The Magnifying Glass

Eggshell Salt Geodes.

 

One of our geodes when almost dry

 

Dawn recently had a post up about making eggshell geodes with her kiddos, and I just had to laugh as soon as I saw it because my daughter and I had been doing the very same project that very same day.  Apparently Dawn and I are very in-synch when it comes to our kid-science projects!  Anyway, eggshell geodes are a fun and very easy project that you can do fairly last minute, provided that you've got a few eggshells left from baking or breakfast.  Here's how it works:

 

Eggshell Salt Geodes

Materials:

Epsom salt

Hot water

Food coloring

Eggshells

 

Begin by taking eggshells that have been broken at the middle and trimming them slightly with a pair of sharp scissors or a serated knife to get a fairly even edge along the top.

 

 

Arrange your eggshells in an egg carton so that they have a place to sit upright when filled. 

 

Make the salt solution by mixing Epsom salt into hot water until the water cannot hold any more salt.  In other words, you will pour salt into the water (we used about a cup and a half of water, but you could easily get by with much less), mixing well with a whisk until you see that the salt is no longer able to dissolve into the water and a slurry begins to form.  At this point, you can add a bit of food coloring as well.

 

 

Fill the eggshells with the salt solution.  You can then set them aside to dry.  This will take some number of days, depending on the humidity level in your house.  As they dry, salt crystals will begin to form inside the shells, giving them an appearance similar to a geode.  As an alternative, you can also put the eggshells into the refrigerator for a few hours and from what I hear, crystals will form this way as well.  Nearly instant gratification! We haven't tried this method at our house yet, but I'm pretty sure that it is what Dawn did with hers, and they seemed to have turned out well. 

 

one of Dawn's geodes

 

For more about eggshell geodes, and geodes themselves, you can take a peek at Dawn's post here.

 

--- Annie

Nature Exchange ~ Sign Up

We love to collect bits of nature. We collect everything from sea shells to snail shells and all things in between. With our finds we create art, play games, manipulate math concepts, examine them under the microscope and share with our friends... We do love to share what we find out there in the natural world and see what others are finding as well. I am sure many of you feel the same way. 

Another thing we love around here is to see the mail truck coming up the driveway with a package just for us. The squeals of delight and calling out of it's arrival are unmistakable. 

What a wonderful thing to combine two of our favorite things... nature and mail. What fun!

Would you like to join in the fun? Would you like to share nature with another nature loving family and receive a box of their nature finds in return?

If you would like to do a Nature Exchange please do the following:

Send me an e-mail at [email protected] by November 2, 2011. 

    Include the following information in your e-mail:

• Name (first and last)
• Full mailing address
• Link to your blog (if you have one)
• Ages of you children
• If you are willing to ship international 
• Title the e-mail "Nature Exchange"

Start getting your nature box ready as soon as you sign up. For ideas on how to pack up your nature goodness please check out this post. 

By November 5th I will match you up with another family and send you an e-mail with the information needed to send your nature box to your match. I will do my best to make matches from different regions but it all depends on who signs up. Once I divide all participants into regions matches will be made by random selection. Please be understanding. 

Please send your box out by November 12, 2011. 

 

Nature Exchange with Annie 

Let me know if you have any questions.

All of us here at The Magnifying Glass are really excited about this project.

Happy Nature Collecting!

~Dawn

National Fossil Day.

As it turns out, October 12th is celebrated as National Fossil Day here in the United States.  Such fun!  The National Parks Service has a special website set up for the occasion, which includes a number of ideas about how you and yours can celebrate National Fossil Day in true paleontologist style.  You can check it out here.  There are plenty of great ideas for activities both around home and out in the field, so to speak.  If you do happen to plan a special trip, activity or project to celebrate National Fossil Day, do leave a comment and let us know- we'd love to hear about it. 

For an easy at-home fossil-themed project you can also view this post from the archives over on my own blog. Enjoy!

 

----Annie

Nature in My Pocket - Craft

These fall days have been filled with unseasonably warm walks on the trail and in the forest. Despite the warmer weather we have found our pockets and baskets full of the usual fall findings of pine cones and acorns... along with many a feather. 

This is what I found in my pocket after a recent walk...

My son asked if we could make some "men" with our nature finds. My mom is visiting and took on the challenge. They gathered the glue gun, some pipe cleaners, a black pen and a few tiny sticks. After a bit of wrapping and twisting, and some gluing they came up with the cutest little solider...

Then they made a few more.

Some fairies are next up in our house but these little people could become anything from forest folk to knights.

Such a fun and simple craft for our nature finds.

What have you been finding in your pocket this fall? 

~ Dawn

Oobleck!

Hello TMG friends! I have a post up about oobleck and some good reads to go along with it, and thought that you all might like to have a peek.  Click on over to check it out and get in on the gooey fun!  I promise that it isn't as horrifyingly messy as it looks.

---Annie

A Favorite Book (and a Little Science Too).

