We are working on sketching something from spring that we find in the yard each day.  Nate picked the Dandelion and quickly sketched a pencil drawing two days ago.  It made me giggle that with all of the beautiful spring awakenings, that Nate would like the Dandelion. Living on the high desert for so many years really helped the boys appreciate anything of color voluntarily growing in the yard!  I found a great book at the library on Flower Families. We learned that the Dandelion was a composite flower, because it was actually composed of more than one flower on one stem, or producing more than one seed per stem. I was fascinated, the boys were, um, doodling while I talked. :) 

Books we are enjoying to learn how to identify flowers so far:

Pacific Seaweeds Louis Druehl
Wildflowers of North America, Vennings
Coastal Lowland Wildflowers, Underhill
Coastal Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest Profiles of Northwest Plants, Robonson
How to Draw Plants, West

Two Favorites:
Plant Families, Lerner
Botany in a Day, Thomas J Elpel

Have you studied Botany in with your kids?  We have not had the opportunity to do alot of plant identification, in the high desert it is limited to few desert plants, and few wild mountain plants.  What books do you keep on the ready for identification? Do you teach plant families? What type of detail do you go to  with petal counts and stamens and such? I am trying to figure out what is a decent amount of information for the boys. So far, I’m just answering their questions and adding a bit of factual vocabulary with names and families.   – my passion will bend towards detailed information, we’ll see how much of that the boys absorb. 🙂