Little Corona Tide Pools

I love the tide pools.  I don't know what it is that draws me to them but I know my children enjoy this nature location just as much.  Green Bubbles loves the rock scrambling and Little Miss likes to puddle jump and eventually end up in the water, no matter how cold or unprepared we are for it!  (Thankfully I was prepared this day and we had a change of clothes in the car for her).

 The kids spent little time finding a great pool to play in.  Little Miss was wet almost immediately!

 Another mom spotted this awesome sea slug.  I love the blue dots in the stripe down his back.

 Here are a lot of sea anemones.  While they are beautiful in the water with color waving tentacles waiting to catch an unsuspecting fish, above water they camouflage into what looks like squishy, grayish blobs with bits of broken shell stuck all over.  Some of the smaller ones can be hard to spot sometimes so it's always wise to be careful when navigating the rocks so you don't step on the sea life that may not be presently in the sea at that moment. 

 Here we have a sea urchin shell.  While sea urchins normally look like those spikey purple beasts of the tide pools, after they die they leave behind their exoskeleton.    The Echinoblog has a great post all about the differences between sea urchins and sand dollars that is very interesting if you want to learn more.  We found a lot of these shells at the tide pools!  The one above Green Bubbles found all by himself and was one of the more intact shells we found.

And, as with any beach adventure, the sea gulls were everywhere.  I normally dislike sea gulls.  They are brazen at this beach and have no hesistation picking through your bags when you walk away looking for your lunch to steal.  It doesn't even have to be left out for these birds.  They pull things out of your bags, rip through plastic bags, grab paper bags with their beaks and fly away.  I've learned through experience to back everything into backpacks that snap or zip closed to keep the birds away from our lunches!

However, I did notice today that we had two types of gulls trying to open our backpacks.  I was curious enough to try and figure out the differences.  Since we went in January, both gulls are common to our area only in the winter time and travel north in the summer for breeding.

 This is the Thayer's Gull, easily identified by his pink legs.  He also has a yellow beak with a red spot on the lower mandible. They winter on the California coasts and aren't really seen anywhere but the coast line.  They travel quite far for migration, in the summer breeding up in the far north Arctic in Canada. 

This is the Heermann's Gull.  His beak is a redish orange color and his legs are black.  A striking difference to the Thayer's Gull above. They are the only North American gull to breed south of the United States and travel north. After breeding they move into Canada in July, but are back in California and Mexico in December.  The gull in the background is also a Heermann's Gull.  It's his first winter so he's a younger bird.  With age he will look like the gull in the foreground.  

Nature Study: Little Corona Del Mar

This week we hit the beach!  School is official for most of us next week (although I know some schools are still out until Sept).  I thought it would be fun for our last 'non-school' nature study to just play at the beach.    While this is normally a tide-pool beach, I didn't plan to go during low tide because low tide in the summer is 6am and I don't know many families willing to do that!  We'll go again in Winter when low tide is right around out normal meeting time and you can see so many incredible things!

Just because the tide wasn't out, doesn't mean the kids didn't still learn anything though! Ginny from the city of Newport's recreation department had a great table set up with different animals that can be found at the tide pools.  She had many real samples as well as some plastic ones for the kids to touch and play with.  There was even some examples of unintended beach pollution with popped balloons and a forgotten baby sandal.  She had a picture of a seagull who's stomach was full of plastic trash.  It gave us a great opportunity to talk about why we should always be careful to clean up after ourselves.
 

The seagulls here will take any opportunity they can to get things as well!  It's a lot easier then you think to leave 'unintentional' pollution behind.  At one point a seagull opened up my beach tote and tried to take off with our pack of baby wipes!  Another seagull was sucessful at taking a plastic cup of oranges and flying off.  While we were able to retrive the plastic thankfully, we were much more careful about making sure all of our trash was zipped up in bags.  We even saw this poor little guy with trash stuck to him.

The kids all collected trash they found on the beach so that we could throw away more then just are own.  We pulled an old sand bag out of the ocean, found a grungy heeled shoe (not sure how they walked on the beach wearing it though!), plastic lids to jars and bottles, and an old soda can that was actually sharp in many places.  It wasn't all about the trash though.  We were able to talk about the awesome footprints the birds left behind and were guessing if the seagulls were drinking the ocean water or not.

We also talked about the flags on the top of the life guard tower.  The yellow flag with the black circle means there is a rip tide!

The kids had a lot of fun playing as well!

