11 Ways to Study Nature that aren’t Nature Study


Nothing strikes more anxiety into my heart as a homeschooler than the words “Nature Study.” That might be a bit hyperbolic, but seriously, hearing those words makes me feel like a big failure as a homeschooler.

You see, real homeschoolers do Nature Study. Real homeschoolers go on nature walks, keep elaborate nature journals with gorgeous drawings and water color paintings of leaves and trees and flowers. And what’s more, you have a Christian duty to do Nature Study. I’m not kidding. Read it. She makes a really compelling point.

So as I plan another homeschool year, I think of all of the ways I’m going to fail at doing Nature Study. Because I know I will. I know I will want to plan beautiful, Charlotte Mason inspired nature lessons, and I know I won’t make time for it, and I know I’ll feel like an utter failure.

Apparently, I don’t really want to sit and draw flowers with my children. I want to want to. But I don’t actually want to. You know how I know? Because I never do it. And not wanting to do it makes me feel like a loser.

My poor mother tried so hard to teach me to love birds and flowers and bugs the way she does. But I just don’t. I mean I don’t hate them. I really do want to love them. I’ve tried learning the names of wild flowers and trees, but it never sticks. My mom can rattle off the scientific name of every plant in her garden. A garden she planted herself. Because her friends the birds and the bees come to play there. I like to sit on her front porch and look at it when I’m there. But I’m more likely to pick up my laptop and start surfing than to pick up a sketchbook and start drawing.

So as I’ve been doing my planning for next year and thinking about how to do nature study so I don’t totally fail at it, I decided to start by setting a really low bar. Like, if I do Nature Study once a season, I’m going to call it a win. Yes, 4 times a year. That’s my goal.

In one of my great attempts to inspire myself toward nature study I schlepped Anna Comstock’s book, The Nature Study Handbook, up to the mountains on a family camping trip. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few years now doing nothing but making me feel guilty for never opening. This time I did manage to read about 5 pages of it. And one of the sections I read was was on what to do with a kid who isn’t interested in Nature Study. This is what Ms. Comstock had to say:

“Usually the reason for this lack of interest is the limited range of subjects used for nature-study lessons. Often the teacher insists upon flowers as the lesson subject, when toads or snakes would prove the key to the door of the child’s interest.” (emphasis mine)

Huh. You mean you don’t have to start by sketching a leaf? I like watching things that move. Squirrels positively delight me. Actually, maybe I do like Nature Study. Or at least I like studying nature. I’m just maybe a little intimidated by the nature journal process. I always just feel like I’m doing it wrong, and I have zero confidence in my drawing ability. But maybe just because I don’t want to sketch flowers doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy studying nature.

Upon further reflection, I realize that we do in fact do Nature Study around here. It just looks a little different than all the pictures on the Charlotte Mason blogs. After just a few minutes I was able to come up with a pretty decent list of nature study-ish things we do around here just because we enjoy doing them.

Here are 11 things we do for fun that could be considered Nature Study.

1) Going to the Zoo

I love the zoo. Every time I walk past the strange and wonderful diversity of creatures, I am struck by the astounding imagination of our Creator. When I was nursing my first baby, there were quite a few animal nurslings at the zoo and I would sit forever and watch them nurse and watch the interaction between mom and baby. I took pictures and put them in an album for my own little nursling. Oh hey! I could put those pictures in a nature journal! Lazy mom’s Nature Study.

2) Helping Dad in the Garden

I am so glad I married someone who likes to grow things. Because I like it when things grow around me even though I’m really terrible at growing things. I’ve killed lots of house plants. I can keep kids alive because they tell you when they’re hungry. Loudly. Plants just quietly whither and die. But my husband keeps them alive and then my kids get to eat carrots and tomatoes and zucchini and peas straight out of the garden. Nutritious Nature Study.