Hello TMG friends!  It has been a busy spring at our house, and I haven't been able to pop in here quite as much as I would have liked.  But summer vacation is only days away, and I plan to be back with you to share book reviews and maybe a few projects too.  To get into the spirit of things, I wanted to direct you to a guest post that I have up on The Crafty Crow right now; a review of a favorite book of ours (and of fellow TMG contributor Lucia's too, if I'm not mistaken) as well as an easy but interesting little science project.  Pop on over there to check out the review and to get instructions for making a simple compass.

--- Annie

Eggshell Planters.

I could have sworn that I posted about this quick and practical little project on my own blog last spring. Well, at least I meant to.  Anyway, I wanted to pop in and share the idea with you all this afternoon. We are having a very, very rainy spring here in Vermont and I have needed to have a few extra indoor activities up my sleeve as a result.  Maybe you do too.

Planting into eggshells seems to a common enough kids' craft project, and with good reason.  There is something incredibly fun about setting a little carton of hollowed-out shells on the table, and watching them grow plants.  Plus, when the seedlings are big enough, you can gently crush the shell to loosen the roots and plant the whole thing into the garden.  You can find many, many versions of this project by doing a quick search, but what follows should be enough to get you started.

 

Eggshell Planters

What you will need:

Eggs

Seeds

Potting soil

 

What you will do:

-  During the course of your normal kitchen activites, start saving your eggshells.  A good way to do this is to use a serated knife or a pair of scissors to gently remove one end of the eggshell.  I found that poking a couple of holes in the eggshell along the line where I wanted to cut allowed me to use my knife or scissors to lop off the top a lot more easily.

- Fill the eggshell to the top with potting soil.  Remember that the soil will shink down a bit when it gets wet.

- Plant a two to four seeds in the soil, following the instructions on the seed packet.  To water, you can either pour a very small amount of water into the top of the eggshell or use a spray bottle to lightly mist until the surface is uniformly damp.  

Now watch your seedlings sprout and grow!  We put our eggshells back into the carton they came in and used them as a centerpiece on the table until they were ready to move outside.  Just make sure that your plants get plenty of sunlight so that your seedlings don't get leggy and flop over!  

 

--- Annie

Make a Mason Bee Nest

Where we live, crocuses and forsythia are the very first flowers to bloom as winter transitions to spring. That happens to be the best time to put up a mason bee nest, and this year we’ve tried our hand at it.

Mason bees are small plant pollinators like the familiar honey bee, but they are solitary and do not produce honey. With no hive or honey to protect, they virtually never sting (unless extremely provoked) and are safe to be handled gently by children.

Mason bees use nests to raise their young. Although they live alone, they happily lay their eggs in cavities near fellow mason bees in miniature human-made communes.

Mason bees are considered true “natives” in North America (as are similar bees around the world). By comparison, honey bees—thought to have originated in Asia and cultivated in Europe and Africa since ancient times—are rather recent arrivals to North America (1620’s) and Australia (1820’s).

Here's a mason bee nest at our local nature center.  You can see that the bees use mud to seal in their eggs into the nest holes, where they will mature into adults and eventually emerge to greet the world.

You can buy mason bees by mail-order and for the past few years we contemplated doing this. However, you must place your orders in the fall (breeders quickly sell out). Plus, we know that mason bees live in our area because we’ve seen their active nests at a local nature center (see photo above).

You can also buy nests, but we’ve learned that they should be replaced at least every two years—if not annually—because they quickly become infested with fungus and mites that kill the growing bee larvae.  Adult mason bees can then carry these pests to new nests and spread the problem.

So, it seemed more logical to make our own nest from found materials, and to hope that local mason bees would find their way. We scavenged a large chunk of an old fir tree on one of our neighborhood walks for our nest.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Below are instructions for making and installing your own mason bee nest. There are lots of tutorials around; here, I’ve distilled the best of them.

1.  When choosing wood for your mason bee nest, select wood that isn’t treated and avoid aromatic wood such as cedar. Our bit of fir tree is 7 1/2” x 8” on its face and 7” deep. A 7” deep block of wood (4” wide or wider) will work fine.

2.  Mark holes for the nest cavities, setting them about 1/2” apart. Drill holes(do not drill all the way through). The ideal hole width is 5/16” (8 mm). The ideal depth for a cavity is 6” deep. Unfortunately, standard drill bits only drill holes 3” deep. You can try using 3” holes, as some suggest, although shallower holes tend to produce far more males vs. females.  I opted to make 6” holes.

3. When you’re finished drilling, cover the front of the nest with chicken wire (I used two overlapping rectangles nailed down to the sides, creating a “bubble” an inch or two away from the nesting hole entrances). This keeps out the birds and squirrels.

4. Consider nailing a shingle as a sloping “roof” to direct water away from the entrance to the cavities. We sawed some wood away to create a one-inch “awning.” You can also place your nest under an overhang for additional protection, as we’ve chosen to do.

5. Mount your finished nest (on a post, fence, or building) facing south and avoiding direct sun.

6. Do not spray insecticides near your mason bee nest.

7. Mason bees need mud to seal their eggs in the nesting holes. We’re keeping a bit of garden bed near our downspouts moist from now until fall so our bees will have mud for their nests.

