I haven't posted an "all in a day's unschooling" post lately because I've been crazy busy with graduate school. But learning hasn't stopped! Here are a few things we've been up to in the last week. 
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Biology:

Took a 6 hour round-trip road-trip to the Wild Center in the Adirondack Mountains; read all about the roles of fungi, bacteria, amoebas, and protistas in the lifecycles of the forest. This was a super cool explanation of the invisible things we'd been reading about in the biology book Helena requested. We also learned all about glaciers, alpine flora preservation, saw otters and trout, hiked, and climbed all over the Wild Walk - a walkway through the treetops with art, swings, lookout points to the high peaks, suspension bridges, a massive "spider's nest" of netting suspended high over the forest floor, and a life-size eagle's nest (MASSIVE) that you can hang out in.
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English Language Arts: We finished the entire C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series and are nearly done with the first Anne of Green Gables book. Helena's slowly working her way through spelling lists she asked me to print off to improve her spelling. She reads daily. Hasn't worked on any of her stories lately. She says it's more fun to play them than write them. That's fine. I know she has above-average skills to write them if she chooses. I wish she would because they're amazing. But that's the power of play for you - the best thing for cognitive development in young children according to multiple studies.

Tonight she did the spelling and vocabulary sections of the CAT test. Her vocab comes out well above 8th grade level. We've never done a single vocabulary worksheet, lesson, etc in her life. We read. We talk. :)

Math:

She occasionally recites some times tables for me. We've watched more Math Antics. We've talked a lot about converting decimals to fractions or comparing size of fractions with uncommon denominators and how to estimate this with a number timeline. We've played mental arithmatic games with this in the car. Tonight she did the first section of math on her CAT test. (NYS requires biannual testing for grades 4-8 homeschoolers.) 

She's sorted her My Little Pony (MLP) collector cards categorizing them in more ways than I can keep track of. She's played Minecraft with all of its amazing spatial awareness and block counting and other skills it develops. She's also done a lot of spatial reasoning work with some interior design app that she downloaded. 

Social Studies:

We've learned more about life in early 20th century Prince Edward Island through fiction. We read a biography about Blackbeard the pirate. We've talked about various social justice issues and about the Presidential campaign. She's learning about her own culture, childhood in this era, watching cartoons and hanging out with friends and generally being obsessed with MLP. 

When kids unschool they often learn in cycles. Earlier in the year we explored so very many social studies topics, historical eras and so on. Now we're barely touching on it but she's delving very deeply into various science topics. 

Arts:
She's currently doing a several hour film making class each week. She helps film the videos for my Online Herbal Summer Camp. She's also gotten very interested in architecture and interior design from watching Flip or Flop on Netflix. She found an interior design app to download and spends a good amount of time developing floor plans and furnishing them. Next time we're at the library we'll get out some books on interior design and maybe the history of design.

Common Name: Goldthread
Latin: Coptis groenlandica
Habitat: Moist woods and bogs
Dicot: Does not have parts in series of 3's
Found: Cherry Plain State Park, moist woodland area
Family: Butercup/Ranunculaceae
Uses: Dennis, from The Bioreserve, told me today they used the roots, on a survival expedition, for fishing line! 

I thought at first this was part of the rose family because of five "petals." However, in reading Newcomb's Wildflower Guide, I realized those are sepals not petals. Still, the slight resemblance to a rose family flower had me looking up the differences between Rose family.

Thomas Elpel's my favorite "go to" for botany, and his website says this: For the purposes of identification, the most accurate pattern to look for is the multiple simple pistils at the center of the flower. In more advanced plant families there is typically only one pistil, the result of a reduction in numbers along with the fusion of several pistils to make a single compound pistil. A flower with multiple pistils is very likely a Buttercup, but could potentially be confused with species from the Rose subfamily of the Rose Family. A secondary pattern that is often easier to see, but not as consistent, is the hooked tips on the pistils. If you are not sure if you are looking at several separate pistils or some that are only partially fused together, then look for a hook at the tip of the pistil. Many species have hooked pistils, and the hooks often persist as the ovary matures after pollination.

Common name: Mayapple or mandrakes
​Latin: Podophyllum peltatum
Family: Barberry/Berberidaceae; interestingly, berberidaceaes are in the order of Ranunculales, so they are somewhat related to the flower above.. same order but different family.
Habitat: Rich woods and pastures acc. to Newcomb's Wildflower
Found: Somewhat open hardwood forest
Dicot: Netlike veins in the leaves rather than parallel; flower is not in series of 3's
Uses: The fruit is poisonous when green - but edible when ripe. Dennis at The Bioreserve said that, despite many Mayapples, he only gets 1-2 fruits a year because the critters are too quick! 

