Nature Study- Mushrooms

(**This is an edited post. It was originally Autumn Treasures part 3 but I wanted to make it mainly about the mushroom study so I renamed it and moved the pictures to Autumn Treasures part 2 and I'm adding more of our mushroom study here.)

Emma in front of our Maple tree.
You can see the leaves are starting to change. 

Emma and I went out alone today on a mushroom hunt in the woods.  I have been reading the Handbook of Nature Study blog. I've had the Handbook of Nature Study for many years but unfortunately it has mostly spent its entire life on the shelf. I hope to remedy that! Anyway, I knew we had a lot of mushrooms in the woods from previous nature walks so we went out and looked at all the different ones we could find, took pictures then later went back and collected a few samples to try to make spore prints.    (This is the original mushroom post that inspired me.)

mushrooms growing in our front yard

more mushrooms in the front yard

a frog (it's on the tire)

a mushroom

bracket fungi

blurry but it's a small orange mushroom

Emma wanted this picture to show how tall the fern was

a fuzzy underside of a mushroom we found that was upside down

Emma

an abandoned paper wasp nest

this fungi looks like sea shells...it was growing on a fallen dead tree

I like this one.  A red mushroom.

classic looking mushroom...cute

tiny mushrooms growing on a dead tree

a bright yellow mushroom

orange and yellow fungi

tiny mushrooms

making spore prints

In the morning this is what we found:

ewww...what is THAT growing on there?

I thought this was so cool.  Two really great spore prints

**Update added September 29

This afternoon we read some more about mushrooms in our Handbook of Nature Study while painting mushrooms in 2 ways.  First paintings "of" mushrooms on water color paper.  Then, painting of actual mushrooms.  We attempted to paint the gills and stamp them without much success (wrong kind of paint I think) but I think it was a very useful exercise because they spent a lot of time just exploring the mushrooms.  

Emma and Jenna observing before painting

This was a double mushroom with buttons attached on the bottom.

Our handbook

Connor painting a mushroom

Emma's green mushroom (she painted it green)

The clouds and sky today...so beautiful.

Emma's (7) drawings of mushrooms with labels

Emma's drawings on a different page.

We used this notebook page mentioned in this blog post about mushroom study.