Green Hour Challenge #13 - Flower Parts and a Scavenger Hunt

Today's temperatures were much more moderate so we decided it was high time to get outside for a nature walk. Before we headed outside Sophie and I filled out the flower parts work sheet that Barb included with the challenge. Sophie actually did remember quite a few of the parts from when we have gone over them before. I was surprised that Ian even remembered a few of them too.
For a little more fun on our walk I also printed out the Spring Nature Walk Worksheet from Hearts and Trees.

Right across the street from our house we saw a bush covered with white iris'. We went over there to take a good look at them.

They were very beautiful but a little difficult to figure out all the different parts.
After looking at these flowers a while we stopped to look at our scavenger hunt list to see what else we were supposed to look for. One of the items was a tree in blossom. I didn't think we would find one because so many of the trees had already blossomed. But then I spotted one of the many magnolia trees in the neighborhood and saw a few nice big blossoms on it.

There are a lot of buds on the tree so within the next few days the trees should really be beautiful with all the big white flowers all over them.

Since we saw so many blossoms a few months ago we took a good look at some of those trees and found some heavy with growing fruit.




As we were walking down the sidewalk, the same sidewalk we walk along all the time I suddenly noticed this orange in the tree ahead. Below it is the Bottle brush bush that we looked at closely last week so I know this tree wasn't orange last week.

When we got up closer I looked at what was making the orange and it really surprised me. I am going to have to find out what kind of tree this is. I haven't seen any others in the neighborhood.

Since this was a scavenger hunt for the senses we also had to touch a lot of different things. We were all surprised by how many leaves are soft and fuzzy. Here is the leaves of a Geranium that were very furry.

The birds were out this morning too. We saw them everywhere and they were loud today too. They are hard to get good pictures of so bear with my meager attempts.

I don't know what kind of bird the one above is. It is hard to identify birds when you only see them from below. But when this one flies it has black wings with white patches on them. Any ideas? Here it is again later on our walk.

This loud crow kept cawing and cawing during our whole walk.

We watched this little gold finch for awhile. Sophie was sure it had a worm in it's mouth. After looking at the picture I think it is only some grass or leaves it has in its mouth.

We didn't get a picture of the blue bird we saw or the humming birds we watched. They were a lot more difficult to catch on camera.
Here are just a few more pictures of the lovely flowers around the neighborhood. These ones were interesting how the petals radiated out like a pinwheel.

I have found it so fascinating to watch how the early spring flowers have almost all faded away and been replaced by the Summer flowers.
There is always new wonders to behold.
Now here is a great flower to look at when you want to point out the different parts. By the time we found this one we had been trying in all other flowers that we found. So the kids new all the names when we got to this one.
Henry's favorite part of the walk was this sticky tree. We examined it and had to touch it.


Sophie collected a few things along the way.

So did Ian.

Sophie came home and colored this picture on the back of the scavenger hunt paper. The drawing on the right is a magnifying glass looking closely at the inside of the flower. I love the butterfly with the little flag that says pollen on it.
She also drew the california poppies on the front of the scavenger hunt paper (you can see the front up at the top of this post). There are still some poppies about. My kids love them!

So that was a lengthy, photo rich description of our walk around the block this morning. I am very grateful to have Spring like weather back for a bit. I am not ready for those high 90 degree days yet.