Nature Notebooking

Watching the kids swim with their friends, I was enjoying the various styles of getting wet. (Some people dive in and get it over with. Others creep in deeper, inch by agonizing inch, letting the cold wick up their t-shirt.) Today, however, I saw a new method. As one young lady was hesitating, trying out the t-shirt-wicking method, her friend splashed up and gave her a sloppy hug. :)  THAT, I believe, is very similar to how we came to be using (for the most part) Ambleside Online as our curriculum. *See! This did have something to do with CM and Nature Notebooks after all! Thank you for your patience. ;)* Just by general bent, we have always had a Charlotte Mason flavor, and in recent years I have dabbled around on the AO website, using it mostly as a resource for finding quality Kindle books. However, after some blog following (Thanks, amy-in-peru!), I must say, Ok, Ok!! I'm in! :)

We just finished our first term - and although our Nature Study was more sporadic than I want it to be, it was still one of our favorite parts, I think. 

We learned a bit about how drawing helps you to really notice an object as we made portraits of our parakeet. My Teacher/Mama heart was warmed to hear Dan, my five year old, upon being asked if his bird was green, describing it as, "blue on his tail. His tummy is green and he's green on his wings. Yellow on his forehead, and his beak is skin color - a little bit darker than our skin color". (Probably more info than the 'is it blue or green' question required, but lovely as spontanious retelling/ proof we actually LEARNED something. ;) 

Here is Glory's parakeet pic.
We did start by looking at a black and white outline to observe shape
 instead of just looking at the live bird.
 We found it useful in that it didn't move around so much. :)

...and here is Levi's. He added the leaf rubbing to it the next week to make it "prettier".

Our other favorite project was leaf rubbings of tree leaves we could find in our side yard. This was good on several levels. First, I have a couple kids who are still a bit intimidated to draw something they are looking at. They have been less tense about the whole Nature Notebook concept. They have since mixed more written descriptions in, too, which I'm glad of. My prime bug-gatherer sees the real value in his notebook as this: "if I draw it, it will be there, and after it's dead, I can still see what it looked like". 

Nature...in the midst of concrete

Moss we scraped off the building and an airplane plant baby

 Until a few months ago, we lived on four acres of fairly wild West Texas. Our closest neighbors were my parents with their livestock almost a mile down the road. "Nature study" came almost as easy as breathing. We currently find ourselves living in a second floor apartment in Quito, and car-less; from a language learning and ministry viewpoint, we are extremely glad we are here...from a Nature Study perspective...well, I'm learning to be "content with such things as I have". We've also realized that there IS creation to be observed, even here... it just is taking more creativity to make it available for viewing. :)

Journaling the carrot seeds Glory planted :)

We also found that the sparrows would come to our balcony if we payed them in oatmeal. :) It has been really fun to observe something living (besides brothers, of course...though they are interesting :).