Nature Study

I asked this question not too long ago myself, since like you, I loved the IDEA of nature study but was having a hard time getting started with it with dd5.  I really wanted to make it a habit in our homeschool during this K year before we get more deeply into the real academic stuff next year.  I think part of my problem was that I was trying to make it too complicated and organize too much ahead of time.  Simplifying has really helped us here (that’s one thing that I love about CM – it has really, really helped me simplify and make things DOABLE, which is important because I do tend to like to complicate things…)  Here is what we finally settled on that is really working for us right now:

We set aside a specific time for a nature walk to begin with, just because otherwise I knew we’d never do it.  For us, we walk to the library on Fridays, so set that walk aside as our ‘nature walk’.  The first time or two, I said something like “let’s see what we notice that is blue” or after an all-night rainstorm “let’s see what we notice that tells us that is was raining”.  That was a really good one – we saw mud and noticed it’s sticky gooey texture, the differences in color (ranging from tan to black), the puddles and what happens when you throw a rock in, the sparkly little raindrops clinging to blades of grass.  Now that we’ve gotten more into it, she is starting to notice more things on her own, so I don’t have to prompt her as much as when we were starting.  And she is also noticing and pointing things out at other times than our formal “nature” time.   Afterwards, if we find something we don’t know, we may come home and try to identify it (which is often because I am nature illiterate and need all the help I can get!), or read more books about that topic.  (At this stage I don’t really have any living book resources to suggest, we are mostly using reference materials since that’s what we’ve got.  Still expanding our library in that area!)  After we found a huge spider, we read about spiders.  After noticing more than 30 little mushrooms on our back lawn, we read about mushrooms. And so on.  We are keeping a little nature journal, but at this stage it is VERY collaborative.  She may dictate to me about what she saw and I’ll write that down, but I’ll add bits of what I noticed in as well (to model what kind of observations we are looking for.)  Then, we may draw a picture – sometimes she does it herself, sometimes I’ll draw an outline for her to color, sometimes we have taken a photo to put in, and sometimes even a specimin if it is flat enough.  (After we saw a pine tree, she said “mama, it looks like a DILL tree!”  since we have dill plants in our little herb garden.  I thought it was great that she was forming a comparison with something she already knew!  So we pasted in some pine needles and a sprig of dill and wrote about how they were similar and different.)

As she gets older and we start doing more formal science studies, we may get more organized about how we are going about it.  But for now, this is really working for us: helping us to establish it as a habit and exercising the powers of observation and developing a fascination with the world God made which I think it one of the big reasons why CM advocated it to begin with.

Hope that helps!

Thank you SO much for posting the Outdoor Hour Challenge website. We are serously lacking in science this year and that is my sons favorite subject.  This is great and hands on!!  I LOVE it. Just thank you so much!!