Book Review: Fifteen Minutes Outside-365 Ways to Get Out of the House and Connect With Your Kids

All those years ago when our family started implementing the idea to go outside for just fifteen minutes at a time, we could never have imagined all the things we would find to learn about and enjoy as we spent just a little time each day together in our own backyard.


Rebecca Cohen has written a gem of a book, Fifteen Minutes Outside: 365 Ways to Get Out of the House and Connect with Your Kids, which explores this idea even more as she made a promise to herself to get outside for at least fifteen minutes each day for an entire year...no matter the weather.

By month and season, Rebecca Cohen gives the reader a  comprehensive list of things to actually do outdoors during those fifteen minutes outside, providing suggestions to make it more enjoyable.

"Going outside with my family every day has changed my life. Instead of frantically running from task to task, I have learned to use the spaces in my schedule to look around, breathe deeply, and live in the moment."
Rebecca Cohen - 15 Minutes Outside

These monthly lists form the heart of this book and will inspire families for many years...no more wondering what to do outside or how to entice your children into stepping outdoors with you. You can keep this book handy and reference it on those days where you just don't feel like going outside but know that once you do you will be refreshed.

As a family, we are naturally happier when we are outside, learning and active together. It doesn't feel like a chore."

Rebecca Cohen - 15 Minutes Outside

Don't miss the opportunity to give these ideas a try. Currently the price of this book on Amazon.com is $10.19.....what a bargain. She has a free download list of  "50 Outdoor Activities for Busy Families" that you can use to get you started.

My copy of this book has found a spot on my nature shelf and its pages are marked and highlighted with things I want to try with my boys. Although the book is aimed at younger children, I found quite a few ideas to explore with my teens.

Rebecca aimed to keep the activities in this book simple, little or no cost, and to be enjoyed every day of the year. I think she hit the mark and this book will help nature loving families to enrich their time outdoors without much extra effort. Thanks Rebecca!


Along with the book, she has a wonderful product that I know you are going to love! She has created Curiosity Cards for you to use as starting points for conversations that can take place anywhere. These laminated cards on a ring can be stowed easily in a purse, backpack, or hooked to a stroller. I recently took these on a day trip with my family and we made use of the cards as a way to stimulate meaningful conversations about thoughts, emotions, dreams for the future, and just plain getting to know each other better.

• What would you like do more of every day?
• Find two things that feel different from each other.
• Look for animal tracks or signs of animals.
• What game could we make up right now?

These Curiosity Cards are a gem and I give them a big thumbs up for my fellow nature loving families. You will use these for a long time in your family. 

Don't miss Rebecca's website: Rebecca Plants. Here you will find lots of encouragement for getting outdoors with your family, including a whole series of videos to watch.

Rebecca has generously offered to supply a copy of the 15 Minutes Outside book to one of my readers. Use the Rafflecopter gadget to enter a random drawing for one copy of this exciting book. Hurry and enter the giveaway before midnight 7/27/12 and I will announce the winner over the weekend.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Please note that I was not paid for this review but I did receive the book and Curiosity Cards for free in exchange for my honest opinion.


Rebecca's products are a perfect compliment to the 
Outdoor Hour Challenge!

Brown Birds: Our Outdoor Hour Challenge

The house sparrow and the mourning dove are our constant companions. The song of the mourning dove is easily recognizable and we have a pair that perch in a certain spot on the telephone wires around the corner from our house.

We have several kinds of sparrows in our yard but the most prevalent is the white-crowned sparrow. In the winter, we have scores of white-crowned sparrows that come to our feeders every day. They prefer the platform feeder or to clean up under the birdfeeder...aren't they helpful?

The other brown bird that we see in large numbers at certain times of the year is the cedar waxwing. I especially like this bird for some reason. It reminds me of a brown cardinal and is easily recognizable by its set of field marks. We had a flock of around sixty cedar waxwings in our tree one time and it was so much fun to watch them.

“Birds do most of their singing in the early morning and during the spring and early summer months.”
Handbook of Nature Study

Another brown bird that we have in our neighborhood that we can recognize by its call is the California quail. This bird has an easy call to remember...he says "Chi-ca-go!" Click the link to the Cornell site and you can find the button to hear his call.

Here is a video I took last year of a quail in our backyard. The video is not very exciting but you can hear his call.

The California quail is our state bird and in our area they are abundant. We enjoy watching this bird scurry along the ground with his top feathers bobbing up and down.

By the way, have you noticed that Cornell's bird site has been updated and improved? I am loving the new look and the organization of it so much better. They provide such a great service to all of us amateur birders.

