Yesterday was one of those early autumn days when you hate to be stuck inside. Good thing we weren’t! After I got Cara and Evan out the door with their school carpool, I got a shower while Liam practiced the piano. Then we got out of the house! Liam is doing a nature study at the park near our house, so we headed that way. I drove because of Lori and our stuff (and because we needed to leave straight from there), but Liam ran the whole way (his choice).

Liam has picked a spot in the woods at the side of the creek to conduct a nature study. He takes his digital camera and field journal and records his observations. We have been visiting about once a week and will continue throughout the year to see how things change through the seasons and weather. (He was shocked to see that with so little rain, the creek has actually stopped running.) We did some exploring and investigating before heading back.

After a quick stop at the grocery store to get lunch for a picnic (where Liam conducted the self-checkout), we picked Cara and Evan up from school (where they had spent most of their time outdoors, too). We headed over to Green Spring Gardens Park. We had a lovely picnic amidst the beautiful flowers, visited the greenhouse, and walked through the woods to the pond (where we saw frogs among the lily pads and experienced a flock of Canada geese take flight towards us). All the while, Liam was identifying the (conveniently labeled) plants for us and comparing leaf shapes. We ended up in the horticultural center where we found a display on monarch butterflies, including a live caterpillar munching on a plant. We read the books and did the puzzles that were out.

On the way to the car, Cara stopped to pick up a fallen leaf, and Liam and Evan grabbed some, too. Liam announced, “Look, Mom, it’s an Eastern Red Oak leaf!” “How can you tell?” I asked. He cocked an eyebrow at me and pointed to the sign at the base of the tree. I smiled. “How could you tell if it wasn’t labeled?” “From the shape of the leaf… if I could remember it.” So they each brought their leaves home with them. As soon as we got home, the boys raced to the crayons. They did leaf rubbings (their idea, not mine), and then traced the leaves and cut them out. Evan also drew a tree with relatively-accurately-shaped leaves (it’s now on the fridge).

Liam then decided to help himself to the pile of left-over fifth-grade math worksheets (that I recently discovered while unpacking a box from my teaching days). He can usually do these by himself, and does so of his own free choosing, for fun.

When I tucked everyone in last night, Liam said he wasn’t quite tired enough to go to sleep, so he was going to stay up and read some of the books he checked out from the library about Apollo 13 and space station Mir. I’m not sure how late he stayed up, but he’s still asleep at 9:30 this morning.

So, yes, I do have a curriculum and a plan and materials, etc. But only as a back-up for when we don’t have something better to do. Sometimes I wonder when that will be…