Ten Days of Little Celebrations - May 2016

May was the height of the spring school field trip season and three was something to celebrate about all of them –

The preschoolers that earned to recognize red winged blackbirds both by sight and sound

Being remembered by a 2nd grader as his hike leader from last fall (and the hike that followed),

Getting through a very wet field trip with 3rd graders – hiking with umbrellas through the meadow,

The 5th graders on the first Bioblitz day finding a toad near the pool in a formal garden – on their sunny day,

The 5th graders on the second Bioblitz day documenting beetles and trees and slugs and flowers – in the rain making the most of their teams of two or three: one holding the umbrella and the other entering the data into iNaturalist…..and then having their picnic brown bag lunch under the chandeliers in the tent that usually hosts weddings,

And the group of middle schoolers that removed a big pile of invasive plants…..before the rain started!

The trip to Conowingo was worth celebrating. I enjoyed it while I was there and then even more once I looked at my pictures! It helped that we managed to go on a sunny day.

A wildflower talk was worth celebrating for the topic and the ‘new to me’ tidbits sprinkled through the lecture.

I am celebrating a good start to my project to digitize our slides. There are some hidden treasures there!

Another project – cleaning out stuff – is also proceeding well. In this early phase, one of the measurements is how much (paper) is going in the recycle directly or being shredded (and then recycled.

Rain and More Rain

It has been very rainy in our area recently. It has not been with the fanfare of thunder and lightning – more prolonged and gentle showers. We’ve sandwiched in some outings – not always being able to dodge showers. On one trip to Brookside I took very few pictures because it was sprinkling the whole time! We did walk around with the hoods of our windbreakers up and generally enjoyed the scenery.

There was a field trip with 3 graders that it rained the entire 2 hours we were hiking. I was prepared with my stream boots and an umbrella for myself and 4 extra umbrellas for the students (I had 8 in each hiking group so it worked out OK with 2 students for each umbrella…and the chaperones had brought an umbrella too. We proceeded to be out on the grassy trails until everyone was tired of dodging muddy patches and puddles. The challenge turned out to be shoes; some students had boots but most were wearing their normal athletic shoes; eventually – there were a lot of wet feet (uncomfortable and cold). By lunch time they were ready to be indoors! When I got home I had a very wet backpack, hat and umbrellas - which we draped across the yard equipment in our garage.

I’ve been noticing that a lot of the water retention ponds are very full. That means that they aren’t slowing down the run off any more. Our 10 day forecast shows half the day with less than 50% chance of rain….so maybe we won’t stay quite so soggy as we are right now.