower is the Mountain-laurel, a cousin to the rhododendrons and azaleas. Here is a patch of baby ones. The mature ones should be flowering within the month: they flower before most of the rhododendrons and azaleas.

Our elder two sons are team leaders at a large wholesale nursery in the state, and have been busy packing and shipping mountain-laurels, rhododendrons and azaleas all over the country. Six a.m. starts and 7 p.m. finishes make for a tired young man.

Last summer, Mr. B was helping a neighbor get his yard in order. Being the helpful guy that he is, he volunteered for the tough task of subduing the hedges. I had told him to be careful of poison ivy, which I had noticed in the grass on the outside of the hedge. In the middle of the job, he called me over to remind him where it was. Sadly, he had already trimmed and weedwhacked it. Doubly sad was the fact that he had removed his shirt on this very hot day, and his body was flecked all over with the tiniest pieces of green, from the top of his head to the top of his socks. Every green speck found a sweaty, hot place to stick and hang out for a good long while, apparently, because he contracted the saddest case of poison-ivy that I have seen in a full grown man.

When we happened upon this next item, he asked about the hairy vine crawling up the tree trunk, and stepped far away when I identified it as his old nemesis, poison-ivy.

Now, in the fall, the poison-ivy leaves turn a beautiful maroon. Most folks recognize the three-leaflets of this sumac relative, but either don't recognize the winter vine, or don't suspect it as being as allergenic as the leaves. I once got a terrible case of poison ivy from raking dead leaves out of a farm cellar doorway. Being fall allergy season, I also must have rubbed my eyes and blown my nose, because I woke up the next morning and didn't recognize the woman in the mirror, whose face was as round as a full moon. Awful stuff. The roots, dried leaves and hairy vines are as bothersome as the green leaves, so be careful chipping wood that has vines growing on it -- you'll end up with a fine crop of poison-ivy in your flower beds. This also happened to us one year. More fun with poison-ivy!




This is an interesting picture. If you look closely, you'll notice a whorl of vines around this guardrail. Every guardrail was surrounded by the same whorl of vines. My husband remarked how odd it looked, and asked what kind of vine it was. I just started to laugh, and he said, "No way. You're kidding, right?" I was not.

Did you know that birds love the berries on poison-ivy? The non-descript flowers produce clusters of white berries, which many birds love. I constantly pull seedling poison-ivy out of my flower beds. I envision birds sitting atop each of these wooden guardrails, eating and pooping, and spreading a little poison-ivy love, all up and down the road.

If your pets like to roam the woods, be careful that you don't mistakenly pick up the oil from poison-ivy from their fur.

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March Treasures...

By now, Mr. B's ankle was telling him to go back home (you can see that he had a trusty staff to steady himself at the end). Plus I think he had started itching, just thinking about the abundance of poison-ivy that he had seen on our March bark walk.

Malik had collected a sparkly quartz rock, Mom had snapped a bunch of photos, and the dog needed a drink of water (which a kind neighbor had ready for him when we made our way back down the road -- what a blessing!).

We stopped by a clump of forsythia to cut some branches to force inside. I added them to a vase of multiflora rose hips that I cut last fall (do you know that those rose twigs rooted? No wonder the plant is so invasive...).



The smallest member of our hiking crew still had enough energy for a tree climb later in the day. Mom & Dad relaxed inside, and the dog found his doggy bed to be a welcome spot for a little nap.

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If you want to do more research on poison-ivy, visit The Handbook of Nature Study for "Poison Oak, Poison Ivy and Poison Sumac: Leaves of Three!"

HNS also has a nice study of flowerless plants, such as mosses, ferns, and our friend, the Princess-Pine, in "What are Flowerless Plants?" Apologia has a free set of botany notebooking pages that you can use to record your observations of these, and other, plants

Spring is a nice time to begin a year-long tree study -- see Outdoor Hour Challenge, Spring Series #1: Year-long Tree Study, for details.

Winter Bird Feeding

Tree felled by hurricane Irene in August.

We always have so much fun feeding our feathered friends. Our weather this year has been so unusual -- a hurricane shut down Connecticut for a week in early September, then a fluke snowstorm at the end of October put the brakes on fall before the leaves had even thought about changing color.  All this, followed by one of the warmest autumns we have seen in years. The week after the New Year began, we were all gathered around a bonfire for an evening of outside fun -- in sweatshirts!

