{this moment}

To Eat or Not to Eat Part I: Nature Study at Thanksgiving

Because of our hectic fall, we missed out on hitting the pumpkin patch last month and, to my chagrin, I could not find any pumpkins for a pumpkin nature study. I read through the pages on pumpkin in the the Comstock Nature Study book for inspiration. We did the next best thing and studied another member of the squash family: butternut squash. We did an indoor outdoor challenge by studying the ripened fruit. For a practical application of what she is learning in pre-algebra, Pamela measured the circumference of the squash at its neck and its widest diameter, which she found to be 23.2 centimeters and 40.7 centimeters, and will calculate their diameters when we do math next week. I created my own nature journal sheet, not as fancy as what Barb usually does, but it worked for us. Pamela studied the fruit using her senses, and her observation that interested me most was that the squash smelled like carrots. With Thanksgiving looming, we decided to put the squash "fruit" to good use by roasting the seeds and making pudding.


We adapted a recipe for toasted pumpkin seeds to squash seeds. Scooping out the pulp with an ice cream scooper disgusted Pamela, so I pulled out the large seeds with my fingers. Since she disliked the sliminess, I gave Pamela a spatula, which she found awkward, so she finally dumped them onto the sheet. I loved her problem solving skills!



How did they taste? We had a hung jury. Had I not over-roasted them, I think they would have been quite tasty! We sampled the least crispy ones of the batch--Pamela found it nasty, but I think roasted squash seeds have potential, baring my tendency to lose track of the timer. Note: David has rightfully asked me not to burn the pizza on occasion . . .
The second thing we made with squash was pudding! I adapted a buttnernut squash pudding recipe by substituting coconut milk for the evaporated milk (the same trick I use for pumpkin pie) and brown sugar for white because I felt like it. Pamela helped me by squashing the squash and spooning it into the blender. I didn't mind doing the rest since we had accomplished so much with one squash. Does she still think butternut squash reminds her of carrots? Nope, she wrote on her sheet that it reminded her of P. P. . . . mmmmm . . . pumpkin pie . . .

Acorns and Oaks Study

"Through cloud rifts the sunlight is streaming in floods to far depths of the wood. Retouching the velvet-leafed dogwood to crimson as vital as blood." Handbook of Nature Study

We took our first nature walk in ages last Friday and marveled at the beauty of the dogwoods, which Pamela likes to call redwoods. Nature study is something easy to skip, but, whenever we get back into the habit, we realized what was missing in our lives.

We had no problem finding acorns for this belated autumn series challenge. Our block is full of oaks. In fact, two tall willow oaks stand on the border of our property, on the neighbor's side. In the spring, yellow catkins color our driveway, while, in the fall, yellow leaves and acorns, which attract squirrels, blue jays, carolina wrens, and tufted titmice to our yard, leave clutter everywhere. Cars crossing the driveway leave a trail of smashed acorns the color of Cheeze-itz. We leisurely walked around several blocks near our home picking up acorns and leaves to journal at home.




Typical nature walks abound with opportunities for sharing joint attention and this walk was no exception. While Pamela was taking notes about an oak tree for her science folder, I noticed a visitor on the trunk. I said, "Pamela! I see a friend!"

"Where?" she asked.

I kept looking at the trunk and answered, "Right there on the bark. Don't you see our little friend."

Suddenly, she smiled and exclaimed, "A beetle!"

Animals are such swift creatures that Pamela finds it difficult to shift attention fast enough. I tried pointing out a hilarious action scene between a squirrel and mockingbird, but she missed it. So, I narrated what had happened for her. The hapless squirrel was madly scampering up the roof of a house with a mockingbird in hot pursuit. Just as the squirrel reached the apex, the mean jet jockey beaned it on the back of its head. The squirrel bounded over the roof like a muscle mobile bounding over a hill in a seventies car chase scene. If you do not believe it is possible, then you need to spend more time outdoors. Here is a video to prove my point!

We even discovered a bouquet mushrooms, neatly placed on a delicately woven mat of mycelium, which we will study next week for our fungus study.


