Observation of Acorns for the Outdoor Hour Challenge

"Trees? That sounds boring." That was my thought when I learned what the October Challenge was going to be for the Outdoor Hour Challenge.

I did not do much nature study as a child, and I am learning a great deal with my kids, but the only thing that our science classes in middle school and high school let us actually observe was trees. The only nature sketching and drawing my college art classes ever undertook was trees. Boring. (And hard, in the case of drawing trees for college art.)

My middle daughter and my youngest daughter both have acorn collections. I only let them keep this stuff because we are doing the HANDBOOK OF NATURE STUDY for our science, and because of the things that Barb has posted on her blog about nature collections. It has always seemed like a waste of time to me for them to collect acorns.

Not a very good start, huh?

"Well," I thought, "we don't have to get as deeply involved in this as we did with the insects. I can cover it, follow along, do the assignments, make the attempt."

"So how can we go about this the easy way?" I decided that if I were to pull out the acorn collections and look through them, that would be easy.

So we got out the two collections. We put them on the table. We looked at them. "What? Hey, wait! Those acorns don't all look alike!" We decided to find all the differences we could. We found long, skinny ones.We found really round ones. We found acorns that looked triangular. We found itty bitty ones. "So collecting acorns isn't a waste of time?" I was having a paradigm shift right there at the kitchen table.

Some of the acorns in my middle daughter's collection. The
bottom of the picture shows an acorn cracked open to reveal
the nut.

No, collecting acorns is definitely not a waste of time. We learned a lot by observing these acorns. If we were so inclined, we could conceivably learn which type of oak the particular acorn came from.

In the book Life Cycle of An Oak Tree, which we read to fulfill the October Grid box that said "Read a book about trees from the library," we discovered that there are "450 different kinds of oak tree.(sic)" (page 30). (Don't you love learning about nature with your children? It allows you to read children's books about nature. The authors present a great deal of good information at a very simple and easy to understand level.)

Eventually, we broke an acorn open, as you can see at the bottom of the picture above. We found the seed inside the hard shell. We discussed that chipmunks crack the shell to eat the seeds. We each drew acorns (even me) and the kids wrote a story about acorns.

My son's acorn with parts labeled. (He wrote the  word "x-ray"
to show that he was drawing something he couldn't actually see.)

My middle daughter's acorns at top. The bigger
picture is a drawing of watermelon. (I don't know why.)

A close up on my picture of acorn types in my middle daughter's collection.

I am suitably impressed with what I thought would be a lame assignment. You can't be "in love" with every single aspect of nature study, I guess. But because of our experience with this one assignment, I decided to try to complete the grid with the kids. I still don't plan to spend every day of the month on trees, like I did on insects last month, but I have decided to have a good attitude and learn along with the kids on the grid assignments.

Thanks to Barb for this assignment that again takes me out of my comfort zone.

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