Wrap Up - First week of Kindergarten

Time for another weekly wrap up!  This week we eased back into school by starting just a few things.  We'll be adding more each week until we work back up to a full load.  Green Bubbles was desperate to start science so we opened up our Real Science Odyssey Life!  I wanted to also get him started on All About Reading Pre-reading in the hopes we might be able to work through the letters he already knows quickly to get to the ones he's struggling with.  Little Miss sat in on a lot of this as well and totally blew me away with her awesome rhyming ability.  She was picking out rhyming cards like a pro, passing up Green Bubbles.  I'm going to start sending her to another room while working with Green Bubbles.  His confidence level is already pretty shaky with language skills and having his little sister do it so easily isn't good for that. 

On Monday we started with discussing what is life and comparing things that were alive and not alive.  We took a break with science after this until Friday.

Tuesday we went to a park day.  We've been missing these a lot lately and the kids really love them.  I'm glad we made the effort to go!  Getting outside is so important for little kids but it's hard for me to make the effort to do it more than a few days a week.  3 kids, one being an infant, is a lot more work to get everything together to get out!

Wednesday is normally our nature study but instead we met a friend at the beach for a bonfire.  The kids had a blast playing in the sand and roasting our hotdogs and marshmellows.  I try to go to a bonfire once every summer for them.  It's a great experience and I know it will be something they will remember when they are older.  Green Bubbles also read his first Dick and Jane story!  We've been working on sight words for him to help build up his confidence with words and letters.   He was so proud of himself when

Thursday we made it to another park day!  I can't tell you how excited I am that we made it outside three days in a row.  This park day was a new one for us with brand new friends to make so my kids were a little shyer but they still had a lot of fun.  I know they will make friends quickly.  There were a lot of boys Green Bubbles age here and even a little girl just one month younger than Little Miss.

Today was our fun day, as if park days and bonfires weren't fun!  We made it to the letter E in All About Reading, but science is where the fun comes in.  We did a plot study in our garden identifying things that were alive and dead.  Green Bubbles even found traces of animals such as the eatten leaves on the tomato plants from the cabbage loppers (we caught one last month and put it in our bug house to watch it make it's cocoon).  Since we were in our garden, Green Bubbles wanted to water the plants and Little Miss helped.  Whenever the hose comes out, it always turns into a water fight as well! 

We are off to the library later this afternoon to get some books for next week's school.  We'll be adding in history and handwriting! 

When you go back to school do you start it all up at once, or ease back into it?  Leave me a comment and let me know!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

Nature Study - North Beach

 This week we went to North Beach in San Clemente.  This one is a drive for us but totally worth it.  There's a small playground, the beach, an awesome pier and, of course, the beach! This wasn't supposed to be a water day though although whenever water is near the kids always end up in it.  We were hiking from North Beach to the pier and back again. And since it's summer, not a lot of nature 'study' was going on, but a whole lot of fun.

Some of the girls enjoying the water while waiting for more friends to come.

Little Miss found a huge feather and carried it almost the entire way by herself. 

Who can resist a little baby cuteness?

Little Miss collecting rocks on the beach.

The kids love this wooden bridge.

Making friends.

Trains!

 I don't have very many pictures of my oldest or youngest on this day.  My oldest was constantly running ahead and I stayed near the toddler, especially being near trains and water.  And the youngest was in the ergo most of our trip.  Everyone had a lot of fun though.

Laguna Beach Main Beach - Kelpfest 2013

So, I posted earlier about kelpfest and thought I would share how our trip went.  I have to state how much I despise parking at the beach on weekends on beautiful days.  Then add onto that special events or holidays and it is just awful.  After driving around for what felt like forever, I finally found a lot that let me pay $10 for all day parking.  I hated doing it because I knew we wouldn't be there all day but better that then driving around some more so I just submitted.

Thankfully, the beach was a short walk from where we ended up parking and there were a lot of people there.  Kelpfest was at Main Beach which is beautiful, and busy.  There were a lot of cool booths there for the kids to explore all featuring things on either the ocean, kelp forests, or just being green.

After we explored the festival area we just had to go on the playground!  This was also very busy and crowded with a lot of kids.  Green Bubbles loved having all the instant 'friends' to play with and created his own game of follow the leader.  Little Miss just liked playing in the sand and swinging.

Just a few steps away was the actual beach so we went to get our toes wet and play in the sand for a few minutes before packing it up and returning home.

Now the best part, pictures!

Boy Scouts had a touch tank!

Even Miss Miss touched!

Closer look.

Artists painting the kelp forest.

Inside the pretend Kelp Forest

Wearing her 'kelp' necklace.

Playing some kelp animal games.

Planting a tomato. (This tipped over in the stroller and alas, I don't believe the tomato will make it.)

Hydroponics...

Decorating a fish.

'Face' painting, shark.

Playground.

The playground had a lot of signs like this as well as information about the different tidal zones, animals, and just good safety information.

Kelp, seen from the top of the ocean.  The paddle boarders were checking it out.

We (I) even saw a couple dolphins swimming by.

A rare group photo courtesy of a nice passerby!