I still remember the first year we tried keeping nature notebooks. My son painted a little yellow flower we’d seen on a walk. At the time, it looked wrong to …
The 5 Guideposts of Nature Study
As homeschooling parents, you’re doing something remarkable: you’re shaping how your children see the world and guiding them to connect with the Living Teacher who created it all. Nature study, …
Keeping a Wildflower List (video)
I’ve written extensively about “The Lists” but I thought it might be helpful if you could see one of my own lists and learn how I keep it up. This …
The Lists
In Form 3 (grades 7-8,) a new Natural History assignment appeared on the PNEU programmes. While in Forms 1 and 2 students were simply told to “Keep a nature notebook,” …
A Brush Drawing Tutorial
The idea of keeping a nature notebook sounds so lovely, but for some people, the thought of making a nature painting is more than a little overwhelming! You may feel …
Brush Drawing for Nature Notebooks
Miss Mason, in her admirable system at the House of Education, gets her students to bring back leaves and buds of trees from their walks, and to copy them in …
Beginning Brush Drawing
The idea of keeping a nature notebook sounds so lovely, but for some people, the thought of making a nature painting is more than a little overwhelming! You may feel …
Nature Notes, part 2
In Home Education, Charlotte Mason referred to nature notebooks as nature journals. What is being recorded, however, is not a daily record of a person’s life, but a narration of …
Nature Notes, part 1
“The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us.” —John Burroughs A cornerstone …
Nature Notebooks: A Pageant of the Seasons
Each of the aspects of nature study that we have talked about so far has focused on observation, but now we will begin looking at the expression of things observed …