We haven't done any nature study for a while, and its a new term, so once again an opportunity for a fresh start.
At the moment I have yellow 'post-it' notes stuck above my desk with the following quotes:
"Inspire not require"
"Seek first to understand before being understood"
"Understanding heart" - this is what I aspire to.
"Things do not change, we change" Henry David Thoreau
As I look at them - all quotes that have spoken deeply to me about how I want to relate to my children and to others, I realise that Nature Study came to a grinding halt because I didn't follow them - I wasn't true to my values. What happened is that a few consecutive times of Nature Study ended with Matthias having an emotional meltdown and me fed-up and frustrated because he keeps sabotaging his nature journal pages. It's not that he doesn't want to do them, it;s just that he's never happy with the picture and wants to destroy it.
In thinking about this, I realise that currently he only draws one thing at a time - at the moment it's dinosaurs, previously it was cars - pages and pages of them. But for each completed dinosaur or car pic, there are many wasted pages that end up in the recycling. Now I'm expecting him to be satisfied with a single attempt at drawing a tree or spider...
So, I resolve that: no output is needed for a successful nature study! From now on, nature journal pages are optional extras, particularly for Matthias. We will just get out there and look. Watch this space :)
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
#3: Seasonal tree study - Summer
Challenge from: http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/06/outdoor-hour-challenge-20-summer-tree.html
Here we choose a tree to study through the seasons. I chose a small garden tree called a Pompom tree (Dias cotinifolia) as it shows quite dramatic changes over the seasons and carries masses of beautiful flowers.
It is named for the abundant beautiful pink flowers, which really do look like pompoms, which it bears in Spring. The tree is still covered in these pompoms now, which have died and are now losing their petals very messily, and the wind is swirling them all over our driveway and garage.
Left: Matthias, Below: Daniela
Here we choose a tree to study through the seasons. I chose a small garden tree called a Pompom tree (Dias cotinifolia) as it shows quite dramatic changes over the seasons and carries masses of beautiful flowers.
It is named for the abundant beautiful pink flowers, which really do look like pompoms, which it bears in Spring. The tree is still covered in these pompoms now, which have died and are now losing their petals very messily, and the wind is swirling them all over our driveway and garage.
On the day of our tree study, we started off enthusiastically, even though the children weren't happy that we weren't going to travel far and wide in search of a tree, but just stay in our garden. But when I brought out ladders for us to climb to get the view from inside the tree, they perked up and thoroughly enjoyed it.
What could we hear? Mmmm, nothing but building sounds from the neighbours... eventually a bird.
What could we smell? Maybe the flowers, although really they were dead...
What could we see? Obviously the tree, with its bright green leaves, a couple of late flowers and loads of dead ones, and the old seed pods.
What other living things are in the tree? We couldn't find anything for a while, but climbing the ladder we suddenly caught sight of a spider sitting on her beautiful web. On checking up in our Nature Guide later, it seems that this was a Garden Orb spider. What was really exciting is that we are reading Charlotte's Web, so there were excited cries of "There's Charlotte, there's Charlotte!" We could compare this web to Charlotte's and imagine the words in it.
The output problem:
Although we started filling out our Nature Pages, we had to rush off and I planned to complete the drawings later. That's where the problems started. Both in Handbook of Nature Study and the blog that inspires our challenge, it is stressed that the importance of Nature Study lies in the observations, and that Nature pages are beneficial but not absolutely necessary. We had had a good time studying the tree and the spider, but I wanted something to show for it i.e. there's got to be some output!
When we tried to complete our pages the following day, both children weren't happy with the previous days' work and decided to start again. This time they drew what they felt like and not what was actually there. This resulted in tears when I wasn't satisfied with pretty topiary-shaped tree pics that looked nothing like our messy-shaped tree. We were all frustrated - certainly not the happy Nature Study that I had in mind.
A couple of days later we tried again, and this was the result:
We'll come back to study this tree again in the Autumn.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Challenge #2 Using your words
Our house borders on a vineyard, so we loosened the nuts on the fence post and squeezed our way through, stepping out of suburbia and onto a winefarm!
The vines are growing prolifically and are amazingly green even now in the hot, dry summer without irrigation, compared to my garden which is so water intensive. Makes one think...
As my major in Horticultural Science was about fruit trees, I immediately showed the kids the heavy grape clusters which will be harvested in the next weeks. Although there is no reference in Handbook of Nature Study to grapevines, I used the questions relating to other types of vines as a guide in pointing out that the grapevine can't hold itself up, and how it uses tendrils. We found one branch that had leaves very different in shape to all the others (I wonder if this is perhaps an offshoot of the rootstock...)
