No Child Left Inside

I love it!! To culminate a beautiful week in the Pacific Northwest, the kids and I decided to take the Outdoor Hour Challenge.

Barb at The Heart of Harmony has challenged the homeschool community to add nature study to their school week. To achieve and encourage homeschool bloggers she has decided to post a weekly challenge every Friday. That gives you all week to plan. Smart lady!

Well, the kids and I have met the challenge. Everyone who knows me knows I am not an outdoorsy mom. I don't enjoy hiking, and I don't enjoy camping. I do like the beach and can spend hours and hours sitting in the sun reading. I can bring a blanket to the park and lay in the sun with a good book. I will willingly sit by the pool as long as a book is in my hand. You get the idea. To accept this challenge I had to put down a book or stop cooking and get outside. I think Barb made an agreement with the weather to give me a whole week of sun so that the motivation would be there.

Nothing is really growing around our neighborhood. It is a new development and it is still winter in our neck of the woods. So we spent our time outdoors watching the clouds.We do have a very interesting tree we want to photograph but I left my camera behind on our walks. Perhaps next week....

The clouds are so cool here. You can have so many at one time. Here are the pictures we did manage to get today.

Oldest Peep took all of those as I was driving into downtown today.

We read about clouds here and here.


We also read Little Cloud by Eric Carle and then I found The Book of Clouds by John A. Day. I am going to look for it at the library.

In the challenge we were asked to research two things in nature that called our attention. Well, we looked and we looked but could not find what sort of pine tree this pinecone belongs to, so we are posting our pictures here in hopes that someone out there knows. We found it interesting because of the spikes or leaves sprouting from it. Please leave a comment if you know what kind they are and we will be forever in your debt.

Barb, thanks for letting us join in the fun.