First day of the new school year!

Although we don't "officially" school during the summer, there are those opportunities for educational field trips that we take. Today was one of those opportunities. We went to Salamonie Reservoir today for a pond study that started with a nature hike. The boys learned about habitats in the woods, Pileated Woodpeckers (and saw a tree that one - or more- destroyed.)

(BTW- that's a puppet woodpecker on the tree). :)

We saw blood root and learned how the Miami Indians used it. Guess what the Indian word for blood root was? SALAMONIE!


She dotted all the kids hands with the "blood" sap.

After our hike, we went to the pond with nets. The kids all scooped insects, larvae, fish, anything they could from the pond and put them in little trays.

Here are some of the finds:

The second square in the middle row are baby crawdads (or crayfish). The bottom left rectangle contain dragonfly and damselfly larvae. The far bottom right are tadpoles. The large ones will be bullfrogs.
This is a dragonfly larvae that is about ready to turn into a dragonfly.

And this dragonfly has just emerged from the water and was still drying its wings.

We also learned about a program while we were there that we can do once a month. Each month they have a theme and activities to go along with it. It only costs $5.00 per child for an entire year of activities (12.) June's activity was fishing - and Salamonie provided the fishing poles (if you don't have any) and bait. Since we didn't know about this ahead of time, we had not taken our fishing poles, but borrowed some of theirs. They also had nets to be used at the pond and the activity book had lots of useful information about fishing - where to find the best fishing sites, how to cast a pole, what kinds of fish you might find and what kind of bait is best to use to catch certain fish.



As you can see, the pond didn't have very big fish, but the boys had fun anyway.

Of course, before we left, we had to stop at the bird watching area of the Interpretive Center and walk through their bird and butterfly flowerbeds. It was a beautiful day in the lower-mid 70's, sunshine and low humidity. Very enjoyable field trip!