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Talk to me about nature study
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I’m following this thread because I really need help in this area! We don’t have a problem getting out and taking walks in nature, but we aren’t really doing Nature Study when we do it – just enjoying ourselves :).
We are also guilty about fitting in nature study. My goal is to have one object lesson each week, and to attempt an outing or two each month. However, I rarely meet these goals, especially in winter. 🙁 We are doing well to have 6 or so object lessons per term and a couple outings. In the summer, we may have a few outings in a week’s time, then go a few weeks without any.
Lately we’ve been enjoying our bird feeder…a couple of my kids are watching the birds as I type! This has been nice this winter while it’s so cold out and everything is covered in snow. When the weather is nice, we’ll be outside more gardening and fishing…I’m always amazed at how many interesting things we find in the yard by digging through the dirt or walking to and from the garden! The same with fishing. Last year, while fishing, we found some fresh deer tracks in the mud, and another time, I had a close encounter with a woodchuck!
My favorite books are the Handbook of Nature Study and Natural Science Through the Seasons. Both require me to read ahead and plan out lessons with my kids. Sometimes I look up something we’ve found in the yard and share some of the information with them. Other times, I pick a topic (usually something I’ve noticed in the yard) and read a bit about it, sometimes taking a few notes on a post-it. During the object lesson (or before we go outside), I’ll share a few facts with the kids. The HNS has really good questions to ask your DC as they are examining a plant, insect, tree, animal, etc. The questions really get them looking closely at the object of study. With the Natural Science book, topics are divided throughout the year and it has some related activities, poems, and quotes for each topic.
For guides, my favorite is the Audubon guides. They have beautiful color pictures, and I can usually find used copies on Amazon for a few dollars. We have quite an assortment of guides that I’ve found used or that have been given to us. The Golden Guides have been around forever and we have several of these as well. I really love our Birds of Wisconsin book–I believe there is a book for each state. It makes it easier to find the bird when you aren’t sifting through birds you aren’t likely to see in your state. There are also corresponding CDs of bird calls.
HollyS… I have heard of this resource before, but I’m having a hard time to find any samples. Would you be willing to share any? Or give me more info?
My kids are young (6, 4, and 2) so I’m sure it will change over time, but right now we go for a weekly walk or nature hike. I bring along a camera and usually an interesting theme emerges (e.g. a type of flower or tree or a weather related theme like snow or wind). We talk about it and I take photos. Later in the week, I’ll read about that theme in one of our guide books and we’ll say a poem or draw a picture in our family nature study notebook. We usually do about two per month with more in the warmer months in the summer.
We like the National Audubon Society guides as well as the Eyewitness Books. The Eyewitness series are great for specific questions about plant or animal anatomy. For example my DD4 was asking about whether bugs can close their eyes yesterday and we found our answer in the Eyewitness book about insects.
There are lots of posts on my blog about the studies we’ve done if you are interested:
I have a new book called The Curious Nature Guide by Clare Walker Leslie, author of Keeping a Nature Journal. I really like this book. It guides you baby step by baby step to creating a sense of wonder. For example, the first “assignment” is to “list six or seven nature observations you see, hear, or feel.” Another one is “what are the colors of the day?” And “write a short poem or story about a recent weather event you have experienced.” I can see myself using this book for years to come to gain lots of ideas.
This year was our first year of diligently doing a nature study. We purchased Learning All About Birds. We work on it twice a week and have REALLY enjoyed it. We recently put up a bird feeder and observe the birds that visit, on a daily basis.
SCM lays out bird study so well. The children draw pictures, record habitat, and journal about what we’ve read during the week. It’s been very lovely.
There is an excellent podcast about nature study on Your Morning Basket. It was so full of fun (simple!) ideas and resources. I’ve been faithful about doing nature study for years and I still came up with some inspiration!
Here’s a link:
RobinP,
I like the sound of The Curious Nature Guide! I feel like I need a little more of a guide! I will be looking into that! Thanks for sharing!!!
We really love Thornton Burgess books at our house. They have some quirks but I find these easy to get over. We love the Burgess Animal Book, Bird Book, Flower Book, Seashore book, and the animal-specific short novels for their story-based way of talking about aspects of nature. We aren’t formal with it; I just read as much as my 6yo daughter wants to hear (which is usually more than I would have read if I’d chosen myself! hee hee) and when our interest is sparked, we look up further information on the internet. For instance, the Animal Book so far has included a lot of animals we’re not familiar with in real life, because they’re not found in southern CA where we live. So we’ll look up videos and photos on the internet to see how they look and behave.
