I got this wonderful idea from Melissa, who loves to go on wildflower walks with her kids! I was inspired by reading her posts, so I decided to try this today with our kids. We got a bucket and headed out to find some wildflowers!
While we were headed down the road, we also remembered to bring a trash bag this time and pick up trash we saw on the side of the road. We see trash everytime we go walking and kept forgetting a trash bag, so today we remembered! I was proud of the kids for working so hard and nearly filling 2 trash bags full of trash!
We found about 15 wildflowers on our walk today. We have not identified them all yet, but here are a few that we have identified. I bought a book that has pictures of wildflowers from our area in it. I also look on this site, which has wildflowers from East TN on it. This site was very helpful! If you click on “galleries” then you can scroll through pictures of wildflowers according to color and find the ones you are looking for! (If you see a flower we have labeled incorrectly, please tell me…these things are hard to identify and I’m sure I will mess a few of them up!)
Chicory – Blue Sailor’s
Rattlesnake Hawkweed
Queen Anne’s Lace
We came home and are working on drawing some of the wildflowers in our nature journals and labeling them with their correct names.
Also, here are some other neat critters we saw on our walk. These are 2 very unique insects that we have never seen before! Do you happen to know what either of these are? I haven’t searched yet, but will look soon.
This first one looked like a very large ant, but it was BRIGHT red and about an inch long! This little guy was also VERY fast. UPDATE: I found it, this little (or big) thing is called a Velvet Ant! While they resemble ants, they are actually in the solitary wasp family! They have a very painful sting. Ouch, glad we didn’t get much closer.
And this next one looked like a butterfly with zebra stripes! Very pretty! I think this might be a Zebra Swallowtail!
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