Common Name: Skunk currant
Latin: Ribus glandolosum
Family: Grossulariaceae; I'd never heard of this family.  It's also known as the currant or gooseberry family. Elpel describes it thus, with the mention that the leaves alone will give it away once you become familiar with it: The gooseberries and currants have regular, bisexual flowers, usually about 1/4inch in diameter. The blossoms are yellow, white, greenish or sometimes red. The flowers have 5 united sepals and 5 separate petals (rarely 4 of each). There are 5 stamens, alternate with the petals. The ovary is positioned either superior or inferior and consists of 2 united carpels (bicarpellate) forming a single chamber. It matures as a berry with several to numerous seeds.
Habitat: Alpine or subalpine zones, forest edges, ridges or ledges, swamps, talus and rocky slopes or edges of wetlands
Found: In a ravine that was very rocky and mossy and had a small (likely seasonal only) stream at the bottom
Dicot: veined leaves; flowers not in series of 3's
Uses: The small red berries are edible, though they apparently stink when overripe - partly giving it the name skunk currant
Other: This one totally mystified me!! I saw it growing all over the bank and bottom of the ravine and went down for a closer look. I couldn't find it in my books though. The handy, dandy folks on the FB page "Plant identification" helped me out. :) The flowers are so incredibly minute. The photo doesn't do them justice. I didn't even spot any for the longest time as they tend to be a bit under the top of the plant. Finally, the entire plant is a bit skunky smelling, in my opinion. 

Course Competencies Met:
Diversity: Learning the differences between plant families that may look alike on first glance such as Rose and Grossulariaceae; 
Innovation: Found the Bioreserve; visited with a prep school field trip group; noted innovation in how the original family of the Corning glass estate had brought species from worldwide to this place; noted how these species had become more "wild" in subsequent years interacting with native species. This also relates to the diversity competency.
Stewardship: This land has been turned into a Bioreserve to be stewarded by Dennis and those part of his non-profit. 
Community: Emailed Dennis; chatted with him; organizing a homeschool field trip; learned from his expertise on the property and plants there and his experiences with them.

As usual these were all found in various parts of the vast acreage of the Wildlife Management Area and adjoining state park near me.

This is yellow avens or Geum aleppicum. The flower looks, to me, similar to a buttercup and I thought at first that it might be a marsh marigold, especially since I found it by water, in a small field like area by a creek. But that guess was completely off. I used Newcomb's Wildflower Guide and looked in the section of flowers with regular parts. I learned that "regular parts" indicates a flower as you'd draw one when you're a little kid, basically a flower with petals at regular intervals around it. An "irregular parts" flower, on the other hand, does not have a stereotypical flower shaped blossom - think irises, violets, and orchids for example. There's no center with a nice sort of circle of petals around it. The irregular are too exotic looking for such mundane regularity. At least that's how I remember it all... 

Anyway, having looked in the "regular parts" section of the Wildflower Guide, I just paged through looking for the correct leaf shape. The picture above is a bit deceiving on foliage. The three long narrow leaves behind the blossom in the photo actually belong to another plant growing beside it! The photo below shows the foliage much better. 

Minnesota Wildflowers has this to say about the leaves: "There are a few to several long stemmed compound basal leaves with a large leaflet at the end and 2 to 6 pairs of small leaflets along the stem. Leaflets are somewhat variable in shape, from wedge to egg-shaped and may lobed in 2 or 3 parts with the lobes broadest at the tip end."

Family: Rocaceae - I'm getting pretty good at spotting these right off with their 5 petals surrounding numerous small hairy looking stamens. 
Latin: Geum aleppicum
​Common Name: Yellow avens
Origin: Native
Habitat: part shade, sun; moist soil; meadows, open woods, thickets, swamps - this was found in partial shade by the edge of a stream
Life cycle: perennial
Uses: Grieve's A Modern Herbal reports that the roots are "astringent, styptic, febrifuge, sudorific, stomachic, antiseptic, tonic and aromatic"
Dicot: 2 leaflets, non parallel veins in the leaves

This flower grows all over in shady wet woodland areas near me and I didn't have any idea what it was. Meet large toothwort! In looking up more info at home I found out it's actually quite rare and endangered. I think I must be lucky because there's quite a lot of it growing in the Wildlife Management Area that I frequent. 

Latin: Cardamine maxima or Dentaria maxima; I was a bit confused over the name. Wildflower Guide said Dentaria maxima but then I also found Cardamine maxima online. One source said fka Dentaria maxima. 
Common Name: White toothwort
Dicot: I can tell because the veins on the leaves are not parallel. 
Family: Brassicaceae or Cruciferae
Life cycle: Perennial
Habitat: by woodland streams or on calcereous (calcium rich) woodland slopes; this was found by a woodland stream
Uses: roots are used as a stomachic, though given its endangered status there are better alternatives for sure

Learing that this plant is endangered in many states had me curious to know what other plants are rare or endangered in NYS. I found this site helpful, though it didn't list Cardamine maxima. I did find a lot of violets are endangered, and considering that I've been seeing some really amazing species of violets that I'm not familiar with, I'm now eager to identify them all. 

