nature study notebooks

I am a CM dilettante, so take this with a grain of salt, but my son is exactly the same way. He loves making notebooks of things he likes (book of centuries for instance) but both nature and art are not his thing.

The purpose of the nature journal, I think, is to encourage the child to notice things and then make them his own somehow to help retain them, such as by drawing them or saving a specimen, etc. Maybe you could accomplish the same thing orally? Ask him to point things out, to describe things he notices, maybe ask him if there’s anything weird or creepy he’d want to put in a baggie and save. He might end up liking a box full of baggies with little dead spiders and birds nest remnants more than a book. But on the other hand… Some kids just don’t like the hands on stuff and are not arty. My son will read anything so I usually allow him to take the walk and then read about these things later rather than try to force him to watercolor about it, haha. Just my thoughts.

Something that helps me is to focus on the habit of observation as the goal, rather than the production. Process over product, I guess I’d say. So, even if my student hasn’t drawn anything in a journal, has she spent some focused time observing?  You can decide your own evidence for this, but mine is some combination of focused attention (even very short!), wonder, questioning, inviting me or another to observe, talking about it later, noticing it in another setting….you get the idea. Has she *noticed*? Have I? This is the skill that I hope will carry over into other situations in life, even if nature journaling doesn’t.

One practice that has helped me with this (with my current student and formerly with my graduated ones) is to take neighborhood walks as frequently as possible. We live in crowded suburbia in Southern California, so we are most likely to be surrounded by pavement and unchanging seasons than the opposite. But as we have become more familiar with our neighborhood (over years!), we have noticed so many nature study opportunities. Even if it’s just to notice the effects of the human population on the wilder population, that’s an observation and something to think about. Since we are on the same turf frequently, we notice patterns, changes, landmarks. The walking, noticing, discussing, has made for rich nature study in its own way, whether we journal or not. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. (And when I say “we,” I include myself.) But even if we just pause for five seconds to look at a red-tailed hawk high overhead, that’s five seconds of noticing and is worth it.