Scouting guildelines: Surveying according to C. Mason with modern helps

 Our local learning community has been working our way slowing through the Scouting Guidelines.  We've had lots of ah-ha moments!  

This term we worked toward the Surverying Guidelines.  

You can help yourself here to the adaptations we made for modern understanding!  

Working our way through the Scouting Guidelines

 So we continue with our local learning community to complete the scouting guidelines and work toward tassels.  

This Fall Term 2020 we will work on the surveying guidelines.  We find that it's much more interesting to work on these together and less challenging when we have friends working on the same things!  

Let me know how these work out for you!  

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.

Scouting Guidelines: IX Starcraft

As my local learning community makes their way through the scouting guidelines, I've been considering how we might make this Terms "Starcraft" extra fun.  Have you looked at the Guidelines and considered using them as you study with your children?

Enjoy using this to help you discover ways to get science, nature study, handwriting, composition, expressions of personality and knowledge recorded in a fun way!

Starcraft Guidelines help

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.

                              

Dry what? Brush drawing in a Charlotte Mason Education part 2

Put in the Time.
I did a quick search of my own blog to see how I've improved in my own brush drawing over the years.  I found a post about my first foray into intentional nature notebooking.  My own habit of keeping up with journaling has waxed and wained over the years.

People ask me how often they should include brush drawing in their weekly schedule.  I usually respond with a question myself.  How soon would you like to feel comfortable drawing with a brush?  Would you like to slowly learn over 10 years?  Would you like to have a noticeable increase in confidence at the beginning?  Let that help you decide how often to pick up your brush. 

If you were in art school, you might be painting everyday.  You might be looking at putting in several hours everyday to become great at something.  So if you wanted to be mediocre,  perhaps you would only put in an hour a week? 

If you haven't read Outliers already, I highly recommend it.  I have decided that I can now call myself a professional reader.  I have put in the 10,000 hours reading aloud by now.  That doesn't stop me from continuing to improve!  Consider this when nature journaling or brush drawing.  Be willing to put in the time and you will see great results! 

My children have improved much quicker than I in brush drawing.  Why?  I wonder if it's because they don't have mental distractions to complete other tasks?  Or is it because it's on their weekly schedule several times a week.  There's my hint.  Schedule the time to do dry brushing. 

more to come...

Dry what? Brush drawing in the Charlotte Mason education Part 1

We've been finding our own way with brush drawing in this house for many years.  I continue to learn.  It gets flung around as "drybrushing" in some circles.  No matter what you call it, the idea of creating an image on paper as a narration of sorts using only a paint brush is called BRUSH DRAWING in the simplest way.

For the past 13+ years of homeschooling my children, we have been slowing trying to incorporate more and more brush drawing and sketching. 

Sketching is done with pencil. It allows for shading with one color OR with the modern invention of inexpensive colored pencils with many colors!  It is one of many ways children narrate in this house.

Brush drawing is done with a brush and one or many colors.  Usually we find watercolors to be the easiest way to have many colors.  If wanting to only use one color, a brush can also provide some depth of colors.  Both with layering more and more paint, or by diluting the color you've picked.

SO how do you begin with Brush drawing?

In the beginning, I don't offer my children expensive paints.  When they are learning to hold a brush and getting more confident, I use the lesser quality brushes.  I don't buy the $.99 kind, but I don't spend hundreds of dollars.  Somewhere in the middle in which the paint is quality and the brushes have to be taught how to be used.

If a child has only been working with crayons and pencils up to this point, the pressure they offer to a brush can easily ruin the tip.  It requires some basic first instructions and much follow up as they learn.   Much time must be spent helping them to have a light hand with a brush.  Encourage acknowledgement of the tip of the brush.

We have practiced touching the top of our hands with our paint brush.  This allows them to feel what the paper might feel.  It's a very gently stroke. Try it.  Take a simple paint brush and use it to brush with no water or paint on the top of your hand.  See if you can keep only the tip of the brush having contact with your hand.  Now try "dry painting" on your neighbors hand.  See if they notice when you push to hard or too light!

We also have experimented with only water in the beginning.  Rice paper allows a child to paint over and over with a wet brush until they see how gentle to be.  This Japanese painting set has been a way to slow a child down and increase their attention span.  The rice paper slowly dries to extinguish the painting.

Here's what we have learned.  Good quality paints are great.  If you are beginning a child on dry brush at age 6, perhaps you can begin with some acceptable paints.  I like to use this one.  Buy quality paper.  But cut it into smaller squares/rectangles.  Trying to brush draw a 8.5 x 11 page is overwhelming (even for this mother).  A 2 inch x 3 inch is much easier to begin.

 

Here are some Parents Review Articles that might help you:
Vol 2, pg 337+
Vol 3, pg 348+
Vol 14, pg. 21+
Vol 14, pg 277+

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.