But, this IS New England, and into every year a little winter must fall. The weatherman was predicting a turn in the weather, so we spent last weekend making sure that all our feeders were well-stocked. And we decided to make some pine cone feeders as a Sunday project.

First step... find some pine cones!
We headed out for a little hike to find the materials for our project before lunch. This was a nice time to talk a little about plant identification, and enjoy a crisp January day.


While I readied my camera (can't leave home without it!) and backpack, the youngest hiking partner headed out to find pine cones. He came back, dejected, to say that all he could find was a little one (which was actually a hemlock cone).

We walked into the woods, and I showed my son a seedling pine (below). Of course, it would have no cones, but what it told us was that there was a mature pine somewhere nearby. So onward we looked.

Many people call all evergreen, needle-bearing trees, "pines."  However, for a pine cone feeder, other large cones simply won't do. So it is important to know what to look for (or just go to Wal-Mart and buy a bag of pine cones -- but what's the fun in that?).

We didn't have to walk very far before we saw...

THE MOTHER PINE!

Pinus strobus,  Eastern White Pine

Pines can be much larger than this tree, but, compared to the rest of the woodlot, this tree was a monster. And it was the only pine as far as the eye could see. So we deduced that all the baby pines we had seen on the forest floor were all the offspring of this tree.

In the forestry industry, in a stand of trees of the same species, there are often giant, very fertile individuals that sometimes tower above the rest of the woodlot. These are referred to as wolf trees, and are often used as seed sources. This pine reminded me of a wolf tree, but it was really the only pine in the stand. We hiked to the base to look for cones, knowing that any cones still on the tree would be very high up, out of reach. 

White Pine cones

We were in luck -- there were hundreds of them. We chose cones that had their scales open (you'll see why when we get to the cooking part).  We inspected the white pine we had found, and talked about how the bald eagles in Maine prefer white pines for nesting, as they tower above the other trees and offer a sturdy set of branches for their huge nests. Have you ever seen a bald eagle's nest? It is truly an immense structure. Put it on your "bucket list."

Pine identification

Do you know how to identify a white pine? It's really quite simple. 

Pines are classified as 2-needle pines, 3-needle pines and 5-needle pines. If you look closely at a pine branch, you will see that the needles grow in clusters, with a brown, papery "sleeve" at the base of the cluster. If you pull the needles close together, they will fit close together, and form a cylindrical "tube", which, long, long ago, was the actual leaf of the pine. Over time, the trees evolved and the leaves split into needles of various configurations, but all held together by that papery sleeve.

White pine needles in 5's

White pines are a 5-needle pine, which means their needles are bundled together in groups of 5. There aren't many native 5-needle pines in the East, so this helps us narrow down the field a bit. What's more, white pine needles are fine and soft, and seem to flow off the branch -- they don't stand out stiffly as some others do.

Here is a photo comparing the hemlocks which vexed our son so, next to a seedling pine. The pine is at the right, center. Hemlock cones are only about 1/2 inch long, so they wouldn't really work for our purposes, but they make cute additions to potpourri (that's for another day...)

 

We filled our bag with cones, and headed back to let the frost thaw off them while we had a bowl of hot vegetable soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. Then it was on to...

Pine cone bird feeder time!

I hope you cook at home with your kids. There is so much to learn by cooking, you use all your five senses,  you talk to one another, and learn a life skill. AND you can eat what you make (usually). Before you say, "Not this time," I have to tell you that I once ground my own beef fat with dried cranberries, bird seed, peanuts and raisins, to make my own suet cakes. We used a big stainless steel sausage grinder, and my eldest son and I took turns grinding. While I went to get the containers to freeze the suet cakes in, my little one sampled the beef suet!

