Green hour #4 - Coming into focus

We headed to one of our favorite parks today. It is hard to believe we live in the city when we are at this park. It is a nice long bike trail that goes along a small creek that flows into a lake. It is home to a bunch of ducks, geese, herons and coots (this was one we didn't know before. We found out the name of it today). I took tons of pictures and decided to just put them in a slideshow rather than post each one.

Our assignment for the week was pick a focus for our nature studies. This is always hard with small kids. They don't focus well. They love to look at everything and each day will pick a new subject. I would like to focus on plants. I don't know the real name for most of the flowers, trees, weeds that we see around us. So it is going to be my focus for a bit to try to identify some of the different flowers or trees that we see. Especially the ones that we find in our neighborhood. We take walks or scooter rides around our block so often I should at least be able to point out some of the different plants we pass.

Today while at the park there was a plant that I recognized and knew the name of. It is a plant that I had fond memories of from when I was little. It grew in large supply right in the front yard of our house. My Mom detests it because it tends to take over and spreads out of control. But Vinca will always remind of my youth.
My kids loved spotting it everywhere along our hike. I told them that as a child I used to pop the flower off and suck on the end to taste the nectar. They of course had to try it and then all along our path there were purple flowers littering the way. Since I knew the name of it ( I didn't even know they were commonly called Periwinkle) and referred to it as vinca my kids now call it vinca. Sorry Mom but they love Vinca.
I brought my sketch book along with us to the park. I didn't expect the kids to draw but while they climbed on logs and played with sticks and rocks and sucked nectar from periwinkles I sat and drew one of the geese that was watching us. And I drew a little bit of Vinca. I added the color when I got home. It looked good before I put the color on but flowers just need color.
When we got home Sophie drew a little picture of our outing. She of course added the play ground in too. We spent a little time at the end there climbing and swinging. But she included all the birds we saw. That is what she really wants to focus on.
We saw some Mallards and I was glad that Sophie knew and callled them Mallards. She even knew which was the male and which was the female. Geese were a different story. We had to look up what kind of Geese we saw. They are Canada Geese and I couldn't see any difference in them so we couldn't tell which was male or female. We saw a lot of little black birds too that we kept calling some sort "little black duck". But we found out they are American Coots. But we really got excited when we saw a Great Blue Heron. We come to this park a lot and haven't seen one. We always look for it but never find them. It flew out of a clump of trees over us and ended up back at it's nest we guess. The sign we read about them said that they love the eucalyptus trees that grow in this park.
We had a great day at the park. Notice I said day. It was supposed to be Green Hour but we ended up staying at the park for 5 hours. I walked to the car with Ian begging for just a few more minutes and Henry kicking and screaming because he wasn't ready to go home.