Today, Pamela finished up her study, drawing an acorn on the notebook page, making leaf ink prints as suggested on page 642 of the Comstock book, and recording her ideas in her nature journal. While you may find it hard to see, Pamela drew the acorn in pencil and carefully made criss-cross lines for the texture of the saucer before she colored it with marker. She experimented with coloring her ink prints with marker.


The Comstock book suggested planting some acorns to see if they will sprout. Given my black thumb in cooking and gardening, there is very little chance of that!

Pamela recorded her thoughts in her nature journal and made these stunning ink prints. She decided what to write to reflect our walk.

Belated Goldenrod Study

Before going on our fall fest working vacation last month, Pamela and I did two nature studies that I ran out of time to blog, and we have not done anything since until our oaks and acorns walk today.

On a gorgeous sunny fall day, we headed over to our friend Tinkerbell's house where I had spied a field of goldenrod. Before leaving, I printed out the goldenrod page from the goldenrod post at the Handbook of Nature Study blog and read up on this beautiful wildflower on pages 503 to 506 of the Comstock book. Since we have not done a study on composite flowers, we focused on other aspects of the lesson.

The handbook is for guiding the teacher, not to reading aloud to the child. On the drive, I narrated my version of the book's neighborhood story for Pamela:

There are flowers which lived in villages and cities, just like people. Sometimes, we are too busy to see flower cities. We are going to find a flower village where everyone wears yellow and everyone lives in little apartment buildings with green roofs. Some families make nectar and pollen bread to fee the butterflies and bees. Others make fuzzy balloons like the dandelion seeds. Other families wave yellow flags to let the insects know where they live. Once we find the goldenrod village, let's figure out what kind of insects like to visit.

We found our golden cities, abuzz with bees, wasps, and ladybugs (or Asian beetles), but did not find any galls. We did not bother identifying the species of goldenrod because they are so numerous and hard to distinguish. Pamela quickly drew a very geometric picture of her find.



Our friend Tinkerbell and her mother saw us on their way home from school, and we wandered the neighborhood and found all sorts of lovely things:

Corndog, or Cattail?

To complete Outdoor Hour Challenge #3, I read pages 16 and 17 of Handbook of Nature Study. The first section covered language arts and nature study. As a Charlotte Mason homeschooler and RDI mom, I heartily agree that "the purpose of a language is, after all, merely to convey ideas" for I wish to know what Pamela discovers. In the cattail study, Pamela connected cattails to cotton and dandelion seeds all on her own! While nature study supplies excellent subject matter to narrate, the quickest way to kill the benefits is to turn it into a language arts exercise. I try to look at journal entries and written narrations as a record of her understanding of the English language.

The other natural form of expressing ideas found in nature study is art. We usually try our hand at water colors, but the handbook encourages allowing students "to choose their own medium, pencil, crayon, or water color." For the tree study (this week's challenge), I brought all sorts of choices: markers, watercolors, pastels, and oil pastels. The most freeing statement in the book concerned my own issues with art because my family has many talented artists, and I am not one of them:

Too much have we emphasized drawing as an art; it may be an art, if the one who draws is an artist; but if he is not an artist, he still has a right to draw if it pleases him to do so. We might as well declare that a child should not speak unless he put his words into poetry, as to declare that he should not draw because his drawings are not artistic.

The irony of it all is that usually children who draw what they see in nature study develop their own style and learn to draw very well!

We followed up the cattail study by painting water colors based on one of the pictures I took: mine, which is entitled "Cattail, or Corndog?" is on the left and Pamela's is at the top. Pamela wrote some notes about the cattails: "It felt like cotton. The seeds were like a dandelion seeds. It floated on the pond." Notice that Pamela made a tiny grammatical error, but I did not correct it.

Yesterday, Pamela selected a tree, well a sapling, from our backyard to do a year long study. Every season, she will record her observations to help her understand how trees grow and change throughout the year, so I printed out the tree study page for autumn.