8. Last, you’ll need nearby flowers to attract and keep mason bees.  But that was why you wanted them in your garden in the first place, right?

If you are amateur mason bee keepers like our family, set the nest up and then keep it undisturbed for a year or two. Then take the nest down and discard it. We’ll make a new one again in late winter another year if all goes well ~ we’ll let you know if we manage to attract any mason bees to our garden.

You may be more ambitious than we are, in which case you may want to line your holes with parchment paper, harvest the nests in November and store them in the fridge. Take a look at this PDF link to learn more.

~ Nancy

Spring: A Simple Garden Project

As spring approaches our thoughts turn toward the garden. Last week we were out marking off locations for our new garden beds... the kids staking out areas for their butterfly and hummingbird gardens. The garden notebook has come out to assist in making a map filled with the new vegetable beds, a pea tee pee, a sunflower house and a pumpkin patch, of course.

We still have a good icy layer of snow on the ground. Most folks around these parts don't put the garden in until June 1st. With such a short growing season, and such a long time to wait until we can truely put in the garden, it is essential and fun to get a head start on things inside. 

One of our favorite ways to get that head start is to start seedlings in egg shells. 

We start by washing the egg shells and storing them in a safe place until they are needed and we have enough for our project. When the timing is right (depending on your growing season) simply fill the egg shells with soil, plant your seeds, keep moist and watch for your seedlings. Sometimes we keep them in egg cartons to help them stay upright and organized. When it is time to transplant them simply break the bottom of the eggshell and place everything in the pot or garden bed. 

We have some time before we will start this project but, for those of you in warmer places, we would love to see some pictures of your seedlings in the TMG flickr pool. 

Have you started any spring garden projects? We would love to hear about them.

Starting (and keeping) a progressive nature journal

We hope you've been inspired by this week full of posts about nature journals.  Our family has certainly felt the spark.

There certainly are many ways to create a nature journal, and they are each enlightening in their own way. But a particular kind of learning emerges from what I’ll call “progressive” nature journals, that is, a journal that returns again and again to a specific living thing or a specific location over time.

I believe this is a very early blooming variety of cherry--this tree was tricked into blooming by a short warm spell.  Left: Using the point-and-shoot; upper middle: his photo; lower middle: my photo; right: his drawing from memory.

 

One way to keep this sort of record was described by Lucia in her post at the start of this week, when she related how the boy in The Trumpet of the Swankept notecards on various natural subjects. As this fictional boy explained, his system allowed him to continue to add notes over the course of weeks or months. Then, as his notes accumulated, he could spot certain trends.

Inspired by this, we decided to take that core idea—returning to a specific subject over time, hoping to make connections and encourage further learning—by creating a journal to document our regular walk.

Forsythia in late winter. Left: my photo; right: his photo with the point and shoot camera.

As a family, we take a specific route through the neighborhood that never varies, because that’s the way the streets run.  It is packed with houses, (partial) sidewalks, asphalt roads, and modestly-sized front yards. It’s late winter here, and I wondered, what if we started now to keep track of the changes in the natural world we see during our walk?

While we do lots of noticing in nature as a family, and we do talk about the things we see, it’s the concentration of the journal on our regular route that I hope will give our family more insight into the plants and animals that inhabit our everyday world.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To start documenting the changes we’ll see throughout the year on our neighborhood route, I lent our five-year-old a basic point-and shoot camera. I suggested that he photograph what he noticed along the way. He was very proud of his pictures. As the walk continued, he became more and more excited by the tiny hints of spring coming just around the corner. (Although he isn't wearing his coat in these photos, trust me, it was plenty chilly.)

Blue crocus.  Left: his photo; right: his drawing from memory.

Our 7-year-old decided she would rather observe than take pictures. I fell somewhere in between; I brought my camera too, but only took an occasional photo as something struck my fancy.

When we returned home, we sat down and talked about all the things we had seen. I asked what they had observed—what the weather was like; the color of the sky; how warm or cold it was; whether it was windy. We didn’t see a single bug, and we only spotted a few birds: a fluffed up robin, a chickadee, and a male cardinal. The trees, we noticed, were still bare, so that it was possible to see the squirrels’ nests toward the tops of the trees. But some of the woody bushes had the very tips of green leaves emerging. One garden had crocus about to bloom, and two daffodils.

 

Outer ring: his point and shoot photos; center photo: mine.

After talking about what we had noticed, the kids used crayons to draw what they recalled. Interesting contrasts emerged between what was observed, what was photographed, what was remembered.

Lone robin, fluffed up against the cold (his photo); our daughter's drawing from memory. Last year we didn't see a robin until the first day of spring. This time they were lured back early.

We'll paste our written memories, pictures, and drawings in a journal devoted to this route. When we take this walk again, as we inevitably will, I hope we’ll find some insight in spotting what has changed.

Have you also been inspired this week to start a nature journal? Have you ever kept a special journal that returned to a specific topic or space over time?

~ Nancy