Nature books

A key part of the Charlotte Mason homeschool or any nature study is a nature notebook.  A nature notebook is a great place to write, draw, or include pictures of things from nature. My 3rd grader has several nature notebooks, and they are all a work in progress.  She mostly likes to draw, and sometimes I have her do her copywork in them.

Here is her ocean notebook.  This is one that I made with my daughter when she was studying the ocean.  It's a handmade one.  We just found some fabric that reminded us of the ocean and glued it onto some cardboard, and tied some pages on the inside, and made a little tie for the outside.  It turned out great.

Here is the inside of her ocean notebook/nature book.  Each page has a printed picture of something from the sea (sea creatures, etc) and here on this page she wrote a journal entry about her ocean study.  It looks like she wrote about her trip to the Marine center on this page, and she drew a picture of a seashell  because she saw some seashells on the beach.

 

Another picture of an empty page from the ocean book.  I think she only filled about the first 3 pages so far.  Then we stopped our ocean study, so hopefully we'll do some more study of the ocean soon and it will get filled up.

 

Here is a page with some writing lines that was also part of the ocean notebook.

 

This nature book could probably be included in with a regular nature study book, but we made another book dedicated to just leaf collecting.  Mostly because there were so many great premade pages to help with identifying leaves.

 

One of the leaf pages.  I don't think she has more than 2 or 3 leaves in this book, and it has several pages of leaves that she still has to find.

 

And, since our squirrel study happened about the same time as the making of the leaf book we just included some squirrel pages too.  See, you really can do just about anything with your nature book :-)  Here is a page of copywork.  She copied some facts about squirrels.

 

Then a squirrel craft that she did that went along with one of the books we read.

 

Okay, this is the last nature book that we have for my 3rd grader.  It's a nice hardbound book with blank pages for drawing, or journaling.  I originally bought this nice one for her to draw all her observations of nature in.  But the bulkiness of it makes it hard for her to really want to carry it anywhere.  What we will probably do for this one is glue her drawings into the book, or mainly use this one at home (which is what she has been doing, and why it's not very full).

 

Here are some drawings she did one day.  I think this was some things from our backyard that she found for her nature study assignment. 

 

Here is a picture showing just how thick the book is and how much she still has left to fill.  So, like I said, we are still trying to get more into nature studies then maybe we'll fill these books some more. 

 

We may even start a few more nature study books, and honestly I could probably make a whole book just from random drawings that she did that weren't necessarily done in her nature book.  Here is a picture of a lion from her sketch book, and there is a nice drawing of some birds in her drawing folder that could be included in a nature book. 

This is just how we do it.  I'm sure there are many ways to keep a nature study book, and maybe you even only keep one at a time.  We're still learning and trying to figure out how to best do our nature studies.

Home schooling one day at a time--as long as it takes

Desiree