Thursday, July 03, 2008

100 Species Challenge

Brenda is engaged in the challenge to find and identify 100 species of plants within walking distance of her home. The initial idea was presented with pictures.

I'm going to break the rules and not list all the rules here; you can go read them for yourselves. Basically the point is to identify species within a mile of your house. Hopefully, your log or journal (on your blog) will include information about the plants, as well as pictures.

Seeing as I don't have a camera, I am postponing the start of this challenge until I can get one. I've been meaning to buy one for a while, and this might give me incentive. This project reminds me very much of one of my favorite books: Naming Nature by Mary Blocksma. We've read this book three times for our homeschooling, and it is the most valuable nature book we've ever used! If I could make this 100-species challenge into a project to do with Maggie, it would be good for both of us. I'm rarin' to go on this (as if I didn't already want to spend hours upon hours writing the blog posts that are spinning around in my head!) and tried to buy a camera tonight to start on the project with Maggers tomorrow. Ah, but the camera-decision was too big. So I hope to pick my son-in-law's brain for all the research he just did on cameras, and get to taking pictures before we lose more of the seasonal wildflowers.

(This will have the added benefit of teaching me how to upload photos to my blog. So far, I always require help from a child. They teach me how to do it, and then I forget before I need to upload the next picture. Many plant pictures may drill the procedure into my brain!)

3 comments:

  1. Oh, thanks for this. Next year's Science is Botany (the Jeannie Fulbright series) and I'll have to check out your book and this nature log. Being as we live next to a state park and in between two big lakes we should be able to find lots of neat species. Now I'll really have motivation to get started again come August.

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  2. See...it is contageous! :P
    And I wondered if you read my blog...
    I still am not sure if I can use the digital camera to actually take a picture, let alone getting them to the computer!

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  3. Brenda, I wouldn't have gotten those photos onto the blog without lots and lots of lessons and hand-holding and help and patient instructions from my boys today. But I learned something! And this evening we bought a camera, something we've been meaning to do since before Katie's wedding two years ago. So now I have to learn how to work that on my own, and maybe I'll be flyin' solo with the pictures in a few more weeks. I want sooooo badly to dive right into this project. But we need to go slowly enough that Maggie has time to absorb the names of the plants. And then, after she learns the ones I know (and taught to the older kids in years past), we'll really have to slow down as we puzzle out species that we see but cannot currently identify. You're right: it's contagious!

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