Ingredients

• large pine cones
• peanut butter (smooth or chunky)
• lard or shortening
• bird seed
• string
• a medium saucepan and wooden spoon
• a cookie sheet and waxed paper

Scoop peanut butter into the saucepan (we used about 1/2 cup for 6 pine cones). Add about 1/4 cup of lard or vegetable shortening (if your winter isn't below freezing, use lard, as the vegetable shortening will melt from the feeders and be messy). When the peanut butter mixture is melted (be careful not to scorch it), add about 1 cup of bird seed. (We used mixed milo and black oil seed, but any mix will do). Let the mixture cool until the peanut butter is back to spreadable consistency. 


  When the peanut butter mixture is cool, spread it onto the pine cones, pushing the mixture under the scales of the cone (this is why we wanted cones with the scales all the way open). I used my fingers, but my son wasn't fond of the feeling of the peanut butter on his hands, so he used a plastic knife.


Continue spreading until you have filled all your pine cones. If you want, roll the finished cones in additional bird seed to cover (we didn't think about this until after we finished).


Carefully tie string between the scales near the stem end of the cone (don't just tie around the stem, as the string will slide off -- use the last scales as a "hook" for the string).


Place your pine cone feeders on the cookie sheets (lined with waxed paper) to dry a bit.

To make them easier to handle, we placed our cookie sheet on the patio table, so the peanut butter would freeze. My son worried that the birds would eat them -- then we kind of laughed about this, since that was, in fact, the point of it all!


We tied our feeders to the trees, creating little S-hooks out of paper clips, and placing the feeders all around the bottom branches of a tree where we hung our other feeders. 




A Migrating Surprise!

Monday, the weather was unsettled, warming up strangely before a mighty wind rushed in. There was a winter storm brewing for Monday evening, and the wildlife was preparing. About mid-day, I noticed that the cats and dog were lined up, eagerly observing something outside. When I went to see what they were spying on, I saw...

Bluebirds!

There was about a dozen of them, on the pine cone feeders, on the suet basket, under the feeders... One even flew within a foot of the excited pets, to pick up some dropped seeds right by the sliding door.  They stayed all afternoon, feasting with the chickadees, juncos and titmouses.

The next day, we had three inches of snow. Not much by New England standards, but probably enough for the bluebirds to say, "You know, I think it's time to get moving." By Tuesday, the juncos and chickadees ate without their blue friends.

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Follow-up Possibilities

If you haven't checked out our unit on thrushes, Bird Migration: A Study of Robins and Other Thrushes, please do -- it offers the possibility of a year-long study of migration and a host of other topics.

The Handbook of Nature Study website always has timely nature study activities -- Barbara has been posting a lot on winter feeder birds -- check out her website frequently.

We continue to read the Burgess Bird Book for Children -- we downloaded it to the Nook Color, which is very exciting to our tech savvy 8-year-old. You can also read it online, for free, via the Baldwin Project. You can read it from cover to cover, as we are doing, or you can read just the chapters on thrushes: 

• Peter Learns Something He Hadn't Guessed (Robin and Bluebird)
• Voices of the Dusk (Wood Thrush)

We are enjoying exploring our woods, and we have a number of evergreen plants to observe: pines, hemlocks, mountain-laurel, princess pine, partridgeberry, wintergreen, and some really hardy ferns that aren't really evergreen, but try hard to be! We will probably do some reading in the Handbook of Nature Study, on one of our local evergreen plants.

We were sad to hear that our favorite Bird Stack birdwatching site is closing down. We want to continue to take data on our bird feeder friends. Here are some options we might choose from:

1. Project FeederWatch's tally sheets - great data on weather and birds, even if you are not participating in the study (but DO! -- it's fun)
2. The Great Backyard Bird Count 2012 - officially February 17-20, but the form could be used any time. If you haven't ever participated, DO!
3. The Notebooking Treasury has a bundled set of notebooking pages, Nature Study: Birds - Complete Set, with a page for just about any bird study you would want to do on any bird you'd like to study.

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Do you have a preschooler or kindergartner at home? Take a look at our web page on Building a Snowman -- a great integrated unit for the classroom teacher, as well.

Stay tuned for our next blog, to see where we take our birdwatching and nature study endeavors...

The Nightshade Family (and a Little Surprise)

We had begun this plant family study when Barbara introduced the September Challenge on Weeds, Seeds and Other Delights. What timing!

