In 1803, President Jefferson wanted to find out if the Missouri or Columbia Rivers made for easy traveling (and potential trading) routes to the Pacific Ocean. An expedition was planned not only to find out about the routes, but to learn more about the land, weather, plants, animals and even the native people groups encountered along the way.
Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were selected to lead a group of about 45 explorers – both military men and boatmen – who began the expedition on May 14, 1804. Despite many difficulties, for the next two years and four months, the explorers made tremendous discoveries about the previously uncharted land west, as well as opening the doors to others for exploration, trading and eventual settlements. Their story is amazing and inspiring!
Both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had birthdays in August. To celebrate, we enjoyed a fun to-scale mapping activity during a recent nature walk.
Find an area in nature where you can walk around pretty freely. Farms, parks, cemeteries and orchards are good choices. Because the day was SO incredibly hot, we just stayed in our yard.
Visually set an area that you plan to map. Make it simple. There is no need to be exact. I told my children, “We’re going to map the area from the fence to the shed to the apple tree to the fence.” That gave them a general area to map – or “boundaries” per say.
Decide how many feet of your area will represent one grid on the graph paper. We chose to say every ten feet equaled one grid on our paper.
Start in a corner of your area and measure out a plot of land. In our case, we roughly measured a 10×10 foot square.
Notice what’s in the square plot and draw it on your graph paper. We chose not to be overly precise and simply drew only major landmarks.
Continue measuring out adjoining plots of land and recording their landmarks until the entire plot has been mapped.
To-scale maps can be as general or precise as you wish. After the maps were drawn in pencil, we took a few minutes to use colored pencils to give them more detail.
The activity was meant for my older children, but even the 5yo got in on the action. (And drew a pretty good map in the end.)
Knowledge Box Central has partnered with me through iHN to offer a lapbook ebook giveaway! Since the Lewis and Clark Expedition paved the way for the future development of the United States, I thought it would be fitting to giveaway one ebook of their US Government Lapbook (you get to choose your level.) We did this lapbook a few years ago and learned SO much! You’ll love it!
What is this?? A bowl of wonderful, living pond water!
Even though you can’t see anything living with the naked eye, there’s a world of life waiting to see under a microscope!
Mahayla has been studying about the Kingdoms Monera and Protista in her biology. And, as you know, Caleb has been studying all sorts of plants, including pond plants. We were amazed at all the life we found in that small bowl of pond water! If you have a microscope, create a few slides with “fresh” pond water and see for yourself!
When studying pond water, you might also enjoy the other activities suggested in the NaturExplorers study, Peaceful Ponds!
Botany has been first on our list and we’ve been having so much fun learning the in-depth ins and outs of various plant types. In the lesson below, we were studying the functions of a flower. The activities came from the Wonderful Wildflowers NaturExplorers study.
In our four-year science cycle, we’re back to the study of biology. {I ♥ biology!} Duh, right? It should be a given that any writer of nature study curriculum pretty much loves biology.
Yesterday, as Caleb was learning about the process of photosynthesis, we completed the transpiration experiment from the Delightful Deciduous Trees study. What a powerful way to demonstrate the fact that plants really do pull up water from the ground, bring it all the way to the leaves as one ingredient of the “food factory”, and then send out excess water through evaporation (called transpiration). Not to mention reinforcing the concept of the water cycle during the experiment, too.
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this year, Caleb (6th grade) and I (along with the interested 4-year-old) are studying biology using a variety of resources like 
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and, of course, 
