A year ago, a great flock of a dozen bluebirds flew into our yard for the day, the Sunday just before the cold spell returned. We delighted in their flitting from tree to grass and back to tree, blueness flashing by.

I got out the Handbook of Nature Study and started reading a bit about the bluebirds to the kids. Then I read to them from chapter 5 of The Burgess Bird Book.

The next day, instead of starting with math as we usually do, I had the nature journals ready. After Morning Time, I announced boldly, “I am going to paint a bluebird so I can always remember yesterday.” I plunked myself down at the dining room table where we do school and proceeded to sketch my bluebird. I had taken the color image and the coloring image from this page, and had arranged them to make a single coloring page in a Word document. I used one of the bluebirds from there as my guide.

The kids sat with me and started coloring their coloring pages. The criteria was to color them identically to the model. It was interesting how Bear (7) took this to heart and tried out a bunch of coloring pencils to get the hues to match exactly. I showed her how you can layer colors as you color. She liked that.

Then J-jo (5) declared he was done and I asked him if he wanted to draw and paint a bird in his sketchbook. Of course he did not. So we compromised and he cut out the birds from the coloring page and glued them into the sketchbook. I cringed a bit at wasting a perfectly great page of watercolor paper! (We use these beautiful, sturdy books.) Bear meanwhile did decide to paint a bird and wrote quite a long entry about the bluebird. It helped that she saw me write more than usual.

We started our journals exactly two years ago and they are barely filled. My goal is to make sure we do some sort of keeping in them weekly, even if the weather does not cooperate. I have been inspired by these daily nature study plans and am trying to bring nature inside more often as a compromise. It’s not my ideal, but it is better than not doing nature study.

What does nature study in your home look like?

I’ve been trying to send the children outside more, especially with the warmer days.  I know that being outdoors is important, but it sure can be challenging to spend time outside with busy schedules.  Yet,  I lived outside as a kid.  What has changed?  In fact, this is why I’ve been wanting to read Last Child in the Woods {affil. link} since it came out years ago. However, the library only has it as an audio book and I would fall asleep every time I tried to listen to it, not because it isn’t inspiring (far from it), but because it was usually bedtime when I was finally able to carve out time to listen. I finally just included the parperback in my last Amazon order and have been reading it during Bear’s gymnastics practices.  It’s eye opening and clearly, I don’t send my kids outside enough anymore and I want that to change.  I used to make a huge effort when Bear was younger to make sure we went outside all the time.  Now that she is school aged, I find we are doing school and letting it and gymnastics eat up all that fresh air time.  So last Sunday, when the weather was warm, I sent them out.  What follows is a great inspiration to me that sometimes it’s what happens in spite of the schedule that is most meaningful.

 The Secret to Get Your Kids Enthused About Nature Study:

If you send your kids outside to play,  chances are they will come running in with massive clumps of these pretty purple flowers (a weed, rampart in all the yards on the street), ecstatic to have picked flowers for mom.  Mom will probably excitedly grab her nature journal and say, “These are so beautiful, I want to record them in my nature journal.”
And if mom picks up her nature journal and starts to draw, two other children will rush to get their nature journals and start to draw, too.
Chances are that if mom writes out the Latin name for the flower, a certain 6 year old will eagerly do so as well.
Moreover, if the 4 year old sees everyone writing, he will insist on his own pencil and refuse that mom scribes for him.
And if the children are content and fulfilled doing this impromptu activity with mom, chances are they will be excited to point out more things found in nature.

The moral: Children love to imitate us and do as we do, so dig in and enjoy some nature study, too.

Bear and I have been taking nature walks every morning. There’s not much nature where we live presently, but we walk along the road and I try to point out what I can – flowering weeds, bees pollinating clover, butterflies, birds singing, etc.

On two occasions last week, (I briefly posted about these in my Tot School post), we had the good fortune of finding very nice insects. Bear had a lot of fun looking at them, especially the “aplar” (caterpillar) that was very active.

Our new house is on a large lot and I look forward to our nature walks. Just one more week to moving day and I am not looking forward to unpacking.

As we strive to spend more time out in nature, we find our nature collection growing. When the kids were younger, it comprised mostly of rocks and sticks. Now, at 6 and 8, they are becoming discriminate and our nature collection has becoming more varied.

We use three shelves as our main nature display. I wish we had something like a letterpress drawer to display some of it on the wall, but for now we use acrylic containers salvaged from my parents’ house, thrifted wooden bowls, and unused vases to contain our nature items on the shelves.

We have the good fortune of a nature center which rewards nature items with points. With these points, one can purchase other nature items. Points can also be earned by doing nature projects, doing scavenger hunts at the nature center, and filling in a reading log. The kids have “bought” gypsum rocks, porcupine quills, moonstones, and other items.

We found a dying butterfly at Kroger one day in the fall and brought that home for the collection

We also have many gems and fossils from our days of being members of the Tellus Museum.

Ideas for your nature collection display:

1. think outside the box and be creative
2. repurpose what you have around the house
3. visit thrift stores for pretty dishes and bowls
4. have tools for observation – magnifying glass, jewelers loupe, microscope (that is the one we own and enjoy)
5. use various acrylic containers
6. include field guides nearby
7. frame your nature
8. group like items together and create labels (these chalk markers work well)
9. have nature journals handy
10. add beautifully illustrated nature books – like this one, or this one, or Brambly Hedge, or Beatrix Potter books.

“Consider, too, what an unequalled mental training the child-naturalist is getting for any study or calling under the sun––the powers of attention, of discrimination, of patient pursuit, growing with his growth, what will they not fit him for?” -Charlotte Mason

Keeping a nature collection allows the wonder for the outdoors to continue once you come inside. I’m all about nurturing my children’s wonder for God’s creation. On your next rainy day, when nature study comes up on the homeschool loop, all you have to do is reach for the display, take up one item and wonder at it out loud and watch the children wander over to wonder too.

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