Natural History Clubs and welcoming new members

It's important to get outside everyday.  And also to enjoy the out of doors with others.

I'm sharing this document I made years ago especially for families new to nature time and nature study.  If you are just staring a nature club or you have families that are joining your existing club that are new to nature experience and journaling, you might find this helpful.

We all move forward from where we are. Welcome and keep going.  You are doing great.

Keeping a Nature notebook

Are you in the habit of keeping a nature notebook for yourself?  Why not?  If you are spending time out of doors I am sure you are making some amazing observations.  Keeping track of when and what you've discovered can be a treasure for a rainy day.  I love looking back over what I found interesting a few years ago.  I see that more than 10 years ago I was keeping Monarch Caterpillars on my kitchen table from the dill they were found on in the back yard.  Today I am adding touches of the prairie plants I've seen this week.

Enjoy this Nature Notebook from a student at the House of Education.  It's such a treasure to be able to see these without having to travel all the way to England!  Link here

Scouting with Charlotte Mason

Last school year our learning community, Sursum Corda, worked towards completing some of the Scouting Goals from the Parent's Union School.  We had so much fun doing these together!  It added some laughs and ah-ha moments in the kids.  And it's been great to see them use these skills in the field.

Please feel free to adjust and use for your homeschool or learning community!
Scouting guidelines written for a 12 week term for General Efficiency I.



My children spend the first few days back to school with a quicksight exercise.  Have you tried this before?  Secretly collect 30-50 small items that would fit on a cookie sheet or tray.  Cover it.  Call your children to begin the learning lessons.  Talk to them about taking pictures with your mind.  (Same concept we use with teaching spelling and picture study!)  Tell them they must remember everything they see.  They can test themselves quickly by closing their eyes and trying to remember everything.  Now uncover the tray and set a timer for two minutes.  At the end of two minutes, recover the tray.  Let the children narrate back everything they saw.  If you have older forms, you may wish to have them write their narration or sketch it.  With younger forms you may wish to have them go around the circle and say three things.  For the consecutive days I let my children take turns preparing the tray and we all participate in the narrating.  I find it very mentally stimulating!

Enjoy these photos of our learning community working on knot tying!

Photo credit: Mo Watson

Bowditch was challenging! Mo Watson

Photo credit: Mo Watson

The following pictures are examples of the badges and tassels earned from meeting these guidelines.  I took these photos while at the Armit in Ambleside in May 2017.

                              

Keeping a Nature Journal in a narrative style

This is a post in response to "Can you give some examples of narrative style of Nature Journaling?"

Here is a nice two page spread of a student from Scale How.  I took these photos in May 2017 when I visited Ambleside.



Here is is transcribed.
We went up Loughrigg on (May 22nd) Tuesday.  It was a very hot and it was very hard climbing, so we rested half way up and enjoyed the view of the Lake.  
There was a boat in the Brathay river under the Brathay rocks which looked very cool.  We all thought we would liked to of been there.  
When we got to the top there was such a nice cool breeze that we all felt glad we had climbed up instead of returning.  
We found Phlox, milkwort, campion, Birds-foot trefoil, Jugnut, sundew, Iris, Good-King-All, Meadows Cranes Bile, Yellow Pimpernel, Stitch wort and Bog Bear.  We came back by Canon Bells and up stony lane.  We found a great many new flowers which we were very pleased with and we all enjoyed our walk very much and we also hope to again shortly when the mountain primrose are out in full bloom.  

The next page has a brush drawing in color that seems to be from a month earlier!  But it seems the painting was pasted in.  This is very common in the archives to see a narrative of what they did supported by the drawing/sketch/brush drawing.

Here is another and it's transcription.

June 6th
I saw a dragon-fly flying near Rydal today.  It was the first one that I had seen this year.  It had very transparent wings, which looked very much as though they were made of cellophane paper.  
June 9th.
I saw a peculiar animals running into the rushes at Bletham turn.  It was mouse colored and about the size of (a pheasant)?, it had a humped back and a fairly small head, it's tail was long, flat and hairy and it had fairly short legs and seemed to run smoothly, we looked for it in the rushes but couldn't find it.  There was only one Great-crested grebe to be seen today, I suppose the other one was sitting on the nest, the one we saw came out from the rushes at the far end of the tarn.  

I think maybe she saw a muskrat--What do you think?
You can see that she drew a bug and a flower she saw on each of these dates, but didn't really elaborate about them.

Here are a few examples from my children and myself:




Here are two examples of bookmarks we use to help find the next page in our nature journals.  Is it just my pet peeve that my kids have just opened their nature journals anywhere to start a new entry?

Print your own copies of bookmarks here.  Or fold your own sloyd corner paper bookmark with instructions here.