Nature Walk

I have been following Barbara's Handbook of Nature Study web blog site as a part of my Home Schooling with my grandson. (If you click the picture to the left you will be taken to her Outdoor Challenge page.)
I want to post most of the information on my Inspire a Child blog, but since since I only have him once a week, I have begun to do some of the challenges on my own.
BTW, Barabara has just made available an e-book of the challenges. I plan on buying a copy for myself and maybe one for my daughter as well. If you click the picture to the right you may go straight to her blog for more information.
Challenge 1 encouraged us to take a walk and just observe and enjoy the outdoors. We found two things of interest we plan on doing more research on, Oak galls and tree resin. We did research on line as well as in the Handbook of Nature Study. What was interesting is that I had always thought it was tree sap running down the trunk, but that thought was corrected to it actually being tree resin, which after many, many years becomes amber. The reference to galls was found on page 335 of the Handbook of Nature Study. The reference to tree resin was found on page 756 under fossils of the Handbook of Nature Study. We found more information online. Although there were not a lot of links just on tree resin we did find two links for Amber, the product of aged tree resin:
Amber, Wiki
Amber
We did find quite a bit on oak galls and their source, a little gall wasp. Hmm who knew a little wasp could make such a large ball? Many of the links had a lot of advertising, but this one was just information:
Galls
I have been participating in The Great Backyard Bird Count htis weekend as well. That information is posted on my Inspire a Child Blog.