3) Walking by the Creek

We are blessed to live just two blocks from a bike path that runs along  a creek. We often (ok, not super often, but often enough I can remember the last time it happened) pop over and just stroll along the creek. We look for critters – we’ve seen crawdads, bugs, birds, leeches. . . We notice how high or low the water is. We visit the waterfall and either stand back in fear or climb over the rocks, depending on the water level. We pretend we’re on a jungle adventure or that we’re pioneers. We have picnics on the sandy shores. Low key Nature Study disguised as fun

4) Watching a Thunderstorm

A couple of nights after watching 4th of July fireworks my 4-year-old was scared by the noise and the flashing lights of a huge thunderstorm. When I climbed into bed with him I realized he had a great view of the storm through the skylight in the bathroom across the hall. As we sat and watched the storm together, I told him it was like God’s fireworks – a beautiful light show with powerful sound effects. We watched together and talked about thunderstorms and God. Cozy, late-night Nature Study.

5) Watching the Dog in the Backyard

We have this crazy little corgi named Penny that is an absolute riot to watch run around in the yard. She runs manic circles around the chickens. She’s a herder by nature and because her chickens never escape (because they’re in a pen) she thinks she’s really good at her job. She also trees squirrels, chases bunnies, and will spend hours every day hunting mice in the wood pile. I never thought of watching all of this as more than a source of amusement until I was flipping through The Handbook of Nature Study and saw the section on observing dogs. House pet Nature Study.

6) Watching the Chickens in the Backyard

Ok, I’ll be honest. I’m not one of those people who can spend hours watching “chicken TV.” But they’re there, and people in my family can watch them. So Nature Study.

7) Watching the Baby

One of my favorite creatures to observe is the human child. Babies especially fascinate me. I could watch my baby for hours. And I do. Nature Study – with a bonus hit of oxytocin.

8) Collecting Roly Polies

I’m not one to complain about the absence of insects in our dry Rocky Mountain climate, but one of the great sadnesses of my life is that my kids can’t chase fireflies on a warm summer night. Mother nature has, however, proviced an abundance of roly polies and a fair number of lady bugs that they do collect and observe. Creepy crawly Nature Study.

9) Going on a Farm Field Trip

Every year we go on a produce harvesting farm field trip with our bffs. It’s a pretty rugged experience where we go out on an actual farm and harvest actual crops from actual fields and haul them back to our cars in an actual farm tractor. We get covered in dirt, bit by mosquitos, and burned by the sun.  It is a lot of work and a lot of fun and the tractor driver always teaches us so much about farming and growing things. Plus they have chickens and goats and things to pet. Super fun, super exhausting Nature Study.

10) Fishing with Dad

My husband loves to take the kids fishing and the kids love to go with him. They drive up to a mountain lake and spend the day catching fish with worms. Then they come home and gut the fish and feed the worms to the chickens. So much Nature Study.

11) Cross Country Skiing 

This is a favorite of the whole family. We once saw a couple of moose from the deck outside of the ski lodge. They’re amazingly huge, beautiful creatures. It was a real treat. Then I went out on the trail by myself, turned a corner, and came face to butt with a giant moose. It scared the moose out of me. Nature Study.

So see, we do study nature. It just doesn’t look like Nature Study.

And that’s ok. Remember all the crazy animals at the zoo? God created so much beautiful diversity. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be a diversity of approaches in studying it.

 

Homeschool Planning Series: What I’ll be Teaching This Year

 

I promised I would share the subjects I’ve chosen for my homeschool curriculum this year. I will be teaching a 5th grader, a 2nd grader, and a 4-year-old preschooler. I want to offer the disclaimer that this is in no way what I think you should be teaching your homeschooled 5th grader, 2nd grader, or 4-year-old preschooler. Your kids are not my kids. They know different things. They have different strengths and weaknesses and different interests. And you have different strengths, weaknesses, and talents than I do!

I’m sharing this because I always find it interesting, inspiring, and informative to know what others are doing. When I read or hear about a bunch of different people doing a bunch of different things, it helps me realize there’s no one right way and I feel a little less anxious about what I’m doing.  If reading what I’m planning to teach is going to make you all angsty, skip it.

