The Outdoor Hour Challenge this month from the Handbook of Nature Study Blog is observing our backyard during the month of December. The means taking a walk somewhere around your neighborhood or close by and just observing the changes and things around your area. We chose to walk around a local nature area in the middle of a big city. This particular nature area is about half an hour from our house.
We saw many stumps and logs covered with moss, mushrooms, and ferns. The Sunshine was just beautiful and coming through the trees to cast a glow on everything that was amazing. Usually our December weather is pretty rainy and overcast, so this is a little treat for our December world.
Some of the old growth tree stumps are huge. Big enough for a 9 year-old boy to fit inside!
Some boys enjoyed the walk, and some didn't. How do you get your teens to enjoy outdoor time?
Moss, leaves, mushrooms, and ferns. That's a lot of what we saw!
Oh and a few pine cones as well. These two were enjoying some sun up in the tree still.
The fern on this log reminded me of hair. I thought it was cool how it was growing out of this log like that.
These weathered roots are amazing. I over heard a lady talking about how she thought it'd be cool to decorate it with Christmas lights.
As part of the December World 2020 challenge, her reading suggestions for the Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock were for moms to read the introductory pages to refresh their memories of some of the key principles of teaching children nature study. It was eye-opening for me! I had never actually read the beginning part. I've only read parts of this book and all those parts were about certain subjects we were studying for nature study. I found some great advice and knowledge in this reading and plan to read it all over the month of December.
So many great nuggets of wisdom are found in this section and this book! I found several quotes that I liked in my reading so far. But, I really loved this part about Nature-Study as a help to health. There are so many health benefits to being out in nature, but I had never looked at it this way. Our kids really should understand nature to literally survive. So, when I push nature studies off I need to remember this, how important it could be to their survival.
These are my completed notebook pages. I like to do them right along with the kids. I haven't had the boys complete theirs yet either, so I figured I'd just share mine. My drawing skills are still lacking, but I gave it a good try!
This December Words exercise was so good. I struggled with the poetry part and just ended up doing an acronym poem. I learned that I definitely need to work on poetry!
What have you been doing in your nature studies?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment, I love to hear what you think.