Nature Study Guides

OK. “Country Diary” is more of an example of a beautiful nature notebook. I love my copy, and it inspires me, but I don’t expect to draw much useful info out of it. When I get tired of nagg . . . uh, encouraging my children to do notebooks and wonder if it is worth it, I refresh my vision by looking over this lovely book.

HNS is a very very big book. 🙂 I love my copy. I use it just like you mention–when something comes up, when we want more info, we refer often to this book. I don’t use it as a field guide–it’s too big for that. We use smaller field guides specific to our area to identify things. But then, when we want more info, we refer to HNS. We’ve loved reading the story of a pet squirrel when we were having fun watching squirrels. The author’s use of “Friend Downy” to refer to a downy woodpecker got our whole family naming our birds, so we have “Mr. Robin” and “Sir Cardinal” and “Missy Junco” and “Bully the Starling” etc. 🙂 We’ve come up with lots of questions to ask as we observe from this book, it’s very useful for generating good questions and things to watch for.

For good inspiration on using this book and nature study together, you’ve got to see this blog. The author sends out weekly challenges. http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/

Hope this helps! I also like the “Discovering Nature” series, I have several, like Discovering Nature Close to Home, Discovering Nature in Winter, etc. They also have lots of additional info and many good ideas for study and observation.

Michelle D