Pumpkin Carving

Each October, a friend from church holds a pumpkin carving party. Dan and I attended this year. There is always tons of yummy food to snack on, adult conversation and the kids have a great time carving their pumpkins and playing.

Dan did a great job of carving and he sure looks like he was having fun.

Nature Study - Pond - October

This year I wanted to add a pond study to our nature study outings. I read about this on angelicscalliwags. They have been doing a weekly year long pond study. I love the idea of following one particular place through a year of seasonal changes. We are hoping to do ours study at least once a month. During better weather, we might make it more often.

Our pond is not really a pond, but an inlet area to a local reservoir. It is separated from the main body of water by a small causeway. It is very close to home and should work well for our study.

Today was more of a scouting mission and we did not do a lot of gathering or investigating, but we did find a few things. Hannah and Dan love that they can get right down to the water. Hannah collected some lily pads.

Rachel ventured to the other side and found a path down to the water. This is a regular fishing spot, so there are paths in several places, which will make for easy access to the water.

Rachel found this interesting plant. We took a sample and after keying it out, found it was a Buttonbush. The seed heads are very interesting.

This very tiny spider was walking along on top of the water. I had the camera on super-zoom and he was quite small, but we wanted to add him to the pictures.

Here is my and Rachel's journal entries for the day.