Our Nature Study Plans

I had Nature Study listed in our Morning Basket Plans, but didn't do any explaining. I missed it because I don't really consider it as part of our Morning Basket, but I listed it in Morning Basket because it is together work for the boys.

I assigned a nature read aloud, By Pond and River by Arabella Buckley (we have it on our Nook from Yesterday's Classics). I think this will be finished by the end of the term and we will read another after that. I have Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton (free on Kindle!) picked to read in term 2 & 3, but we may wait as I have some more Buckley books on our Nook and the boys are out-growing them (mostly Caleb), so we may read those instead and save Seton for next year.

I wanted to be more intentional with our nature study this year and decided to select a theme for the year. Our theme this year, at the family farm, will be a pond study (or lake study as we tend to call the pond at the farm a lake). I can't tell you anything about that because Scott is in charge. This is his type of thing and I thought it would be silly for me to teach it when he knows everything there is to know on this topic. I'm sure we will have post as the nature study gets underway.

We typically go out once a month for a nature hike (weather permitting, nice weather we go out more and cold weather not so much). We are looking forward to doing this since it's been since May! Chiggers were bad this year at the farm and I haven't been back since Tyler's birthday since they got me good! We should be back out later in August.

We are also hoping to learn six each of native trees, birds, and flowers. This will mostly be done in our yard. We will have to do the flowers out at the family farm though. Probably some trees too because it feels like the ones in our yard they already know. 

Last Friday we went out and looked at the River Birch and discussed all it's features and pulled out a guide and read through the birch section. We had a good discussion about it and it only took about ten minutes to do. We will review it next time we do nature study in the yard. I'm hoping to find some of the trees we have in our yard out at the family farm and see if they can recognize them in a different environment. 

We are excited about our Nature Study this year.