OHC – The Fern

Today’s focus area was the Fern Plant. I had been a little reluctant to do this as I have not seen any fern’s in my immediate surrounds, but was encouraged by my friend who shared our Nature Hour with us last week, and already focused on the fern this month, to ‘step out in faith’ -LOL.  I have to say at the outset of this post, that the OHC has proved to me time and time again that I seem to have very poor observation skills! Often the nature area in focus has been right under my very nose the whole time! Today’s study was no different!

I kicked off this study by showing the girls this awesome time lapse video of an opening fern.

Immediately Miss V-L observed that the fern uncurls vertically first and then horizontally. That would be each frond uncurls and then each Pinna, which has been curled up within the fronds spiral, uncurls too. The whole frond seems to be a maze of spirals – just beautiful.

We then went to hunt for the ‘elusive’ ferns – and found them all along our lane and in fact, right in our very back yard! How silly I felt!

We collected some fiddleheads/crosier, which are the tightly wound fronds as well as some that were fully opened and some in the process of, and off we went to make our entries into our journals.

The girls decided to work in their journals today as opposed to a notebooking page, I was inspired by this beautiful miracle of nature and so made my own entry. 

Miss J-L

Miss V-L

My own efforts

 I plan to re-visit this study later on in the Summer when the spores are ripe. Thanks again to Barb for all her inspiration and hard work!