Tuesday, April 21 - Nature Break

Howdy Vikings and Friends,

What a gorgeous day God has given us today!!! This morning, my youngest son had an assignment to go outside, find a seed, and try to figure out how that seed disperses. So we walked to our neighborhood park, and explored a patch of weeds (he was determined to find a dandelion). Sure enough, we found a dandelion, and a ton of tiny little flowers around it. The purple ones I recognized as field madder, but the white, blue and yellow ones were new to me. We also found a tiny mushroom. All of which, we would have missed had we not stopped to sketch a dandelion.

After we drew the dandelion, we pulled off a couple of the seeds to sketch them up close. And then he opened his hand, and we watched them catch the tiniest breeze, spiral up into the sky and drift away. It was pretty awesome!

For today’s nature break, I highly encourage you to find a dandelion and observe it closely. For the sake of your parents, don’t disperse the seeds in your own yard, but if you can find some in an open field, try pulling off the puffy seed pod and watching the seeds catch the breeze.

If you have bored younger siblings, check out this site to help them engineer their own seeds.

And if you’re bored, check out this article- even scientists are learning new and more efficient ways of making parachutes by observing dandelions!

Isn’t nature amazing?!?

-Mrs. Breclaw