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It’s time to begin our nature journals.

These journals are your own – they will not be graded or checked for grammar. However, there are some things you will want to include for your own benefit:

Date and Location
Weather (e.g. cold, sunny, rainy, hot)
Scents in the Air (e.g. crisp air as in spring, earthy as in fall)
Sounds (kids playing in the distance, airplanes, a wolf)

The only rule is you will be expected to share your discoveries.

In your Personal Nature Bag you’ll find:

1. Your very own sketchbook journal with a drawing pencil/pen
2. Your very own copy of Anna Botsford Comstock’s “Handbook of Nature Study”
3. Magnifying glass
4. You can bring your scopes, binoculars, cameras, etc. if you like, however you may find it hard to carry more than just the binoculars or a magnifying glass if you are going far.

The Shared Art Supplies Bag contains:

1. Artist drawing pencils
2. Small bottle of water (for your watercolors)
3. Cotman watercolor set
4. A few different pieces of drawing charcoal (vine, conte’, and block)
5. Crayons or colored pencils

You can color your sketches in the field or when you get back. The choice is up to you.

REMEMBER: ALWAYS SAFETY FIRST!

When you go on ANY nature hike, carry:

1. First Aid Kit
2. Bottle of drinking water
3. A snack (you may lose track of time)

Have Fun!

Additional Research:

Plants / Trees:

1. Ibiblio.org’s Virtual Herbarium: Start here to identify your plant
2. PlantsUSDA.gov
3. What Tree is That? at treelink.org

Birds:

1. What Bird.com
2. IBird Explorer on the Touch
3. Various Bird Books – don’t forget to check eachother’s books.

Animals:

Enature.com Identifying What You See

Reptiles

Reptiles and Amphibians of South Carolina and Georgia courtesy of Savannah River Ecology Laboratory Herpetology Program

Scat and Tracks

1. Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management
2. Identifying and Preserving Wildlife Tracks

Miscellaneous:

There is a generous amount of information on the internet available for the budding naturalist, however, here is just a handful of some that you may find as interesting as I did:

Savannah River Ecology Laboratory’s Outreach Links *ecology fact sheets, experiments +lots of other great information.

Sci4kids

NRCS Soil Education
Discovery Education’s The Dirt on Soil

USDA Outreach and Education Portal *Check your grade level for terrific links!

Kids Pages from Fedstats.gov.

The History of the Land

Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 years from USDA NRCS: National Resources Conservation Service

Additional reference material can be purchased at:

NSTA – Nation Science Teachers Association Science Store

The following lecture has been graciously provided by the folks at MIT world.

The Wonders of Electricity and Magnetism
Walter Lewin
September 25, 2005
Running Time: 1:41:56

About the Lecture

The inimitable Walter Lewin gives a literally hair-raising performance in this MIT Museum lecture/demonstration for learners young and old. He unveils the real meaning behind words and things most of us use everyday without reflecting on what marvels they really represent.

Here are some of the mysteries exhibited, explored, and explained in this talk: How can you make two perfectly normal balloons zoom apart from each other? What happens when you connect a 12-volt light bulb to a 110-volt outlet? If you toss a handful of confetti onto a comb, why does some of it stick and some of it fly away? What’s the best way to make sure your flashlight will work the next time you really need it? (If you guessed putting in new batteries, go to the back of the class.)

Lewin is at his electrifying best when working with children from the audience. He gives a 12-year-old girl the worst hair day of her life, and offers a young boy 10 cents for 10 hours of backbreaking labor. But Lewin reaches a new high (low?) when he repeatedly beats one of his young assistants with a swatch of cat fur. Lewin doesn’t exempt himself from the torture, though: he even makes a serious attempt to electrocute himself with a 150,000-volt Van der Graaf generator.

Lewin indulges the armchair physicist who’s mathematically challenged, by covering all the basics of electricity and magnetism while introducing just one equation. If you’re still undecided, check out some of the unique special effects – sparks, flashes, smashes, and more –pinpointed in the Video Index. Keep watching, and you will find out why Walter Lewin was recently honored with MIT’s Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

With the addition of this video to MIT World, Lewin has a total of 100 lectures available on line–94 at OpenCourseWare and 6 at MIT World.