Before we headed out, I read pages 622-624 of the handbook, focusing on autumn work. Pamela drew an incredibly geometric picture of her tree, while I snapped pictures that will help us study and classify the tree next week, focusing on the leaves, seeds, roots, trunk, bark, and crown.

How has my attitude about nature study changed since starting the challenges? I have longed to be more consistent but thought a weekly field excursion was too time-consuming and the handbook, too intimidating. Thanks to Barb's bite-sized plan to ease families into short but effective studies and her scaffolding of the handbook, I feel much more confident. I have kept my own nature journal, sporadically in fits and starts over the past three years, and seeing Pamela's art is inspiring me to do my own. The benefits of nature study are plentiful--exercise, fresh air, attention, science, language arts, topics for conversation, art, etc.

P.S. Pamela's tree is weeping mulberry (female cultivar), a variety of the white mulberry, so we will be doing a mulberry study for science next week. Since the handbook does not cover it, Barb's article on subjects not specifically covered will come in handy!

More Outdoor Hour Challenges

Lichen Follow-Up
Last Friday, Pamela became interested in lichen, but she did not know what it was. During the week, she googled "green bark tree trunk" for images and found out its name. We looked up information on lichen, and she typed the following narration for her science notebook:

I saw green stuff on the brown bark. It was lichens. It was a fungus with blue-green bacteria. It grew outside on bark, tree trunks, wooden fences, and even rocks. It will not hurt the tree.

Challenge #2
On Tuesday, we combined Lesson 5, Day 1 of Writing Strands Level 2 with Outdoor Hour Challenge #2, which focused on using words. This series guides parents in guiding their children in nature study. Challenge 2 asked us to read The Field Excursion and How to Use This Book from Handbook of Nature Study. I loved the idea of taking a well-planned, efficient field trip of only fifteen minutes, which my busy schedule demands. The suggestion to preview the outing by talking about what you expect to study dovetails nicely with how we homeschool anyway. I learned to "make the lesson an investigation and make the pupils feel that they are the investigators." How? Keep the information shared in the book's studies to myself just like I avoid giving away spoilers in a novel. Likewise, imperative language (direct questions) kills a nature study in the same way it douses conversation. "If the questions do not inspire the child to investigate, they are useless"--perfect advice for an RDI parent.

For this challenge, Pamela and I sat on the steps of our back porch with lined notebook paper. I explained that we were going to practice sequencing in a story with nature study. She would find words to describe what she saw, heard, and felt and use sequencing words like first, second, third, etc. Since we have been making nature journal entries regularly, I skipped that part of the challenge. Unlike me, Pamela remembered that Tuesday was the first day of fall and I loved what she wrote:

Summer is over. First, I saw the green-and-brown tree with green-and-brown leaves. Second, I heard the wind, and it was blowing. Third, the yellow leaves were falling, and I felt cool. Fourth, the birds were whistling. The season is fall.

Autumn Challenge #1: Cattail
Before heading out, I reviewed the challenge and skimmed (busy schedule, remember?) the part about spring, summer, and flowers in the study on cattails and focused on what to expect in the fall. I even printed out the notebook page and packed some markers.

I called my friend Brenda because I figured she would know where to find cattails. She went above and beyond the call of duty (it fits--she's a veteran of the Coast Guard and I'm a Navy veteran). Brenda gave us a ride on her golf cart up and down several hills until we reached a beautiful fishing pond with plenty of cattails.


Pamela and I orally observed the setting first: weather, date, season, location, etc. We noticed how cattails grow along the edge of the pond. She touched the cattail and said it was soft. I added that it felt like a sponge. She drew a detail of one cattail and then drew a bunch of them, very neatly and abstractly. During the week, she will write her observations for science class. The book asked if the cattail would float and Pamela guessed that it would. I snapped off a cattail and handed to her to throw. Impulsively, she ripped off some of the seeds and said, "Dandelion seeds." They are so soft, white, and downy. We talked about the wind blowing the seeds away.



