OHC - A Twiggy Challenge

We love our OHC with Barb!

With an abundance of bare branches and twigs piercing the winter skies, it seems like the obvious thing to do is to take a closer look at them. Of course it took Barb's Twig Challenge to draw my attention to it ;o) - sometimes it is hard to see what is right before your eyes, so I am always so grateful to Barb and her wonderful nature challenges!

Doing a bit of research before the lesson, I thought I would pop onto the Nature Detectives website and see if they had any free 'twiggy' downloads. They did! Quite a few actually.
Visit Nature Detectives for some great twiggy downloads

 I found this great twig identification sheet which I thought was just perfect to take along with us on our walk to help us identify some of our finds.

Next I created a notebooking page for us to use - feel free to download it...
Download here

Armed with our nature collection bags, and some twiggy vocabulary (short discussion prior to setting off) - we headed out into the great outdoors.
We collected twig samples from many different trees while enjoying the crisp freshness of the morning.

We noticed that some twigs were already unfolding little green leaves - a clear sign of the mild winter we have had so far!

As usual, we found many other interesting finds...

This tree was covered in moss
On closer inspection, we found this very interesting fungi again - could it be bracket fungi? I don't know, it's always so hard to tell!

I just had to take this photo of our cottage! It looked so cosy nestled amongst the trees ;o)

Once home, we got straight to identifying our twigs and labelling them.

 The girls really quite enjoyed this task. Then it was time to fill out our notebook pages, once again, I am amazed at the progress the girls have made in their sketching skills!

Happy trails ;o)
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6 comments:

  1. karen26 January 2012 at 19:25

    Love the photo of the mossy tree! You do not see that over here.

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  2. Barb27 January 2012 at 00:12

    Excellent! Great find with the twig printables from Nature Detectives. I always love seeing your part of the world and your cottage has a perfect winter setting. :)

    Thanks for sharing your outing and your resources with the OHC.

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  3. Zonnah31 January 2012 at 16:46

    Love your cottage :)

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  4. Liz31 January 2012 at 18:10

    Just popped by to see what you'd done - linked from the blog carnival. Intrigued, as we are also under an English sky, but we're new to Barb's inspiration. Just thought I'd let you know that I think you have a Jew's ear fungus. I googled and the first two hits that came up give you nice pics. HTH. BTW, it is one of the only ones I know - I'm no expert;0)
    Liz

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  5. Shirley-Ann1 February 2012 at 13:25

    ;o) Thanks Liz - very interesting. There is so much of this fungus around so nice to know what I am looking at! It is great to see more English home educators joining in with Barb's OHC - yay!

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  6. Hodgepodgemom2 February 2012 at 20:50

    What a wonderful study fungi, twigs and all. Love the photo of your cottage too!

    ReplyDelete

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