Winter Wednesday - Getting Up To Date

We are using the Winter Wednesday Notebook Pages and Activity Ideas from Barbara over at her blog called Handbook of Nature Study.

It's been a little while since I posted our Winter Wednesday Nature studies. For our first one we went to a park, but there was a murder there only a week or so later and being new to this area I'm not certain what nature areas are safe. We've not been going to any for now, which is a bummer. However, I don't want to stop the studies. We'll have to focus on what we can see. The picture above was taken of a chicadee under a pine tree infront of our apartment.

 We did our night sky study on our new iPad. There is a program called SkyWalk and the kids can move the iPad around and look through it, like a window, at the constellations.You can point it anywhere and see what stars are in that direction at that moment.

 I demonstrated how the night sky is different from the summer to winter with a globe and a flashlight. They looked for the winter constellations on the iPad. It will look through the earth at the other side as well.

 We studied the winter silhouettes of deciduous trees by looking out the window and comparing what trees we can see. We talked about what deciduous trees are and how trees can be identified by the silhouette. We also talked about other ways to identify different deciduous trees. Zoe drew a deciduous tree silhouette.

We studied evergreens. I ran out in -20 degree Celsius weather to collect a cone and a branch clipping off of one of the evergreens in front of our apartment. I tried to identify it for them but didn't have much luck. We watched the videos provided with the Winter Wednesday package and learned about how evergreens reproduce.