Nature Study: growing things

What happens when you have an onion on your counter so long that it starts to sprout?

Well, if you home-educate, you plant it and call it "nature study". We've now been growing this onion for almost two weeks (we planted it on March 27th) and it is going gangbusters! Very cool for the kids and I (especially as when we tried beans, they quickly died once we planted them!
By the way, the little seedlings growing around the onion are apple seeds that BamBam wanted to try growing ... now he's sure we'll have an apple tree with our own apples (but we'd better transplant BEFORE they get that big!)

Art and Nature

Yesterday, we went to the Denver Botanic Gardens and found, much to the delight of String Bean, a water garden with a myriad of water lilies floating on the pond. String Bean loves water lilies and water gardens, primarily because her favorite artist is Claude Monet! She has loved his works for a couple of years now and has collected pictures and books about this famous Impressionist.

We used up many digital pictures, trying to get a good shot at one of the waterlilies. When we got home I was asked to IMMEDIATELY load the pictures so she'd have something to study and work from.

Here's the result of her morning's work:

By the way, she created the "easel" from scraps of wood left from a renovation project dh and I are working on (more about that if we EVER finish!)

Ooops -- another rabbit trail ...

I can't wait till the weather turns cooler and our thoughts move to a cooler clime (this when the Front Range temp, at 10:42 pm, is 78!). Thanks to Elizabeth over at 4real, I so want to go on a Beatrix Potter unit study/rabbit trail ... here are the resources I'd use this time around:

• Miss Potter (the movie) -- this sounds like a wonderful (if not QUITE accurate telling of her story)


• Beatrix Potter: A Journal


• Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

We already own the Collected Works and we love watching the ballet, so these should round out a unit nicely, don't you think?

Have you done a Beatrix Potter unit? Have you had your kids draw like Miss Potter? What resources have you found that would fill out this unit study?

Blessings and prayers,