We are having such a successful time studying birds family by family, that we decided to do the same with plants. And we have so many "cousins" in this family, right in our vegetable garden: tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant, the rogue tomatillo from years gone by. Also our little petunia basket.

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The Nightshade family (Solanaceae)

Our garden has quite a few members of the nightshade family. It is a nice family to study for nature study, as it originated here in the Western Hemisphere (although its ancestors didn't resemble most of our common garden varieties now).

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Read-Alouds:
 
I have this thing about books about gardening. I usually go through periods of bringing home armloads from the library, followed by more restrained times where I bring home some chapter books. All through the summer, we read a great number of books about vegetable and flower gardening. Here are some favorites (from this summer and previous years):

In Enzo's Splendid Garden, by Patricia Polacco (anything by Patricia Polacco is terrific)
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (good connection to history)
Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney (so many Maine connections for us)
The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein (this book always made my boys cry...)

There are so many... You can get so much mileage out of the ones above, because the characters are so delightful. Lots of life lessons.

We also took the time this summer to study Genesis 1 and 2, to learn about the Garden of Eden, when we began our series of read-alouds about gardens.

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Notebooking:

We started our notebooking with a colored sketch of our common nightshade, which tumbles along our back fence behind the wildflower garden. We had fun sketching together. I found that my son did a nicer job with his detail when I sketched along with him. And I enjoyed myself too -- how often do we stop to spend that time with one another, just BEING?


 We noticed as we sketched that we had a hitchhiker, who we will talk about later...

We found a diagram of a potato plant  that we studied and colored. We wanted one that was more like a diagram, and not cartoony.


We used a number of blank notebooking pages from the Notebooking Treasury, because we did a lot of sketching of the nightshade plants and other "cousins".


Here are some other places for notebooking pages on these plants:


The Outdoor Hour Challenge Crop Plant Challenges Notebook Pages include pages for a number of common vegetable garden plants, including tomato. Here is a link to a sample.


Homeschool Notebooking has free pages for download, on many topics.


Enchanted Learning has so many pages, diagrams, mini-books and activities, that you are bound to find something to include in your notebook. My little guy doesn't always like to sketch, but he enjoys diagrams, so this is a good place to go for things to add to your drawings.

 

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Background Information:

The Handbook of Nature Study has several pages (pp. 582-584) about the petunia, the flowery cousin to the common nightshade and its vegetable friends. Petunias are nice to use to study the flower structure of the nightshade family, as the flower parts are big.

Here is a case where there isn't a lot that can substitute for just going out and working in the garden. Even in the years when the garden doesn't do well, we always learn something new and get a refreshed spirit from working with seeds and soil.

If you didn't have a vegetable garden this year, think of putting even a container garden in next year.
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Lesson Ideas and Links:

1. Grow a Vegetable Garden

We spent a lot of time gardening while we studied this plant family. We learned about how common nightshade is poisonous, while the other cousins in our garden are not. As we gardened, we compared the flowers, and talked about how botanists use the flowers to identify a plant.

We have about a zillion cherry tomatoes, and they are so much better than the store ones! Two of our four kids don't like tomatoes, but the other two love them. We also have plum tomatoes, some big, meaty, pink-fleshed ones, and, of course, Brandywines. We picked a bunch before Hurricane Irene, just in case, but the plants did well, even thought the heirlooms have climbed far out of their cages. 
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We had started digging potatoes just before the hurricane, and I'm sure that we have a ton of them -- if it can just stop raining! Our soil was already quite wet before Irene, and I think we've only had 2 or 3 days without rain since she passed through our way. I just walked the dog, and the ground sounds like a sponge. At any rate, the first potatoes were delicious for breakfast,  so we're looking forward to the rest.


Malik planted some potatoes in his little garden, too. He found digging potatoes to be fun but tiring.
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I planted the cutest little eggplants this year. I am the only one who likes eggplant in the house, but I think the flowers are beautiful. Don't you? Like our nightshade flowers, on vitamins.

The ones I planted have little fruit (about 3" long), which are purple and white striped. We had to fight the squirrels for the fruit this year. Last year, they would wait until the fruit were just beginning to look like eggplants, then they would strip the branches off! GRRRR!

