Outdoor Hour

This post is long overdue... I recently started a teaching job twice a week and that together with some other English and Spanish lessons at a private language school take up most of my afternoons. So homeschooling (and many other activities) have been on hold for some time now. I'm hoping things will calm down once I get more used to planning my lessons and I'll have more time for our usual activities.

We won't be following all the tree related challenges as the trees over here are quite different. I will try to look for some pines so I can introduce the kids to the notion of evergreens. However I chose to start with our own back yard examining the trees we have over there. This time we took a look at acerola, lime and guava (in the picture above acerola on the left, guava on the right and lime somewhere behind those two...).

We've been able to enjoy acerola fruits until recently and the kids just love eating them fresh. We all really like the juice too.

There were still some tiny flowers on the acerola tree. They're so small and fragile but oh so pretty.

Luana sat on the swing and drew the trees after we observed their shapes and their differences.

OK so she was in a bit of a hurry with this one :D I tried to encourage her to colour the picture but she had something else interesting on her mind at that time. She did write down the names of the trees though.

We also talked about vitamine C that all of these fruits have plenty of and I explained very briefly a few things about vitamines in general.

Outdoor Hour # 31 part II

During our second outdoor hour last week we went to look at one plant in particular. I had seen it as I passed by and was curious to take a closer look.

It just happens that we have cotton growing around the corner by the street. I have no idea where that came from and I can't believe I've never seen it before but there it is now. The kids thought it was really exciting and we obviously picked some cotton to take home for an even closer look.

Luana spotted this pretty flower and wanted a picture of it.

Half-way through our walk we had something to drink at this tiny bar.

We some bananas growing by the river Mororó.

We passed through this quiet and cute street...

... and saw our own house (the white one) from a completely new angle. It took the kids a while to recognise it was actually our home.

This was such a nice walk. We had taken these route already before but that was ages ago and lots of things seemed different this time. The best thing during the walk was definitely the cotton :)

Outdoor Hour # 31 part I

We actually did two nature walks looking at trees. This post is with pictures from the first walk when we mainly looked at what grows near our house and which trees can we actually name.

The one the kids always remember: papaya (carica papaya) or mamão in Portuguese.

Lucas spotted this achiote (bixa orellana) seedpod. In Portuguese the plant is called urucum and the name comes from the indigenous Tupi word uru-ku meaning red.

The kids also recognised these two: coconut and mango.

This is cashew tree (anacardium occidentale). In Portuguese it's called caju, which comes from the Tupi word of acaiu meaning "the nut that produces itself".

This is river Mororó, flowing very peacefully at this time of the year.

This horse was one of the favourite things of this walk.

Outdoor Hour # 30

This was supposed to be weeds and seeds but we concentrated on the weeds only. At first I read the kids a story from this book:

In the story the kids shrink and are able to go and visit seeds underground. They see how carrot seeds start sprouting (above) and visit onion ladies (below). They also hear the weeds boasting about how they won't let the small carrots grow and they promise the carrots that they'll pull all the weeds out the next day.

The kids already know the story but don't mind hearing it over and over again. Apart from the story we also love the illustrations.

This is part of our garden. The picture was taken about a week ago when we did this study and the difference is already huge; everything seems to grow so fast! Closest to the camera are kale (Brassica oleracea Acephala group), then rocket (Eruca sativa) and closest to Lucas dill (Anethum graveolens). We also have spring onion, basil, broccoli, green beans and maxixe growing.

We pulled some weeds from the dill and the kids thought it was great fun. I picked dill for them to work with as the leaves are so clearly recognisable that I knew they would be pulling only weeds and not the dill :) They obviously also got to taste some dill and thought it was yummy.

We also took a look at the weed situation in the front yard and found some amongst the grass. We also marvelled at the blooming heliconia (above) and the almost ripe cherry tomatoes (below).

Outdoor hour # 28

This week we took a closer look at dragonflies. We have plenty of these flying around but again it was so hot that we didn't do a nature walk. Dragonfly was the last in my collection of dead insects and now we'll move on to study trees. As we observed the dragonfly I told them about how they are born, what they eat etc. Even the kids' cousin joined us in our study today.

The kids were most impressed by the beautiful wings and the huge eyes.

The picture on the top is Luana's and the other two are Lucas'. I did draw their attention to the shape of the dragonfly's body but it still didn't really come out in the drawings. Bless them :)

Edit. I'm beginning to think this is a damselfly instead of a dragonfly. I bet they have different names in Finnish too but we simply used the one people mainly use when talking about dragonflies/damselflies...

Outdoor Hour #26

Ladybugs were a fun theme that the kids liked a lot. We saw lots of ladybugs in Finland last summer but haven't really seen any over here. We looked at different kinds of ladybugs on the internet and inspired by the images the kids produced the ladybugs above.

We also talked about their life cycle as well as aphids in general. The kids were amused by the relationship of aphids and ants.

The ladybugs below are about 20 cm in diameter and we stuck them on the wall by the blackboard in our library/study room.