Here’s an example: The Burgess Flower Book is a wonderful old book with photos of each of the flowers discussed. Again, so far most of them have been unfamiliar to us, but I’ve been surprised to see how well my daughter has remembered them. My husband told me that the other night he was reading to her, and at the mention of the little girls collecting “Dutchman’s Breeches” in the book he was reading, my dd said, “Wait! I know that flower!” She went and got the Burgess book, flipped through it, and found the photo of Dutchman’s Breeches.
This was so thrilling to me. Not because I’m invested in my dd knowing how to identify flowers, though I do find that a rich way of knowing about the world. But because she was excited about it. The part of CM philosophy that delights me the most is the concept of children forming their own relationships with knowledge and discovery, rather than always depending on us to filter it for them and present it to them. This resonates so much with how I want to educate because it’s how I experience the world myself and always have, and until I read CM philosophy I didn’t know it could be described that way.
So when we do any kind of nature study, I try not to “get between” my dd and what we’re observing. If we’re out in nature, I generally keep quiet. I want to see what she’s drawn to, what she thinks about, what she observes. And I let her see what I’m excited about and drawn to (I may not keep quiet at that point!) but I don’t expect her to get as excited about it as I am if she’s not truly excited. So I’m probably somewhat the opposite of what you need, OP, in this sense, if you want more of a guide. I like using the Thornton Burgess books or Jim Arnosky’s Crinkleroot books, and also some visual guides we have that show us local flowers, mammals, butterflies. But I use those after the fact, not so much as what to look for. I use them when we want to learn more about something we’ve seen. What I always hope for is repeated exposure and repeated observation, because I think that’s part of what helps form a relationship: knowing that when you’re in this place, you may encounter this bird, for instance, and this bird will look and sound like this. I tend to think of the birds and other forms of life (animal, plant, etc) as “friends,” in a sense, and I have felt this way since I was a kid. Maybe a CM forum is one of the few places I can mention that part of my personality, but it does help explain why I love CM so much! I feel like “knowing” these features of our local environment is part of what helps us feel we have a place in the world and feel at home here, “bloom where we’re planted,” in a sense.
We live in urban Southern CA, so we have to make an effort to be in wide open spaces. But it’s been amazing to see how much nature we can observe and even cultivate in our own little yard. Having a bird feeder has been a great help to us. Planting bushes and flowers that attract butterflies and hummingbirds. Collecting flowers and leaves as we take walks, pressing them and mounting them on cards, then hanging those on the wall.
The most talking I do in nature study is probably to praise and thank God for allowing us to see what He’s created and given us to see, how beautiful He’s made the world and how blessed we are to be able to enjoy it. This is a big part of nature study for us.
Well, I’ve gone on and on. I have a passion for this topic, apparently! HTH!
Eeek! I guess even after that long ramble, I still wasn’t done!
I wanted to add that when my two older daughters (now 17 and 21) were younger, we spent several years in a homeschool group that was CM/classical focused. As part of that group, once a month we got together for a nature study day in which all the kids would bring notebooks and find things to observe and draw wherever we were that day. I really enjoyed that and it was interesting to see what the different kids would choose to focus on, plus I think it was helpful for the kid to have that peer influence of everyone drawing at once. At this point I don’t ask my daughter to draw anything, but sometimes she chooses to anyway. As she gets older, I will get gradually more focused with her studies, as a preparation for higher level science, but we’re pretty informal at this point because she’s only six.
I have my Natural Science book in front of me now…I had a difficult time finding samples too. It was a leap of faith to spend so much on one book sight unseen!
It’s just over 400 pages and was written in the 1950s. Each unit is about 2-5 pages, and there are 100 units total, divided by months of the year. Each unit has a bit of information on the topic, diagrams, activities (some divided by age groups), and a list of books you could add. The newer version has updated readings that you should be able to find at your library. The book was written to use in a classroom setting, but it doesn’t really have a “schoolish” feel to it. The activities usually include things like taking nature walks, building a pinwheel (to learn about air), making a list of birds you see, making birdhouses, lots of gardening projects, observing butterfly life cycle, making a weather calendar, etc. Some are large involved projects and others are smaller projects that take a few minutes.
This post show the calendar pages and “Beautify Your Surroundings” pages. They have these for each month of the year: http://www.aholyexperience.com/2010/02/nature-walk-nature-table-and-free/
For more inspiration, we added Nature Connection by Clare Walker Leslie.
There are also the Outdoor Hour Challenges and more inspiration at handbookofnaturestudy.com I signed up for their free emails. But we haven’t done any of them yet. I think maybe it overwhelmed me.
We simply get outdoors and look for an object of interest. Then we draw it and research more about it. We are taking this winter off. We have also really enjoyed doing the nature notebook lessons that are incorperated in the SCM science guides of Outdoor Secrets and Jack’s Insects.
I just saw this post which recommends a resource that might be helpful.
http://expandingwisdom.com/2016/02/exploring-nature-with-children/#sthash.LYrM7ATZ.dpbs
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