Nature Scavenger Hunt

We kicked off our first day "back-to-school" with a nature scavenger hunt.  I used the book Naturally Curious: A Photographic Field Guide and Month-by-Month Journey through the Fields, Woods, and Marshes of New England.  I LOVE this book and so do the kids.  I have found them flipping through it on a number of occasions.  What I really like about the book is that it is color tabbed with the months of the year.  This allows me to quickly flip to the current month and discover what's going on around us.

I made a list of things I thought/hoped we might find:

Find a tree with holes.
Find a mushroom.
Find a caterpillar.
Find a spider web.
Find two types of ferns.
Find a wildflower.
Find a frog.

I told the kids they could use a photograph, draw a picture, or take a sample to use in their nature journal.  We used Naturally Curious and A Handbook of Nature Study to identify some of the things we didn't recognize.  Some of the mushrooms we found were difficult to identify, but we found everything on our list!