Okay, one last brown bird (at least the ones I see are mostly brown) that we have a lot of in our area. The wild turkey is not the most beautiful bird in the world. The photo on Cornell's website actually makes him look quite elegant but in real life the turkeys we see are scrawny, blue faced things that usually end up in the middle of the road trying to look elegant. The males will fluff out their feathers to impress the ladies from time to time but for the most part the wild turkey is just a nuisance to the rest of us. Here is an entry I wrote awhile back about our turkeys: Silly Turkeys

I think that about wraps our brown birds for this challenge. We have a few more but this entry is already too long. I will save the other birds for another time.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

If you can find this book at your library or purchase it used on Amazon.com, you find it is a great beginner's book on birds. It is a picture book and each page is a watercolor painting of a common bird with its name. I would definitely use this book with preschoolers or grammar stage children.


We have this little guy on the shelf in our living room. Frequently someone will get him down and play his call. He happens to be my favorite of all the Audubon plush birds.

Finding Your Wings-A Great Beginners Course in Birding

Sometimes after many years of searching, you find just the book you have been looking for!

Most of you know that I love to watch birds and have started to keep a life list of birds that I have identified. Although I am able to recognize quite a number of birds at this point, I am still an amateur when it comes to distinguishing lots of birds I come into contact with.

For instance, take the Purple Finch, the House Finch, and the Cassin's Finch. They are so similar and I really have had to learn to look at certain distinguishing qualities to pinpoint which one is in the feeder.

Last week when I was at Yosemite National Park, I was browsing the bookstore on a hot afternoon's break from hiking. I skimmed through the shelves to find anything interesting and I was rewarded with this beauty of a book!!!
The Peterson Field Guides' Finding Your Wings: A Workbook for Beginning Bird Watchers by Burton Guttman.

This book is spiral bound and has 206 pages. It is written as a course in beginning birding. You use this worktext along with either:
A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America, fifth edition
or
A Field Guide to Western Birds, third edition
depending on where you live.

If you follow the link to the workbook above, you can look at the table of contents. While you are there, take a look at the sample pages and see what you think about this book.

I have read through just about the first hundred pages of this book and I found it very reader friendly and basic enough to give me what I need to get started but deep enough that it is going to really give me the help I need to learn to identify more birds, more quickly.

The first sections help you choose equipment like binoculars, field guides, and notebooks. After the introduction, there are chapters on learning to really "see" birds and then it moves on to teaching you to see the "easy" birds first. There are exercises with each chapter and they are to be done using the field guide for your particular area of North America. References are given to the particular field guides so it is easy to look up the birds that are being discussed. Each chapter has its own field exercises for you to complete.

There are also quizzes for each section to help you remember what you were introduced to in the chapters.

After the introduction and general lessons, there are lessons to learn about each family of birds like sparrows, wrens, blackbirds, etc.

I am seriously thinking about using this book as a supplement to the boys' biology courses or as a part of our weekly nature study. The book is set up so you could very easily make it into high school level course in ornithology. Or you could just work through it as a means of getting the basic understanding of a life-long hobby, birding.

Here is a quote from the "How to Use This Book" section.
"This is a workbook. It contains specific questions and exercises, requiring you to look at certain points in the field guides or to go out and make certain observations. As I explain in chapter 2, birding is largely about learning to see (and to hear), so most of the exercises ask you to look at the birds on a certain plate in the book and see something specific about them."

I am really looking forward to working through this book, both on my own and with the boys. I think this is just the starting point for a more thorough understanding of how to identify birds. If your heart's desire is to get to know more about birding, I highly recommend this book.

I was thinking that using this book would be a great way to supplement Apologia's Flying Creatures book too.

His whole strategy in this book is based on his idea that the best way to identify birds is "bird by bird". Taking one bird at a time, we can build a long life list of birds identified.

This book is a gem.
Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Winter Wildflowers: Violets

This week as part of the Winter Wildflower blog-a-thon at Wildflower Morning, we were asked to come up with some literary connection to wildflowers. I remembered that I had just the thing for this entry.

I recently read a really interesting book about flowers. 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells was a quick, fun read and was packed full of interesting tidbits about how both garden and wildflowers got their names.

According to the author about the violet:
Common Names: Violet, pansy, heart's-ease, Johnny-jump-up, love in idleness
Botanical Name: Viola

She also relates the story of how violets became associated with love. Let's just say it has something to do with the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, and a heifer.

She includes literary connections to violets by referring to works that violets play a part in like Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also relates a story about violets that has to do with Napoleon.

"When Napoleon was banished to Elba, he said he would 'return with the violets.' When he did return, Josephine was dead, and he picked violets from her grave before being exiled again to St. Helena. They were found in a locket, along with a lock of hair, when he died."

We are going to keep this little book handy as we enter the spring term and our study of garden flowers. Each flower has a small illustration at the beginning of the chapter. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in short accounts for many common flowers. I got my book on bookmooch.com but you can find it used on amazon.com for less than a dollar.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Some other flowers included in the book: dahlia, daffodil, daylily