Thistles and Sunshine Nature Study for Your Homeschool

If you are studying thistles for your homeschool nature study, here is how to easily adapt it to your own backyard. And to be spontaneous when you need to soak up the unexpected sunshine.

Sleeping Beauty. Eeyore. Two characters that were mentioned when I told the children we would be learning about thistles for nature study. I do have a little bit of a history with thistles. Back on the road I grew up on there were plenty of thistles to see. I remember their pink/purple blossoms. I even took a bull thistle to school for show and tell, even telling my classmates this was the kind of thistle that grew up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. But its been years since I’ve seen a thistle. I’m sure I would have had I looked closely enough.

Thistles and Sunshine Nature Study for Your Homeschool

For this nature study, I had planned a little nature trip over to the park for our study. But…

…something changed our plans. Sunshine and a stick fort. Eldest boy started a stick fort on a beautiful fall day. That did it. We were in the backyard the rest of the day. So, I moved the thistle study to the stick fort.

Adapting Your Homeschool Nature Study for Your Own Backyard

The Handbook of Nature Study has some wonderful information on thistles, including sketches of the roots and seeds.

From our field guides we noticed:

• how beautiful a thistle looks when the blossom is fully opened
• one type is called a horrible thistle
• thistles are outlawed in 37 states!
• bees use them to produce a fine honey
• thistles are composite flowers
• thistle seeds have pretty, parachute like tufts (the older children enjoyed sketching)

We sketched.

We walked through the woods. (Finding plenty of thorny bushes and scrub).

We discovered insects. (Middle Girl found two slugs, a bunch of termites, a rolly polly, earwigs and a worm!)

Even the family cat and stuffed shark liked the stick fort!

Everybody enjoyed the notebook pages (pages for each age and stage. Coloring pages for the two youngest and study pages for my elementary and middle schoolers)…

…especially completing the pages outside!

Then we soaked up some more sunshine, still wowed by fall colors.

This thistles nature study is yet another wonderful prompting by Handbook of Nature Study. Perfect for cultivating curiosity in your homeschool. Even though we didn’t see thistles first hand, we learned some very interesting facts about them and spent an entire afternoon outside!

–first published November 2011 and updated March 2024