Pamela went to the edge of the pond and threw the cattail. She was right! Before we left I snapped some pictures for our follow-up study next week.

The sweetest moment was when a mother showed up with her little girl, probably no more than two years old. Pamela asked for her name and repeated it when she heard it. Pamela looked at me and said, "New friend?"

"She who opens her eyes and her heart nature-ward even once a week finds nature-study in the schoolroom a delight and an abiding joy." Anna Comstock

Green Hour Challenge #1

We have exercised every school day this year, logging in 18 30-minute walks so far! One of the benefits of walking is getting to know the neighborhood better. This week was full of interesting nature finds: a bird nest on the ground, a lizard in a tree just at our eye-level, a dead baby snake (and, YES, I squealed when I saw it), and a chicken trying to cross the road. We think it fell off a chicken truck bound for the poultry plant thirty minutes away. I nearly always carry the camera to give Pamela a chance to practice her photography skills. The interesting things we see offer many opportunities to reinforce declarative communication, thinking and wondering, writing, Spanish (yo veo la gallina blanca), and nature study.



Walking outdoors dovetails very nicely with nature study. Every year, I have had good intentions but only managed to hit it sporadically. Our schooling must be going well this year because we have managed to do a nature walk, complete with watercolor painting four weeks in a row--how many weeks does it take to build a habit? Pamela does not paint complicated, detailed pictures. She probably spends less than five minutes on her subject.

Before I head out, I pack the following supplies in a hip-pack:

• a well-sealed container of water, bagged in a ziploc,
• a few paper towels
• different sized paintbrushes
• watercolor paints
• the camera
• crayons (if we do a bark rubbing of last week's tree)

You can do nature study almost anywhere, even the backyard. Since I am trying to combine exercise with nature study every Friday, we walk to a little park next to City Hall and walk around until Pamela finds something interesting. The first two weeks she painted leaves from trees. Actually, I am not sure they were true trees because they have multiple trunks and that usually means glorified shrubbery. Instead of getting wrapped around the axle because I could not figure out what they were, I used the opportunity to work on classification skills. I took pictures of key features of the tree and brought a leaf home. During the week, we spent about five minutes a day analyzing and recording characteristics like the kind of bark; leaf margin, shape, and veins; fall leaf color; leaf arrangement (simple versus composite or alternate versus simple); buds; etc.

Thankfully, last week I recognized the tree trunk full of holes that caught Pamela's attention! The clusters of bright, red berries, leaf color and shape, and alligator-skin bark told me it was a flowering dogwood tree. I resisted the temptation to steal an opportunity for Pamela to discover the identity of the tree. Pamela painted a small detail of the holey trunk in her nature journal, and we spent all week studying the characteristics of the mystery tree. Today, we entered data in an interactive tree identification program for Piedmont Carolina and only required three characteristics to zero-in on the dogwood.



During today's walk, Pamela painted some lichen from another dogwood tree and I plan to let her investigate lichen next week. Last year, I wrote two lengthy posts about the value of nature study and how-to-do nature study. For more details than you can ever imagine, try Harmony Art Mom's awesome blog and her Green Hour Challenge series on how to apply Anna Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study is simply inspiring. I gleaned the following ideas from the first eight pages, which Harmony Art Mom assigned for the first challenge:



The Benefits of Nature Study

• Cultivates the habits of accurate observation, discernment, curiosity, and declarative communication.
• Provides understanding of things close to home, opportunities for exploration of the land of the undiscovered, practical and helpful knowledge, wise respect for what happens when some break natural law, and new interests.
• Develops an appreciation for nature, beauty, color, form, music, and how creatures live.
• Nourishes the soul, mind, and body.
• Releases children from too much instruction and repetitive lessons that dull the mind.
• Permits the teacher to feel young again by not knowing, to let students pursue their interests, and to take a break when nerves are raw.

Caution: "If nature-study as taught does not make the child love nature and the out-of-doors, then it should cease."

Prescription for Teachers:
Spend Saturday morning either outdoors or napping in bed . . . z z z z . . . you can guess where I will be . . .