Course Competencies Met:
DIversity: Again, learning a few more of the vast number of plants that grow locally
Innovation: Learning how to use field guides, how to look plants up by leaf type or by whether the flower is regular/irregular
Stewardship: Seeing that white toothwort is endangered in some places led to a lengthy search of NYS endangered plants; NYS and other plant conservation websites; and lenghty purusal of lists of plants to see if there were any I know or had seen. I also look up uses for each plant identified.
​Community: Reached out to a FB plant identification community when I was stumped and fairly quickly got an answer

I'm taking a field botany class this semester and creating a journal for my class. Such fun!! Of course I must share.... 

Tonight I was eager to get out with my new camera, perhaps a little too eager as I didn't notice that it was missing a memory card until I got to the wildlife management area 20 minutes from my house. Forty minutes to Target for a card and back up I went, arriving nearly at dusk. 

I decided to take a short trail that winds along the bottom of a slope alongside the back of a large pond, more of a lake really, except for the lack of depth. It's mostly an evergreen forest back there, with interspersed deciduous trees. At the far North end of the lake is a crazy microclimate where I've found six inches of snow when there's no snow elsewhere! It can be unbelievably cold there in the winter. From this small, cold pocket, the land curves out into almost a small peninsula with beautiful evergreens overhead. From there you have to turn around because you hit a small damn.

My favorite part of the trail is about half way along where there's a big, beautiful beaver lodge right on the side of the shore. My dog has climbed all over it trying to figure out where the door is. That doesn't seem to bother the beavers. Tonight Mama and baby were swimming together, rubbing noses, and then mama swam directly up, about 10 feet from us, and stopped to say hello. 

But this is a flora journal not a a fauna one... 

Here are a few plants I found tonight.... I'm trying to focus on plants I don't know and/or digging deeper into the botanical taxonomy and family characteristics of the plants. It's really interesting to take the information out into the field and I was especially excited at how well the trillium photo reveals the characteristics of a monocot.

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Above is a beautiful example of false hellebore 
Latin: Veratrum viride 
Common names: Indian poke, Indian hellebore, green false hellebore, false hellebore 
Family: Melanthiaceae aka "bunchflower" because "Most plants in the Bunchflower family have bunches of little white or greenish, lily-like flowers with 3 sepals and 3 petals that are identical in size and color, plus 6 stamens, and a 3-parted pistil. In most species the pistil has 3 styles which have not completely fused together as they have in the Lily family" (Elpel). Melanthiaceae used to be classified as part of the lilly family. 
Monocot: flowers will be in 3's or multiples of 3's; leaves are linear and leathery; sprouted with one seed leaf
Habitat: wet woods, swamps
Origin: Native
Uses: Most melanthiaceae, including Veratrum viride are highly poisonous although the Native Americans did have some uses for the root of this plant. 

Latin: Rubus idaeus (L)
Common name: raspberry
Family: Rosaceae, the rose family
Dicots: sprout with two leaves; woody stem and a tap root system; flower parts are in 4's 5's or multiples
Uses: The fruits of course are delectable; leaves are a tonic herb full of nourishing minerals and especially beneficial for nourishment of the uterus during pregnancy.
Raspberry or blackberry? The underside of a raspberry leaf will be very pale, almost white whereas the underside of a blackberry leaf will be only slightly lighter. Furthermore, blackberry canes (the woody stems) contain much larger thorns that more closely resemble the large thorn you'd identify with many roses (though some roses have smaller thorns like these). These thorns are very thin, almost hairy looking.
Strangeness! This plant was found at the edge of a wet marshy area; raspberries don't typically like wet feet! Also, the leaves look extraordinarily toothy to me in contrast to pictures of raspberry leaves found online. But I can't figure out what else it could possibly be. 

Latin:Trillium erectum
Common names: red trillium, wake robin, purple trillium, stinking Benjamin, Beth root
Family: Lilliaceae This might be debated as one of the sources I read about Veratrum viride (the false hellebore above) mentioned trilliums as a part of the melanthiaceae family. However, most sources say it's in the lilly family, and, unlike the false hellebore, it is not poisonous as seen below.
Monocot: In this photo you can see the multiples of 3's common to monocots. There are 3 petals (the red), 3 sepals (the thin green between the petals). A litle harder to see, there are 6 stamens, the yellowish green parts going around the outside of the center of the flower. In the absolute center is the pistil which has 3 stigmas on it.
Origin: Native
Habitat: woodland wildflower
Uses: the leaves can be eaten as a sald green or pot herb; roots were used to balance hormones, ease childbirth, boost immunity and may even be beneficial as a treatment for cancer

Defining terms: 
Sepals: the part of the flower that closed up to make the casing of the bud
Petals: the floral, fragrant, insect-pollinator attracting part of the flower (though sometimes sepals are colorful and attractive as well)
Stamens: male reproductive organ of the flower; contains the filament or long slender stalk and the anther at the top of the filament which is where pollen is produced
Pistil: the female ovule producing part of the flower; the mature ovary is a fruit containing the mature ovule or seed
Stigma: the sticky part on the pistil for holding the stamen's pollen; from the stigma, the pollen goes down the style to fertilize the ovary which produces fruit and seeds.. voila! plant reproduction!

Sweet mama beaver with her baby... but it's very poor film quality since it was nearly dark out.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKZozS5v9Y