Learning in the Great Outdoors - September 2007

School is off and running here in Armuchee, Georgia. The triple-digit heat wave has finally broken. It feels downright cool in the nineties and eighties. And our nature study project has officially kicked off with a Rivers Alive! clean-up of our woods, stream, and campus. So it's time for the Back-To-School Edition of Learning in the Great Outdoors, the Carnival of Environmental Education.

Welcome Back to School
...in the Great Outdoors!
The September 2007 edition of
Learning in the Great Outdoors
The Carnival of Environmental Education


Back to the Library
Homework
Find a tree for shade, an apple for a snack, and a good book...

Tricia of The Miss Rumphius Effect has a group of books on animal migration to recommend and even a group of poems on the topic, including this acrostic of her own:

Flapping, flying, flitting
Lepidopteras
Unite! Blanketing vast landscapes
Thousands swoop and swarm
Traveling southward
Engaged in the migration dance
Replaying the cycle of life

- Tricia Stohr-Hunt

Barb is Sketching in Nature at The Heart of Harmony. Well, she reviews the book, anyway. She says it is a "Great book for help with your nature journal"

Julie Dunlap wonders What's More Fun than a Free Book? at Pines Above Snow. She says, "What better way to start the new school year than contributing to a nonprofit organization that sends free books to need children? And strike a blow for environmental literacy by donating favorite "green" titles whenever you can."



Back to the Classroom

Stephanie decorates with Wild carrot blossums -- Queen Anne's Lace. Read about it at Stop the Ride!

Barb asks Do you Know Your State Insect? at The Heart of Harmony. This is a lesson on the

Your host invited a 95-year-old native of the school community to talk with his classes and learned a bit about the connection of people to the environment 85 years ago.

Silvia has posted Monarchs at Po Moyemu--In My Opinion. She has been busy raising Monarch caterpillars inside and includes some links to other resources.
Speaking of butterflies, Terrell at Aloneonalimb plans to participate with his students in a University of Georgia study of Monarch parasites this year. Check that out at the Monarch Butterfly Parasites Web Page.

Karen Bastille declares I Know That Tree! at At Home With Grandmother Wren.
Grandmother Wren suggests a hands-on lesson, introducing children to individual trees.

And there are the obligatory classroom reports on "What I Did this Summer" ---

By Sun and Candlelight has gotten back from the beach with some good shots of the shoreline habitat.

Cloudscome at Sandy Cove Trail has also been off to the shore.

Cool Virtual Outdoors Children's Website Award: Each time I host this carnival I try to hunt up a great kid friendly website related to the outdoors. I invite guest hosts to choose such an award as well. The only requirement is that the host think the site will be interesting to students. The first designee in July was EEK!

This month the award goes to a personal favorite. Frank and Victoria Logue and their little daughter, Griffin, were our neighbors for several years. Frank taught me what little I know about HTML. He and Victoria are wonderful writers with a number of books about the out of doors. Frank helped Griffin set up a web page about animals when she was only five. It has grown into an award winning little endeavor and now has one more award to its credit. Griffin is now a beautiful young woman. She probably doesn't put a lot of time into her Wild Animal Page these days. But it is an excellent example of what one talented little girl can do with the internet.

Back to the School Garden...
Christine Gowen presents DIY Bug Catchers, Nets and Boxes posted at The Crafty Teacher.
(Your host likes those clear, hard plastic, parmesan cheese containers for temporary bug barns. Put a little panty hose or mesh over the shaker holes and you're in business.)

Back to the Nature Trail...
Your host and his class had a bit of a Surprise on a Watershed Walk posted at Alone on a Limb. He also has enjoyed playing with the macro feature on a new camera and has captured some super close-ups in the outdoors recently.

So there's a little birdlet peeping for its Mom at the base of the hawthorn. What should you do? Mike Bergin presents Handling Birds: Yea or Nay? posted at 10,000 Birds, saying, "Is it OK to handle baby birds in need of help? Yes!"


Back on the Magic School Bus...
Speaking of birds, Hop aboard the Magic School bus and take a field trip with the Bird Study Ecology Group in Singapore. Tricia introduced us to it last month. It's a great resource for gorgeous nature pics.

Dana at Southern Gal Goes North gives a photo tour of Roaring Fork Nature Trail.

Jim at Decorabilia has posted pics of the Woodard Bay nature trail.

Check out the most recent updates on the River Ribble in the old country.

Back to the In-service Meetings...
Dana at Backyard Birding wonders Who Should Pay for Conservatiom Efforts? Perhaps this would be a good debate question for a middle or high school group.

Kevin Bedell suggests a simple step you can take toward living green Eat more locally grown food posted at 21st Century Citizen.

Nature Moms smell fall in the air and give lots of tips for greening the home, including your finances.

In the weird zoology department check out this story in the New York Times:
Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors. (read more)

-from the New York Times

Kevin Bedell presents Steve Loo is Changing the World posted at 21st Century Citizen.

Check out some of the other outdoors oriented Blog Carnivals:
Festival of the Trees
Oekologie
I and the Bird
Circus of the Spineless
Carnival of the Green

There's the bell. School's out. LIGO will be back here on the Limb in November. If you are interested in taking a turn at hosting Learning in the Great Outdoors please drop me a note at thelimb[at]mac[dot]com. In the meantime Julie Dunlap at Pines Above Snow will host the October edition. Julie would "love to be hiking through a pine forest right now" but she also finds time to do some excellent writing, mostly on environmental issues. Please support her with lots of submissions this month. Submit your blog article to the next edition of
Learning in the Great Outdoors
using our
carnival submission form.
Past posts and future hosts can be found on our
blog carnival index page.

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learning in the great outdoors, blog carnival.

(Monarch butterfly photos copyright 2005 by Terrell Shaw)