Wild Mushrooms

We spent Black Friday at home, hanging out. The boys got a hair cut, and we did some fun crafts. We watched a movie together and had hot cocoa, and then we went to a park and picked up litter. I was AMAZED at how much litter there was in this tiny little inner city park... we got 3 handle bags worth of litter and a gallon bottle of something that looked like Kool Aid (I wouldn't let the kids open it) in less than a half hour.

While we were collecting litter, I brought along a basket to gather wild mushrooms. I have had this 'life cycle of a mushroom' deck of cards for a long time and thought that now was the time to pull it out.

We found so many varieties and we were only there for a little while. I am excited to go back and find more kinds next time. We laid them all out on white paper, and then looked under them with a magnifying glass.

Then I had the kids cut the stems off and place them gills (or sponge) down to get spore prints tomorrow (which I will also put into a collage like I did the pictures to help us identify them later).

We are trying to figure out what they are, but I am SO new to this that I am not even sure how to teach the kids to identify them. We are not eating any wild mushrooms at all, although we love Chanterelles. But I am pretty sure that none of these are those.

For now we are using this chart:

And these books to help figure out the characteristics of them. Once we know what to look for, we will start to try and ideitify them. No worries though... my children and I will not be eating wild mushrooms any time soon.