A cattails update and pond study

Oregon Garden Homeschool day!

9/10/13

Every year The Oregon Garden has a homeschool day in early September.  We always enjoy this day.  We went again this year, and discovered that they had a great big area full of cattails all around the pond!  I knew they had some cattails, but didn't realize they were just right of the trail.  We got to walk right up to the cattails and touch them!  Aric (below) loved it.  He couldn't believe how soft they are.  If you read my last post, our first Fall cattail nature study, we couldn't get this close to cattails, so it was pretty exciting for me and the kids.  

It was

fun to get some close up

pictures...

 

April loved the water lilies in the pond.  She got some great pictures of those.

As a fun bonus, during the homeschool day they have stations set up all through the garden.  One of the stations that they always have (and my kids absolutely love) is the pond discovery station.  This station is always the popular one with lots of kids all around the buckets.  Well, we decided to come back to this station after we walked all through gardens and visited the other stations.  I was hoping it would be less busy on our way out.  It was!  When we got back, there were hardly any kids and a lot of free buckets.  Each of my kids got their own bucket to explore, although they still buddied up when someone discovered something cool.

We spent at least a half hour at this station!  Maybe more.  They didn't want to leave either.  There were all kinds of pond critters to discover.  We found at least 1 tadpole, some little fish (can't remember the name of them), larvae of some sort, water skippers, and a lot more I can't remember at the moment.

 These two were working hard to find that tadpole that kept hiding in the greenery...

This kid didn't want to leave (I had to bribe him away).  He would catch a fish, and say "fishy, fishy!"  Then dump it out and do it again.  He LOVED this.

The tadpole that they finally caught.  It looked really cool when I looked down through the top hole, but my camera couldn't get a good focus on it that way.  Can you see the tadpole?

I didn't know there was so much in such a little sample of a pond!  I think we might spend some more time on pond life in our school soon!

Your homeschool friend,

Desiree