Nature Study with confidence| Charlotte Mason Homeschool 

This was PERFECT!!! Bite-sized doable steps!! Thanks so much! We walk around the neighborhood often and nature trails frequently but we never notebook it. That is our biggest setback. I am gonna add to mine today!!! Love the idea of looking closer or reading from the Handbook! Thanks again so much!!!!

Our nature study started when we moved to our farm and we had no idea what the local flora and fauna were so I downloaded a plant and insect identifier app and now my 5 year old son's favorite thing to do is identify new plants and critters (and then birds and mushrooms)! I am amazed by how many weeds he can identify and he has even taken up the task of removing our dangerous ones. He calls it Adam's Poisonous Plant Removal Company! I love it so much. He and I have learned so much and now we are teaching little brother.

Thanks Joy :) Its great to hear this simple explantation. We are just starting out and following your recommendations :)

We took a long break from nature study at one point and when I wanted to get back into it, I prayed about how to go about implementing it again. I remembered a book I had called Woods Walk. I read the portion of that that applied to our current season and our part of the country to my children. I picked a nature spot that we would return to several times each season to see what changed. The book gave us some ideas of things to look for. I told my kids that all I wanted them to do was find one thing that they would like to draw on the page in their nature journals. It could be something very simple, in fact I encouraged them to make it very simple. (The reason we had stopped nature study was that we had gotten burned out and I didn't want that to happen again.) Our nature spot is less than five minutes from our house, but it's a place we had not explored much previously. The first trip there was honestly rather rough, but we went back again and now my kids absolutely love going to our nature spot. I am very encouraged by how their observation skills have grown. Typically they will ask me to take pictures with my phone of different items. Then on a different day at home we will look at the pictures and they will choose something from them that they want to draw. I think the next thing we need to add is also writing a few other observations alongside the drawing.

We're homeschooling our last child who is in high school. We struggle with doing nature walks and nature journaling. We're just struggling period with the whole idea of it where we live. We live in North Eastern South Dakota. Honestly there's not a whole lot of plant life by the time school starts for the fall. The few wild flowers (weeds) that i do see if we take a gravel road, are in pasture lands which we can't access. Our little town has few flowers or bushes. People just don't have them. It gets very dry and is usually nearing the end of the growing season by the end of September and in October the trees lose their leaves. Winter brings plenty of snow and more snow with lots of wind and often extreme cold with well before zero wind-chill. Quite frankly i get weary of advice to study birds at the feeders. You can only do that for so many years as the one topic of choice for winter. And indoor plants is also suggested which we have one plant. I don't have space for plants indoors and I usually kill what i do get. Clouds is another topic. We're tired of doing these as the only nature we really can do... It just becomes the same old same old over and over every year. We do observe but not as a taking time in the day for it. We notice the little things in nature. We've just not scheduled it. And the drawing.... How do you draw mounds of snow and nothing but snow. How do you draw the clouds. How do you draw the landscape of unending sky and the pasture lands. And when you do find something that you can actually try to draw... Well, it gets stressful. It just doesn't look like the thing you're trying to draw. I had an idea. But it's not really CM to do nature this way. But I've wondered if we get a book with real photos and we try to draw from that. Like for instance when i was a girl my Mom had a book with photos of fish for home aquariums. I loved to try to draw the fish and color then realistically.

So I've always thought that CM style nature study had to include drawing outside, but can you bring something home to draw? That would totally change things! My boys never want to do anything except run around and enjoy everything when we're outside, but I could see them drawing something after we got home. I just thought that was cheating or something. :}

It's hard to just get outside and do it. Once I'm actually out with the kids it's all pretty easy. I learn a lot and so do they. I guess motivation is my issue. However, I am teaching a nature study class at a co op we go to. I felt this would push me to do more in this area. I'm not sure where to start with the co op kids though. I thought about starting with trees, like you said. But I'm not sure how to go about it. Should I have each child pick out a tree at home and have them bring a leaf or something and add their own tree to their journal? Or should I pick the one tree at co op and study it there with them? Maybe as a seasonal study. Another issue is I'm teaching 2 classes. One will be 3rd to 6th graders. I think I can handle teaching them NS. But the second class will be 6th to 12 th graders. I'm nervous about teaching nature study to the older group. How should I approach that age differently? Anything would help. Thank you for your time