The following is compliments of the Happy Scientist.

This week’s experiment started as an idea for a Science Photo of the Day, asking why spider’s don’t get caught in their own webs. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it had great potential for getting folks to actually go out and explore the wonders of a spider’s web.

To try this, you will need:

- a spider’s web

- a thin blade of grass or piece of string

A good time to find spider webs is in the early morning, before the spiders have dismantled them. Before a rain is also a good time, as the spiders know that insects are very active before it rains. This bit of weather lore is useful when you are hiking. If it is going to rain, invite a friend to lead the way, so you don’t get all those webs in your face.

Once you find a web, take a few minutes to look at it carefully. If the spider is there, be sure not to disturb it. If you are lucky, you will be able to watch as it moves around the web. Notice how it walks on the web, and that it never gets stuck. Why? If other creatures stick to the web, why don’t the spiders?

First, not all the strands are sticky. In a standard orb web, the strands that radiated out from the center are not sticky. They are a different kind of silk from the sticky strands that circle around the web. In fact, spiders can spin up to seven different kinds of silk for different purposes, ranging from thick, non-sticky strands for support, to tough, non-sticky strands for making egg sacks.

You can identify the sticky strands by carefully using a thin blade of grass to touch different strands. Be careful not to destroy the web, although if you wind up causing some damage, the spider can easily repair it. In fact, many spiders destroy their old webs (eating the silk to recycle it) and spin a new web every day.

Even if it walks on the sticky strands, the spider does not get stuck. Part of this is because it only touches the silk with the very ends of its legs, so there is not much surface area to get stuck. It is also thought that some species produce a chemical that keeps their feet from sticking to the adhesive of the silk strands.

There are over 38,000 species of spiders, with new ones being discovered every year. Recent discoveries include the world’s largest orb weaving spider and a species of spider that eats plants instead of insects. That means that there are thousands of different web designs. Try testing different webs, to see which parts are sticky. This can help you figure out how the spider uses its web.

A good example is the “cup and saucer spider,” which builds a saucer shaped sticky web that is horizontal. Above that, it builds many non-sticky strands that crisscross. Flying insects bump into the crisscrossed strands of the “cup” and fall into the sticky “saucer” below.

You can wind up your web wondering by eating a snack the way a spider does. Spiders don’t have jaws for biting and chewing. Instead, they have two sharp, hollow fangs. To eat an insect, they bite it with their fangs and inject a venom that kills the creature, and then digests its internal organs. After letting the prey digest for a bit, the spider sticks in its fangs and slurps out the liquified insect, just as you can slurp a milkshake through a straw.

Have a wonder-filled week.

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This weekly e-mail list is provided free of charge. You are welcome to print it in your newsletter, repost it on the Internet, etc., as long as you do not charge for access, and my name, and website link ( http://thehappyscientist.com ) are included.

Now that we are getting into our health books, it’s a great time to watch this video.

Stormy Weather Systems on our Planet Earth

NOAA Education Weather Site for Kids

So many exciting things are coming up while studying history, that it’s now time to learn where things are in the world. Geography is the study of the earth’s surface. We are going to study the continents, oceans, and various countries. We will learn about the various land forms that exist around the world. This will lead us into Social Studies as we explore the people, animals, customs, and languages. It will also lead us into discussions about geological concerns like minerals, rock types, earthquake faults, underground water, and landslide areas.

The land mass on Earth is divided into continents. The seven current continents are:

• Africa
• Antarctica
• Asia
• Australia
• Europe
• North America
• and South America

We will also get the chance to explore the oceans. Oceans cover more the two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. We will learn the names of the oceans, what lives in the oceans, and discover how very little we know about the oceans. There will be an entirely new world for us to explore under the deep blue waters.

First we will learn how to read a map. After all, every explorer needs to know where they are going, right?

As we travel, we will let others know about the places we have visited on our Cub Explorer’s page!

Here are some fun places to start:

Enchanted Learning: World Geography
National Geographic’s Xpedition Hall
Fact Monster Atlas

(note: strands for science, social studies, art, and history – historical timelines)

We will be picking up our Ancient History Timelines by a quick discussion of creation vs. evolution. We will then explore some of archeology’s greatest finds.

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