Does nature study make you uncomfortable? What is it, after all? And how are you supposed to do it? When I was pretty new to this style of education, I thought nature study just meant going outside for a walk. While that is largely true, I felt awkward because I didn’t understand what was happening when we got out there. Furthermore, I had no idea if I was supposed to be doing something to facilitate my students’ learning instead of just letting everyone wander. Then one Autumn day, the whole thing finally became clear.
My little band of homeschoolers went outside our back door for one of those seemingly aimless nature walks. At that point, it was on my list, and my goal was just to check it off. But as we wandered around, we happened upon a wee little mushroom. It was the cutest mushroom I had ever seen, standing there upright like a soldier, and we were so excited to see something besides a leaf or a twig.
The next day the mushroom had opened up even more, and we couldn’t help ourselves – we picked it. We could then look at it much closer, seeing the gills for the first time and how the stem attached to the crown. (I use all these words now, but we didn’t know any of them at the time, which was fine.)
It wasn’t long before we tried to identify it and found that identifying a mushroom is difficult. Our field guide taught us that it is helpful to determine the spore color, so we searched for directions on how to get a spore print from our mushroom. We learned that spores can be dark brown or white, so we decided to lay our mushroom half on a white piece of paper and half on black. We covered it with a drinking glass to prevent the airflow in the room from ruining our print, but as directed, we tilted the glass just slightly, so moisture wouldn’t build up inside. Then we waited.
You should have seen the kids’ faces when we lifted up the mushroom the next day and found the spore print underneath! It was beautiful! We couldn’t have made it more distinct if we had used a rubber stamp.
The next time we went to the library, we borrowed a great book called Let’s Learn About Mushrooms by Phyllis Perry (1974). It was just a short book, but through it, we learned about mushroom structure, how they propagate, making spore prints, and details about many kinds of mushrooms. We also discovered that amateur mushroom hunters, like ourselves, can never trust our identification of a mushroom because a poisonous one can look very similar to a non-poisonous one.
By now, we had mushrooms on our minds and couldn’t wait to find more. My sister had a large piece of property with a little creek, where we spent several days a week playing. That location held possibilities, though we had never seen mushrooms there before.
I laugh to think of it now because, as we walked around her property, we noticed hundreds —no thousands — of mushrooms! They were everywhere! Hidden in the grass, standing tall on dead logs, white, brown, and even tiny ones with bright red caps. Where had they all come from? Had they all popped up overnight? No, they hadn’t. Our eyes had just been opened.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the middle of a special study. We had spent some time finding out about one particular thing: mushrooms.
- We had read a simple book that we borrowed from the library, which enabled us to learn more,
- We did a few object lessons, prompting everyone to look closer at the mushroom, and
- We drew pictures and made notes in our nature notebooks of what we observed.
Never again would mushrooms go unnoticed by us as we wandered down a path on a nature walk. Furthermore, as we accomplished one special study after another over the years, our eyes were opened to many things, such as birds, trees, flowers, lichen, moss, ferns, and animal prints.
Autumn is a great time to do a special study on mushrooms, and I encourage you to give it a try. My now 19 year old daughter and I went for a walk recently and found hundreds of them! (She was barely school age when we did that first mushroom study.)
Best of all, you can all get a newly reprinted copy of the excellent book Let’s Learn About Mushrooms thanks to Purple House Press, who has republished this little gem! Used copies have become a super expensive, if you can even find a one, but now, with this beautifully reprinted copy, you can all join in the fun of doing a mushroom special study this fall!
Related:
My previous telling of the mushroom study with more pictures.
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