Boy did we have fun.
We discovered a variety of items and took time to draw some pictures.
The lad had hoped to get close enough to some Canada geese to try drawing them but we were unsuccessful in that endeavor but he did find TWO wooly bear caterpillars that came home with us. And he took a fair bit of time to get a small spider to hold still for five seconds so he could get a good start on drawing him. And he did up a leaf. It was good.
I sat down and worked on drawing a log with the moss and fungus growing on it, and I showed the lad a trick to outlining a leaf if you couldn't quite hold steady enough to draw the leaf outline. He was quite the curious lad.
But when we got home we looked up why one of the wooly bears was more orange than the other and learned that it's a sign of age. "Through the years, research has shown us that the Woolly Bear caterpillar’s coloring is actually based on how long the caterpillar has been feeding, its age and, of course, the species. " We also learned that there has been a fair bit of discussion on whether these caterpillars can be useful in predicting what type of winter we'll have. The jury is still out on that. :)
we learned how to care for them over here.