Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Monday's Nature Walk


One of the local marshes (or swamps, if you will) in our neighbourhood. 

This spot is wear the muskrat lives, although we 

haven't spotted him in a long, long time.

 

Looking for something interesting...


What's that in the water?

 

It's slithering between the logs...


We were so excited to see how the snake gets around in the water!

Then we saw this very large goose fly by, just in front of us!  Jennie didn't have her SLR camera with her, or we would have gotten an awesome shot of it right in front of us!  It flew over to another goose, where they appeared to be arguing over something, then this one flew right back.  It was like we were in a runway, very close to the airplanes!


Then we took a brisk walk through the woods to inspect what the forest looks like in spring.  We were lucky enough to find some flowers sprouting out beneath the fallen leaves.


The children also found this tree trunk fungus to be particularly interesting, and requested a photo to share this find with their parents.  I can't wait for us to find the decomposing tree trunk we found last summer, so we can see how much more it is becoming like mulch.  Just like in our book we have been reading from the library about the life of a tree, The Gift of the Tree.  I would love for us to take this book along with us, and a blanket, so we can sit and read it in the forest, and pick out real examples of the tree's life stages as we are reading. 



Just a reminder to parents - we did NOT go to the garden store last week, as the clay art project we were working on was so captivating to the children that we ended up spending time each day on clay (or play dough) doing sculptures, then re-doing them again and again.  Our gardening field trip will be rescheduled for the week after Mother's Day.  This week, the children will be working on finishing painting their fired clay, and will be finishing their sculpting if they had not finished it last week.  


Monday club update:  Next Monday will be our last session of the season.  It will resume again in the fall.  We will using this time slot to do field trips, or outings, or play dates.  In other words, it's still open for suggestion - if you have somewhere you'd like me to take the kids, please drop me a line!  I am hoping to take them to a few places we haven't been in awhile, like Doon Pioneer Village, Castle Kilbride (in Baden), Riverside Park in Cambridge, and of course Churchill Park - which is the absolute coolest park in the whole region!