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astroaztecNext month my first grader's class will do a habitat study. This month they are to prepare something for the school science fair. The teacher gave them the option of doing both projects as one.
The class habitat is to be the ocean. I suspect they'll go down to the beach and look at the rocks at low tide and the estuaries and such. My daughter asserted that for her project she wants to study a meadow.
A meadow, a meadow, where to find a meadow? Oh, how about that one I walk through daily, taking pictures of flora and fauna and livestock. The one of which I've got a sequence of digital photos showing the whole annual cycle of deer antlers, and various predators, and prey. Best of all, those few shots of the occasional but really unique examples of evidence that hint at how the animals and plants interact -- photos which just shout out questions that want to be answered.
So I've fired up Google's Picasa application and I've tagged all the meadow photos. Last week I took her on a virtual tour of the things that I've encountered over years -- things she is not likely to see on a few brief visits for a class project. Yesterday I took her to the meadow to get a quick overview of what's happening now.
She already wants to know more about that skin which covers the growing antlers on the deer from around April to August. I won't tell her what it is called, but she understands that she can go to a library to try to find out. She also has a theory of how a ground squirrel carcass got left on top of a 6x6 fencepost. Maybe next weekend we will collect some plant samples. I doubt that she will encounter the bobcat like I did, and I hope we don't encounter a puma. The only predator I think we have a good chance of seeing together are the golden eagles, and that only if the weather happens to be just right, but maybe the heron will appear. The real trick will be to see if she can figure out how to tell me the identity of that predatory mammal who wouldn't let me anywhere near, of which I have a distant photo and movie of it shaking the dew from its fur.
This is fun. Life is good.
The class habitat is to be the ocean. I suspect they'll go down to the beach and look at the rocks at low tide and the estuaries and such. My daughter asserted that for her project she wants to study a meadow.
A meadow, a meadow, where to find a meadow? Oh, how about that one I walk through daily, taking pictures of flora and fauna and livestock. The one of which I've got a sequence of digital photos showing the whole annual cycle of deer antlers, and various predators, and prey. Best of all, those few shots of the occasional but really unique examples of evidence that hint at how the animals and plants interact -- photos which just shout out questions that want to be answered.
So I've fired up Google's Picasa application and I've tagged all the meadow photos. Last week I took her on a virtual tour of the things that I've encountered over years -- things she is not likely to see on a few brief visits for a class project. Yesterday I took her to the meadow to get a quick overview of what's happening now.
She already wants to know more about that skin which covers the growing antlers on the deer from around April to August. I won't tell her what it is called, but she understands that she can go to a library to try to find out. She also has a theory of how a ground squirrel carcass got left on top of a 6x6 fencepost. Maybe next weekend we will collect some plant samples. I doubt that she will encounter the bobcat like I did, and I hope we don't encounter a puma. The only predator I think we have a good chance of seeing together are the golden eagles, and that only if the weather happens to be just right, but maybe the heron will appear. The real trick will be to see if she can figure out how to tell me the identity of that predatory mammal who wouldn't let me anywhere near, of which I have a distant photo and movie of it shaking the dew from its fur.
This is fun. Life is good.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-12 08:20 pm (UTC)Both your youngun's have the most splendid brains and vision; no surprise consideering their sources.
Hugs all around
no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 06:23 pm (UTC)