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Nature Study not working….help!
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My dc (7, 6) love nature and observing but they haven’t taken to their journal/drawing yet. I’ve modeled my own nature journal with them all last year…watercolors, pencils, tracing…just to show them that they have choices along with the enjoyment of it. This spring we did a bird study book that included stickers and a blurb of where you saw the bird and what it was doing. We are starting a calendar of firsts…just waiting for a “first” to happen. I’ve read HUFI, SCM, CMInstitute, Karen Andreola, etc and understand that nature study varies from family to family. Some pick the same item to draw while others let their dc pick any item from nature. My dc are completely not interested in drawing in their journals. What should my next steps be? My ds6 had a major meltdown when I asked him to draw an acorn this morning. We were noting the changes of the growth from a month ago.
How can i encourage them to want to draw in their books? We’ve had wasps, beetles, flowers, etc and not one interest of drawing it. I feel like it should be so simple and that I’m messing it up! Any ideas?
Thanks, Leslie
He may be just intimidated by the idea of drawing and want to make it more of an art project than using as recording the observations you are making. I would think at this age it would be perfectly fine to make the observations together and you can talk and decide together what you want to write/draw in your journal. Let him be apart of your journal makign the experience a postive one and then when he is a little older he may feel less intimidated by it. Just my thoughts on it, but I’m no expert!
I let my kids pick from a variety of recording, and they had to do SOMETHING but I didn’t dictate what. We did a little drawing. (We also did some drawing instruction. The Nature Friend used to have nice drawing lessons, esp. on birds) They could also take a photo, after learning about photography. They could do rubbings (obviously not on birds LOL) They could record songs. They could calendar. They were theoretically SUPPOSED to do all things, but I let that slide some as they really developed some of their own ideas, like taking photo series, or really doing a good job of the calendaring–I had one kid keep an incredibly detailed one for a couple of years. — I intended them to draw some, but no one really enjoyed it–and one kid really resisted. (He once took out a ruler and measured all the petals and leaves of a flower –in really minute detail! while I tried to convince a younger brother to draw one.) Oh, one year we drove around at night in the spring and recorded frogs. 🙂 Mine kept trying to convince me that today, photography was much more important than old Victorian drawing. Never did really convince ME, but it’s still what THEY do.
A few of my kids aren’t artists. That’s OK. Sometimes we take photographs of things we see, sometimes we’ll print something from the internet, sometimes they’ll just write a few sentences about what they observed.
We’ve even taped in pretty leaves. A few weeks ago my 8YO found a dead Swallowtail butterfly and we researched whether it was male or female, what the caterpillar would have looked like, and what they eat. Then we taped that inside the journal. We’ve also done some pressed flowers.
A few years ago my grandfather had a huge paper wasp nest in his yard. We went to his house a few times to observe it, we researched more about how the wasps make their nests by reading The Handbook of Nature Study, and when the nest finally fell, my grandfather brought it to us so that we could take it apart and study it. In the end, my son had drawn some wasps, glued in a picture of the nest that we had taken, and taped a piece of the nest into his journal.
Because I am not an artist at all, I have sympathy for kids who recognize that they can’t get down on paper exactly what they see in their minds. Just enjoy the process!!
My kids love looking back at their journals and I’m happy that they are creating memories.
I have found that my girls all started drawing more as they grew older. At 8, 9 and 13 they all enjoy drawing now (but my 13 y/o more than the younger too and more than she did at younger ages). My 8 y/o hated anything drawing / craft related at 6 y/o. If I could talk to myself as her mother at 6 y/o . . . I would say slow down and back off – she is only SIX. : ) In a somewhat related note – she found a dead bug on a recent walk and pinned it to our art wall. When I wondered out loud about the bug pinned to the wall she explained it was so beautiful it WAS art. Lol!
Alright, alright I’ll relax on the drawing and focus on the observing. As always, thanks for the wonderful feedback.
My ds was painting with water colors today and he said, “look at my acorn on a branch!” He was so excited that he could paint it after all! Just wanted to share.
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