When I completed the process I described in this post I had the following list:

Henry (Grade 5)

  • Improve spelling
  • Write a solid paragraph
  • Complete Singapore 4A
  • Memorize all math facts
  • Improve handwriting
  • Work more independently
  • German (with dad)

Helen (Grade 2)

  • Sacramental preparation
  • Phonics
  • Addition/Subtraction fact memorization
  • Character virtues: responsibility and humility

Thomas (Age 4)

  • Become more “regular” with eating, sleeping, and daily rest periods
  • Improve mental flexibility, be less bratty and demanding
  • Learn to ride his bike
  • Scale back on screen time, limit exposure to Henry’s screen time
  • Share good picture books – including alphabet books
  • Expose to preschool fine motor opportunities such as playdough and drawing
  • Preschool field trips with mom and buddies on Fridays

All Children (Stuff we’ll do as a family)

Note: This is a sort of “inspire don’t require” time of our day. I’m hoping the content and material will excite and delight my kids. I’m going to try really hard not to force anyone to participate in this part of our day but rather to make it something they don’t want to miss out on.

  • Participate in daily family prayer time and catechesis
  • Gain an age appropriate understand of US History from Civil War to Present Day
  • Gain an age appropriate understanding of electricity and astronomy
  • Memorize some Shakespeare
  • Share good literature (favorite picture books and novels, history related literature)
  • Nature Study
  • Poetry
  • Folk Songs
  • Memorize Parts of the Mass in English and Latin

This comes pretty close to being All The Things. But there are some things I did leave out rather intentionally. For example, I won’t be studying grammar as a stand alone subject with any of my kids. I’m not adding handicrafts to the list of things I feel required to do. We’re not studying Latin as a stand alone subject this year. Picture Study didn’t make the final cut, though I long to make that happen at some point. I don’t have any specific, do-or-die reading or writing or math goals for my 4-year-old. (If you haven’t read my posts on a relaxed approach to the early years, check them out here.) There are times when I get all heart-poundy about leaving out these things. That’s why I’m being very intentional about setting my goals this year. It doesn’t mean we’ll never study grammar or Latin or handicrafts. It just means that this year, I’m not holding myself accountable for these things.

Also, there are a few things on this list that are a little aspirational. I really would like to do some sort of nature study this year, but I’ve never managed to make it happen in the past. I’m hoping to figure out a way to make it less overwhelming and more fun. I’ll share more thoughts on that later. Also, memorizing the parts of the Mass is something I see going out the window on all but the most perfect days. I’m hoping to figure out a schedule that makes sure that doesn’t happen.

In the next post, I’ll talk about my process for pulling together all the curriculum, books, and other resources I’ll use to teach these subjects.

 

So what are you excited about teaching this year? Anything you’re intentionally letting yourself off the hook for?

Homeschool Planning Series: Planning the Calendar

 

As homeschoolers, we have the freedom of structuring our year and planning our homeschool calendar any way we want to. In my state, so long as I provide 172 days of instruction, I am free to choose any 172 days I wish. Which means if I want to take a whole month off at Christmas I can. It’s totally up to me.

For the last several years, I’ve simply followed the local public school calendar. I didn’t do this blindly, but rather because my kids are good friends with the neighbor kids and I wanted them to have freedom when their friends were free. Also, having lived according to the traditional school calendar for much of the first two decades of my life, thinking in terms of two semesters felt natural to me.

The fly in the ointment for me was that it seems that public school kids around here have a lot of random days off – especially in the first half of the year. I found it really hard to get into a rhythm and to get my kids on board with a regular routine. Also, I hated letting someone else dictate my family’s schedule.

More recently, I’ve been noticing how other homeschoolers, mostly bloggers I respect, plan their homeschool calendar. This brought to my attention a number of intriguing possibilities for organizing our school year.

Sarah Mackenzie (I know, I I’m always talking about Sarah, but she really is that great) at Amongst Lovely Things organizes her year into two month terms.  Her goal is to school for six weeks out of every two months leaving 2-3 weeks of break every term. She can take these breaks in a chunk, or simply take days off as wanted or needed.

Mystie Winckler at Simply Convivial does something similar using six-week terms. She schools for six weeks and then takes a week off. She takes longer breaks at Christmas and in February (because February blues) and takes off the entire month of June. This differs from Sarah’s approach because Mystie pre-plans the weeks she will take off rather than using the days as she needs/wants them.