This year, they started, but our cats spent their first summer outside since they were born, and I think that discouraged the squirrels enough to let the eggplants have a fighting chance. I think we are doing well!

I am amazed at how resilient eggplants are. We have had one of the wackiest summers that I can remember -- about two weeks of near 100 degree, humid weather, followed by a cold spell, followed by tropical, followed by hurricane... And they keep coming!

We have not seen any potato beetles on any of our nightshade family plants this year. Last year there were a few on the eggplants, but I picked them off by hand once, and that did the trick. A few holes on the potatoes, but that's it.

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Our hot peppers were not nearly as resilient as the eggplants, potatoes and tomatoes. It's always tricky, timing the planting. Peppers don't like being cold. And it seems like they never really recover from being set out when the soil is too cold. My plants are small. The peppers are tasty, but there could be more of them. Next year, we'll wait, then we'll plant more.

If you want a great hot pepper for your garden, grow Hot Lemon Peppers. They are pretty, bright lemon yellow, and produce a ton of peppers that are about 3 inches long. I'm not sure why, but no vendors had them available this year. It must have been a bad seed year last year. At any rate, if you are seed catalog shopping this winter, and see them for sale, buy them (we usually buy plants). You'll be pleased.

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If you want to do a nice botany study, the nightshade family makes a nice choice, since there are so many members that you can find at your local garden center. Plus, you get to eat the results of your study!  In these two photos, you can see how the shape of the potato leaves is very similar to the shape of the common nightshade leaves, below. But the habit of the nightshade (almost vine-like) is more like the old-fashioned tomatoes that we have in the garden.

For older children, slicing the fruits lengthwise (stem end to flower end) and sketching the arrangement of the seeds would be a very beneficial botanical study. You will need a hand lens to compare the fruit of the common nightshade. Did you know that all the fruits are berries?



I wanted to find the strange nightshade weed cousin, Jimson-weed, to add to our studies, but have not found any in the vacant lots on our walks. I will have to check by the railroad tracks. When I've found Jimson-weed before, it was in a grassy, overgrown second growth meadow.  The fruits of Jimson-weed are prickly. Jimson-weed, like nightshade, is poisonous.









When I was a little girl, we called the bright red fruits of nightshade "poison berries." I read in one source that 200 of these would be enough to kill a grown man.
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2. Make a Plant Press

Before the hurricane, we built a simple plant press, following the directions in Barbara McCoy's blog post, "How to Make a Plant Press."  We will continue with our plant press project after things dry out a little bit!

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3. Learn Some Scientific Names

My son enjoys the scientific names for the plants and animals we study. For more information on Latin binomials and binomial nomenclature, see my article, "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? Scientific Names and the Natural World."

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4. Practice Penmanship

When we first started homeschooling last fall, we struggled with our little guy's handwriting. He had learned so many bad handwriting habits, and it took a lot of practice (and holding the bar high) to get things back in shape. Charlotte Mason would say of copywork and penmanship, "Accept only excellence."

We use our vocabulary sometimes as a source for copywork. This is what we did with our nightshade family plant names.

Because Malik is in third grade, we practice manuscript several times a week, but we also work on cursive.

As a teacher, I always introduced the letters in the order of ease of creating them: the "loop" letters first -- e, l; then the closed loop letters -- i, t, u, w (a little trickier).  We only write words that we have studied the letters of, or we practice joinings, only.  The photo below shows some cursive practice of joinings.

Periodically, I have my son "grade" himself on slant, size and shape of his letters. We also put a smiley or star next to our favorite word or joining on the page.

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5. Bug Study

We discovered an interesting, as yet unidentified, insect who hitched a ride on the nightshade we sketched. Malik named him, "Buggy." It looks like a shield bug, but it eats holes in the leaves, and most true bugs are sap drinkers.

Buggy is very happy in a plastic container with a fresh supply of nightshade leaves regularly provided.  We will keep trying to identify him (unless one of you can!). It doesn't seem to like the other nightshade family plants nearly as much as he likes common nightshade.

Fall is a great time to do a bug study. Friday, we will be posting about the incredible crop of anthills that have sprung up in our driveway this summer.



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For classroom teachers looking for integrated studies centering on nature study, download my September newsletter, "The Little Green Corner," posted today.