Outdoor Hour #27

I'm sooo behind in posting things and I just realised I'm posting in the wrong order... Ladybugs were supposed to be first and bees after them. But here goes...

We studied bees quite recently although we had made big cardboard bees with pipecleaner legs (first picture) already earlier. It's so hot outside at this time of the year that we don't really want to venture outside until much later in the evening. Hence our nature studies haven't involved a nature walk for a while. Instead we look at pictures on the internet, craft and talk about different insects.

We drew this beehive and the kids decorated it with small bees.

It opens up so that you can see what's inside. The kids practiced some hexagons, coloured some (honey) and again decorated with some bees that we glued on.

We also baked a honey cake and have been enjoying honey in general :)

Outdoor Hour # 25

This time we took a closer look at houseflies. It wasn't the most pleasant topic but it was good that the kids also learned about the importance of not letting flies close to your food etc.

We checked out the life cycle of flies from here. We also tried to watch the video of houseflies that Barb recommended but it didn't work for some reason. Might check that later on though.

Lucas drew a giant fly (on the left), a man that's looking after it (the one with the read hair sitting on a chair), a horse and a princess.

Blogger decided this picture looked better this way... Luana drew a woman riding a horse and a man walking. Oh, and there's a fly on the sky too :D

Outdoor Hour # 24

This time we were off to study crickets and unfortunately I don't have any of those in my collection on dead insects :) I knew some of our books happen to have crickets and grasshoppers in their illustration so I asked the kids to find them. Lucas went through two smaller books and Luana took the bigger book in order to find the cricket.

The kids made drawings looking at the books' illustrations and I told them about how the crickets lay up to 2000 eggs at one time. Luana was so impressed by this that she drew loads of eggs in her drawing :) Lucas decided to draw a mantis (that was a new word in English for me!).

We also talked about different beliefs involving crickets here in Brasil. Depending on its colour a cricket is said to bring illness, wealth or hope. They are also said to predict a pregnancy in the household.

And look what the kids found just outside our front door later on this afternoon! What a perfect timing!

Outdoor Hour # 23

It was time to study yet another dead sample of my collection and this time it was a moth. We observed the moth with the magnifying lense and talked about the differences between butterflies and moths (which in Finnish are called simply "night butterflies").

I encouraged the kids to divide their paper in two sections and to draw a butterfly on one side and a moth on the other side. Lucas drew a huge sun and a butterfly underneath it (see it? It's his first ever butterfly and he was sooo proud!) :) On the other side he drew a moon (see it? It's his first ever moon and he was again sooo proud!). Later on he also drew a moth underneath the moon.

This is Luana's picture. We did discuss the colouring of the moths but the one on the right is however a moth (see the stars and the full moon that tell you it's night?) :)

Best part of this task was by far Lucas' joy of his new drawings.

Outdoor Hour # 22

This week's theme was butterflies. I've been really lucky with dead insects lately (if you can call that being lucky...). I've collected a few dead houseflies, a butterfly, a moth and a dragonfly and kept them in glass jars for the upcoming Outdoor Hour challenges. I'm not much into insects but looking at the kids' joy when they study different things through the magnifying lense is so gratifying that it makes me want to collect even dead insects :D

This post is a little different in that the kids took all of the pictures. This is the dead butterfly that I found on the porch the same morning I had planned to do this challenge (and yes, that's Lucas having a mini melt-down on the background, can't remember what that was all about...) :D

We talked about the different stages of the butterflies and made a notebook page about them. These are the eggs that Lucas drew.

This is Luana's butterfly.

And this is Lucas' version of a butterfly.

We're planning to take on moths today. There's a dead one already waiting in the glass jar :)

Outdoor Hour # 20

We went over to our neighbours' side of the fence and checked out our guava tree that we started studying earlier on. I asked the kids whether they remembered how the tree was back then and they remembered the parrots and the abundance of fuits.

This time we found one ripe guava (that unfortunately had some insects so we couldn't eat it) and LOTS of snails. I knew snails can get to many places but that they climb trees... I had to tell the kids not to use the swing that hangs from the tree as these snails spread diseases and even touching the slime can be unhealthy.

We also discovered many more snails in our neighbours' backyard and gave them a hand in getting rid of the ones we saw. The doggy on the other side of the fence is our 6-month-old puppy Oona.

On a more positive note then we realised that the marigold seeds we planted already some time ago are actually becoming flowers! I had already given up on them but hadn't thrown them away. Two survived the lack of attention and pouring rain/hot sun and we finally planted them in our garden. I'm not a gardener type at all but it sure is gratifying to see the seeds grow into flowers :)

This is the other one that survived: a gourgette also seems to want to bloom. If I ever get a gourgette out of this one I bet it'll be the most delicious gourgette ever! :)

I thought we should take a better look at the snails and learn a bit more about them with the kids. And to my surprise Luana suggested that we'd study snails tomorrow! Not sure if we'll have time tomorrow but some time this week.