I know others who are less formal in their approach and just school year round without any need to break up the year into any official terms. These people tend to create their own curriculum or maybe lean toward unschooling, but for these families a school day is not all that different from a “day off.” They are always schooling and never schooling and truly integrate living with learning in a seamless sort of way. These people are probably not reading my planning posts. 🙂

Then there’s Melissa Wiley who coined the term “Tidal Home Schooling” to describe how her family tends “to ebb and flow between periods of ‘high tide’ times of structured learning . . . and ‘low tide,’ which looks a lot like unschooling.” Her words are beautiful and inspiring and worth a read.

Personally, I’m loving the idea of two-month terms with a focus for each term. We’ll start in August. August/September will be our easing in back-to-school term. October/November is our fall term with a full week off for Thanksgiving. December/January is our Advent/Christmas term. February/March is our Lent term with a full week off for Holy Week. April/May is our Easter/Spring term. June/July will be our summer term.

I’ll keep a simple calendar to mark off the days we do school and make sure we get in 6 weeks every two months. Our kids do an enrichment program one day a week making me responsible for 4 days a week of homeschooling. So I’ll need to make sure we do 24 days of school every two months. There are 43 weekdays in August/September. Taking out the Fridays (when the kids are in the enrichment program) leaves me with 35 days.  Schooling for 24 out of 35 days. That seems doable.

Thinking of things this way gives me a lot of freedom to CHILL OUT when thinking of planning. Most homeschool curricula are based on a 36 week calendar. Many are based on 4 days a week leaving day 5 for co-ops and such. So this schedule allows me to finish any curriculum should I choose that route, while also allowing lots of freedom for field trips, play dates, movie days, sick days, snow days, and I-was-up-all-night-with-a-teething-baby days.

I’m the kind of person that functions best within a well-defined structure. But I also need lots of margin or I feel like I’m always behind, always failing. I am hoping that this approach to planning our year will help me feel simultaneously organized and relaxed.

So tell me. How do you organize your year?

 

Homeschool Planning Series: Choosing the Subjects

In this installment of the planning series I discuss how I choose the subjects I will teach this year.

Is there anything more exciting than looking at all of the pretty curriculum catalogs and homeschool blogs and Pinterest boards and curriculum fair materials and thinking about all of the wonderful joyous time you’re going to spend with your cherubic children teaching them all the things?

That is, for the few brief moments before full blown panic sets in and you think “how in the world am I going to teach my little monsters anything at all let alone All The Things?”

 

Experiencing the bi-polar emotions of homeschool planning is one of the most challenging parts of homeschooling for me. I want to do it all. And I want to do it all in picture-perfect blog-worthy style filled with hot chocolate and hand-crafts and great living books while snuggled up with my precious children on the couch.

Sigh.

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It happens.

 

It is in my personal nature to have the above picture-perfect homeschool fantasy, realize that that’s never going to happen (at least not on any sort of consistent basis), and decide if it can’t be perfect than I might as well not even try.

That’s not the holiest part of my personal nature.

Over the years I have learned from some wonderful homeschooling moms, both online and in-real-life, that doing a little every day, even if it’s not perfect and even if it’s not “all the things,” can build something truly wonderful in you homeschool and in your family.

 

We have had our moments through the years.
We have had our moments through the years.

 

And so, as I enter the phase of my yearly planning where I choose the subjects, I take the advice I learned from the great Sarah Mackenzie in her book “Teaching from a State of Rest.”

Namely: Major on the Majors and Simplify the Curriculum.

It’s hard, oh so hard, to take that advice. Because I want to do picture study and composer study and nature study and Shakespeare and a rich science curriculum filled with hands-on projects and all the language arts – grammar, spelling, mechanics, essay composition, dictation, copywork – all of it! I want to fill the days with handcrafts and fine art and rich, deep history unit studies and amazing field trips and music lessons and daily mass and service projects. I want to do it all!

My husband is an economist so he’s always telling me that choosing one thing necessarily means not choosing something else that may be equally good. For him, this is simply applied logic. But to me it is THE great unfairness of the universe that makes me cry out to heaven, “But I want to do it all!!!!!”

