Green Hour Challenge #5: The List & Puffballs

This week is challenge #5 over at Barb's The Heart of Harmony. Last week, we decided our focus for the next 6 to 8 weeks would be plants without leaves - primarily lichens, fungi, and mosses. Well, in Handbook of Nature Study (HONS), the section covering these plants is called "flowerless plants."

The first part of our assignment was to make a list of things found in the book that we think we'll be able to find and study. I think we will study:

• the hair-cap moss
• mushrooms
• puffballs
• bracket fungi
• morels (possibly)
• mold

Part 2 was to go on our nature walk. Since I'd already decided we were studying puffballs today and we knew two areas in our yard that had some, we just went straight to the puffballs.

Next, we were to discuss our finds. So, we used the questions listed in HONS on page 721. This was the first time I'd used the questions in the book, and I found them really interesting.



From the questions, we learned that puffballs can be up to 4 foot in diameter! And, that some type of puffballs are sliced and fried.



We also learned that if you give a puffball a light squeeze, "smoke" spurts out. This is actually the spores and they are normally released from a little hole on their top. Alexandra enjoyed making the spores come out over and over again. (see video)



The puffballs we have in our backyard are a special type called earthstars. We opened up some of the earthstars to see what was inside. As Alexandra described it, it looked like "coffee grounds."

We also drew pictures of the earthstars in our nature journals and Alexandra added some spores (covered by tape) to her journal.



CORRECTION!!! On the first draft of this post, I showed some photos of some greenish mushrooms and thought they were puffballs. But, I just realized we never got them to "puff!" So, I don't believe they are puffballs and I deleted them from this post.