I am using Anna Comstock’s well know book Handbook of Nature Studyto teach the children (and teach myself as well) about the lovely spring flowers that grow in our home’s lovely garden.

I started a little late, we have already seen our crocus flowers come and go, but we read about them anyway.  They are such lovely flowers, and seeing them crop through the snow in early spring is definitely a well deserved pleasure after a long and dreary winter (all winters are long and dreary for me).

Next we studied the tulip, Jonathan’s favourite flower.  We have 7 different varieties growing in our gardens.  It was interesting to learn about their food storage needs, their care and keeping (for instance, the like well drained soil, otherwise their stems become rotted), and that they do indeed make seeds (I thought they could only reproduce through the bulbs duplicating), though not all of the seeds are viable and it takes 5 to 7 years for one viable seed to produce a flower.  Phew!

I will not grumble about the cost of tulip bulbs again.

We took the flower apart and learned about their anthers, stigma,seed pod,and their petals and sepal (I always thought they only had petals), and their stems and rubbery leaves.

To keep our observations nice and pretty, we used Notebooking Pages’ Wildflowers, Weeds and Flowers Notebooking Pages set.

They are having a half price sale on right now and I found this set, which fits in perfectly with Handbook of Nature, since it was designed for with that purpose in mind.

Each child chose the pages they wanted to use to record their observations, wrote them and coloured the pictures as well.

We also took pictures of all the tulips we have, printed them and the kids pasted them onto one of their pages.

This is what they look like. (These are Samuel’s, 7 years old)

The following are Katrina’s, 8 years old.

This didn’t take a lot of time nor effort.  The children were completely focused on the work and enjoyed learning about these flowers.

They asked to do daffodils next.  We have just a few still in bloom.  Better do those quick before they die away like our crocuses.

What I learned is that I need to cut the flowers and stems once the flowers are done blooming (which is pretty much within the next few days) in order to help the plant use its energy in building up the bulb instead of the seed pod. I later need to dig out my tulip bulbs and store them until October, and prepare better beds for some of them than the ones they occupy now.

I should have a better growth of tulips next year.

If we stay in this house for another year...

from karen's blog