Soil Exploration!

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As promised, I have pictures of our amazing soil exploration today! It turned out to be such a beautiful, very windy day! So after a bit of work time in the basement, we headed out to my husband’s construction yard. We have a bit of property that we use for our business and there is a ton of overgrown land. I thought that it would be the perfect place to dig a hole or two! So we loaded buckets, shovels, and containers in the car and off we went! On the way there, we talked about the different layers of the soil and about the different kinds of soil. We also talked about what makes up the soil. Bunny seemed to retain a great deal of the information! When we got there we looked around at all the different kinds of dirt that was around. There was topsoil, and lot of clay (which is the main type of soil here). After digging around a bit, we got to work making our own representation of the layers of the soil. We started with bedrock, then smaller stones, then subsoil (clay here), next we added some topsoil, and finally we added some organic matter (dead leaves that will add nutrients to the soil). It was pretty cool! Bunny made a small one in a cup. After we talked a bit about each layer and how the organic material turns into soil, we dumped out the big one and I offered to let Bunny make the big one again on her own! She did and she got all the layers just right! It was great fun! While we did this, Pup played in the dirt! She was SO dirty and so happy! She was running and grinning and scooping dirt the whole time! Here are a few pictures of our day! 🙂

Here we are looking at the different grains of the dirt and the clay.

Here is our layer of the soil container. The second one Bunny made was better, but my camera battery died before I could get a picture!

Bunny really love the clay we dug up! This is what a majority of the soil in our area looks like!

As you can see it was a good morning! All of these explorations came out of the waseca biome study! We learned alot and it has been so cool to see how what we learned about rocks in the fall ties in here! I wish you all Happy Schooling!