OR – Something pretty must die to find life! ( I’ll explain in a bit).

Another stormy day in the Pacific Northwest. A few waves in the lake, sustained winds of 25-30 and gusts up to 70+, power failure for a  a couple of hours, and rain like crazy. So what do us PNW’er think?  Well – Nature Study of course!!!

We printed out our Notebooking Pages for the Pansies.  The three youngers sketched, traced, and colored Pansies. Then we described them and created a short poem with the cues from the Outdoor Hour Challenge.  We looked through some field guides and read in the Handbook of Nature Study book.

We had to stop and explain the differences between drawing and sketching with our visiting friends.  Sketching what we see vs. sketching what we think a flower looks like. All of our flowers were different, none of the stamen, petal, stems, or leaves were the same. Once they had the freedom to sketch from the eye, instead of from a memory of a photo, they really took to it!

I didn’t have  a field guide specific to Pansy – I had quite a few local varieties from the Violet family. So the older boys paired up and did a contest to search out the information on the internet. They did a great job!

Part of today’s challenge was to find the “face” in the flower. I just couldn’t find it. I could see an angel of sorts, but no face of a man . . .

Finally, due to the direction of the Older’s Notebook Pages, I let them take apart some of the flowers.  They came running into our room screaming – WE FOUND THE FACE!! It took me a bit, but I finally saw it too. Can you?

I was pretty excited. It was worth it to kill a few flowers to see the life of the little guy’s face!

If you are stuck inside with cabin fever, ask hubby to bring home a flat of Pansies after work, and you too could spend an hour with nature!

Outdoor Hour Challenge, More Nature Study Book 2 – Pansy