 

Unfortunately, God in His wisdom has not seen fit to provide me with more than the 24 hours a day he has allotted to everyone else, and so I must learn to spend these precious hours wisely. I should not try to cram them with all the things. Nor should I allow them to simply fill up with crap because I failed to plan to fill them with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

And so, as I plan this year, I am prayerfully discerning what Major on the Majors means for each of my children. I decided to ask the Holy Spirit to guide me in making a list for each of my kiddos for the next year. I didn’t get all fancy about it, I just opened a google doc for each kid and started typing.

I was surprised at how quickly this distilled and clarified things for me. (Not sure why I am always surprised by the good things that come when I ask the Holy Spirit for guidance. I really should call on him more often!)

I have a second grader who will be preparing for her first reconciliation and first holy communion this year. So that’s of prime importance. She also needs to continue to strengthen her reading skills – that’s goal number 2. For math, I want her to memorize all of the addition and subtraction facts. Sure, we’ll work on other stuff, but if she knows those facts cold by the end of the year, I’ll call it a success. Finally, I asked what character traits this child needs to concentrate on at this time. I didn’t think long. The answers were fairly clear to me – responsibility and humility.

So boom. There I have it. Four Majors for my second grader. Could I fill up our schedule and stress myself out over at least a dozen other subjects? Yes. And honestly, I probably will. But at least I have this list to come back to and say “if you’re doing this, you’re doing enough. Everything else is gravy.”

Also, now I know that even if I teach her how to knit a sweater and she memorizes all of the presidents in order and she learns to speak fluent Swahili, if I haven’t helped her to improve her reading or helped to teach her responsibility and humility, I haven’t done what the Holy Spirit asked me to do for her this year.

Once I’ve clarified the fundamental goals for each kid, I make a list of all of the subjects I want to teach or feel like I should teach. This includes stuff like science, history, Shakespeare, poetry. This list can end up being All The Things. At this stage of the game, I’m not ready to completely give up on that fantasy. But that’s ok. I’ll get more realistic in the next couple of steps, and I have my list of Majors to guide me.

If you’re interested in what this process yielded for me for this year, stay tuned! These first posts will talk about my process – then I’ll share with you the results.

In the next post I’ll share the process I use to decide how I will plan my year once I’ve decided the subjects I will teach.

In the mean time, tell me, how do you decide which subjects to teach each year?

 

List Links to other useful posts on this subject:
If you haven’t read Sarah Mackenzie’s posts on Simplifying the Curriculum  or Planning to Teach from Rest  go ahead and click on those right now. They’ll open in a new window and you can read them now or save them for later. They’re very good and they’ve inspired a lot of my thinking about this.

Homeschool Planning Series

It’s July and my thoughts are deep in planning mode for our next school year. This is my favorite part of homeschooling because I get to reimagine a flawless future in which I teach All The Things and my appreciative, well-behaved children dutifully and joyfully soak up the amazing lessons I’ve prepared for them before heading off to spend the afternoon designing a device to help blind kids learn braille.

What? That’s not your favorite part of homeschooling?

I think of planning in three steps. First, is the research and discovery phase. That’s where I comb blogs, read books, search pinterest, visit curriculum vendors online, and add 203 books to my Amazon wishlist. At the end of this phase I want to know two things:

1) What subjects I want to teach and

2) How I want to organize my year.

The second phase is where I narrow down the curriculum/resources I want to use and map out my year according to the organizational structure I chose in Phase 1.

The third phase is where I get down to the nitty gritty of planning our weeks and days. It’s my least favorite phase because my fantasies of teaching All The Things to appreciative well-behaved children is replaced by the reality of needing to feed people, take care of the house, nurse a baby and still teach my sometimes reluctant, sometimes bratty children.

 

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He’s totally going to do whatever I tell him to. Same with the little guy in the background.

But I’m still in Phase 1. Hooray! And here I will share some of the thoughts and resources I’m finding useful in case you want to fantasize – um, plan – along with me

I’m going to break Phase 1 into two posts – Choosing Subjects and Organizing the Year. Sit tight. There’s more to come!

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