The challenge for today was about using words as a way to focus all of our senses on our Nature experience.
- One word about what we hear
- Two words about what we see
- Three words about what we feel
We picked a few leaves to carry back through our hole in the fence and spent time doing leaf rubbings, which was their good idea.
This is Daniela's Nature Journal page:
and Matthias':
This was our second challenge and the second week that we squashed in Nature Study in a busy week. If it wasn't for this challenge, we definitely wouldn't have got to it, and yet I'm so glad we did! I do want to go on more exciting nature walks, yet I love the idea of finding nature right where we live. To think that we've lived in this house for 18 months and its the first time we've squeezed through the fence to explore (it does feel a bit like breaking and entering!).
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Let's get started - Challenge #1
Challenge #1:
Read http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/02/green-hour-challenge-1-lets-get-started.html
The main point is just to go and take a walk with your kids - anywhere - in the garden, in the park, at the beach... then come back and spend some time chatting.
Decide on 2 things that they saw that are worth following up on.
What we did:
We took our clipboards and wandered to an empty field in our road which seems very boring - it only has a bunch of Blue Gum trees with a bit of brown grass.
But it turned out to be pretty interesting after all! The trees are in flower - in various stages from blossom, full bloom, to seedpods. It's not often that you get to see all flowering stages of a plant at the same time, so this was great.
Daniela noticed a tree stump and tried to count the rings to tell the age. It wasn't clear enough for that, but in the process Matthias noticed some dried dead millipedes which interested him.
Our journal page (which we printed from the blog listed above) asked "What are some sounds you hear?". At first the kids heard nothing but street and building noises, and it took quite some prompting for Daniela to hear the birds - however, no matter how hard he listened, Matthias just never heard them. In looking for the birds, though, we found a beautiful nest dangling high in the trees.
Matthias, stick on hand (boys just have to have a stick in their hand if they possibly can, don't they!) started prodding the tree trunks and noticed how easily the bark strips of Gum trees, so we chatted about the bark of different types of trees.
Daniela's Journal:
Our 2 things to follow up on are:
- Read up about Blue Gum (Eucalyptus) trees
- Find out what kind of bird could have built that nest (the hanging type you typically see next to water)
Outdoor Hour Challenge
11 Jan 2010 - INTRODUCTION
Nature Study is important to me. When I reflect on my best memories and my most satisfying moments in each phase of my life, I was recently surprised to discover that they all involved the great outdoors. Maybe that's why I decided to study Horticultural Science as my career. (I have a BSc in Agriculture)
Anyway, its one of my values to pass this on to my children, and I love the Charlotte Mason approach of encouraging gentle, delight-directed learning based on a child's curiosity and discovery. This is very enticingly described by Karen Andreola in "Charlotte Mason Companion". This was also where I was introduced to Anna Botsford Comstock's "Handbook of Nature Study". So when I found the Outdoor Hour Challenge (http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/02/green-hour-challenge-1-lets-get-started.html), I was hooked!
Let me warn you: Handbook of Nature Study is a real whopper - over 850 pages and no colour! Written in 1911! It's a tome, a doorstopper...I would never have given it another look if it wasn't for these referrals. But it's value is in the way it is written. Try this about the housefly: " The housefly is one of the most cosmopolitan members of the animal kingdom. It flourishes in every land, plumping itself down in front of us at table, whether we be eating rice in Hong Kong, dhura in Egypt, macaroni in Italy, pie in America, or tamales in Mexico. There it sits, impertinent and imperturbable, taking its toll, letting down its long elephant-trunk tongue, rasping and sucking up such of our meal as fits its needs". Or about the Pansy: "Some people are pansy-faced and some pansies are human-faced, and for some occult reason this puts people and pansies on a distinctly chummy basis."
CHALLENGE FOR THIS WEEK:
- Read the first part of the blog at http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/02/green-hour-challenge-1-lets-get-started.html).
- If you have "Charlotte Mason Companion" read the chapters on Nature Study again
- Decide on a format for your Nature Journals (I am just going to use lined or blank papers as appropriate which can be punched and filed - my kids hate not being able to remove a page that they are not happy with. Each child has their own clipboard which they know is especially for Nature Study. Oh, and just for fun I got them each a R10 magnifying glass at Crazy Store).
- Discuss the plan with the family and share your excitement.
- Start your own blog like this and tell us how you're doing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)