How to do Nature Study with Small Children| Charlotte Mason Homeschooling

do you ever get frustrated with your children when trying to do a nature study lesson so you end up just not doing it at all in this video I'm gonna share with you some really great tips that I've learned from other mamas and that I have also implemented myself and learned the hard way on how to get nature study done with small kids and not lose your mind don't forget to subscribe and like this video if you want more videos about nature study and how to get nature journals done with your children so when we're talking about nature study there's really four different elements that we can implement to get nature study done in our homes so I talked more about what nature city is in another video and I'll link down to that below but for today let's just kind of look at doing nature study with small children so we have these tools at our disposal one we've got nature walks getting outside and just walking and looking at things with our kids and we do have to be present for that another is reading about nature with our children so this can be read aloud or it could be an assignment to an older student as well and another one is observation so or doing what's called an object lesson where you take a specific thing and you study it in a bit more detail and you let the child study it as well you're touching it you might be cutting it in half you might be looking on the inside and finally we have nature journals so doing our nature journals is another aspect of nature study but all of these different work together to help us understand nature more deeply and also these are just different tools that we use to do it okay so when we're talking about doing nature study with small children we have three goals so goal number one is to get in the habit of using a nature journal regularly so my goal with especially my smaller children and I'm gonna say anywhere from third grade and younger is getting them to touch their nature journal regularly so I'll get into more detail about how I do that and the systems that I've created to help make sure that that happens for the smaller ones the other goal is to get them outside regularly and I'm sorry to say we have to get outside with our kids if we want them to be playing outside as well so that just means either going for a walk or maybe you're watering the plants or maybe you're grabbing your book and you're going outside for a period of time on a fairly regular basis now that's why I do nature walks with my kids or just walk around the neighborhood because I usually find something else that needs to get done inside the home where as if I get outside and I go for a walk with them then I'm able to see okay this thing needs to be cleaned up or we need to fix maybe part of the swing is broken or there's an area that has bees in it that I need to you know get rid of that so that they can play in that area safely so it's really just maintenance and just checking on their play spaces outside and making sure that it's pleasant but also me being out with them shows them that that's a worthy place to be another goal that we have with doing nature study is to encourage their natural wonder and I don't know if you've ever been around children you know that they are always in awe and wonder of the new things that they're discovering and nature study can really help us continue to foster and encourage that natural wonder as a matter of habit because of course we want them to take that wonder into their adult lives and we don't want to sculpt that so that is just a really great place to intentionally foster that sense of wonder in our children so we talked about getting outside regularly with your kids so I think that this could be weekly sometimes it's daily and it could even be for larger excursions such as a field trip with friends or a hiking expedition what do you do with your family I would love to hear let me know in the comments how you get outside with your kids and what works for you so one of my favorite tips that I've learned and I'm now going to share with you about getting nature study done with small children is picking one thing to study the world is so full of a number of things as Robert Louis Stevenson said I am I think that we can get overwhelmed so if you just pick one thing such as birds or trees just stop there and then when you go outside on your walks or you're going on a hike or you're just walking around your yard you're paying attention to that one thing that you're studying and then that that helps you train your eye and train your thoughts to look more closely at that one thing that you're studying and that will help you learn more about it for instance we studied trees a few years ago and we have one tree in our front yard that we love it is a wild cherry tree its glorious my kids can climb it and the leaves change it gets flowers it's the perfect tree but what we noticed as we studied it throughout an entire year was that there's some particular bugs that like to live on it and there also are as a particular pattern to the bark of the tree and I didn't realize my kids had really studied that bark there was we found a spread a page of a ton of different bark and one of my kids comes behind me goes oh that's the cherry tree the child cannot read and there is a very particular silver pattern and the stripes that go this way on a cherry on this particular cherry tree so it was really fun to see that that child in studying climbing the tree just pay more attention to it had already begun to differentiate that tree from others so again this is what nature study does is as we get outside more regularly we start to develop more wonder and get our senses more heightened so now that you've picked your one topic it's time to pick a book that you really enjoy that you can read through with your children over let's just say about 12 weeks it could be six weeks I love to take picture books such as there's amazing picture books by Gale Gibbons and I really just read one or two pages from these books because they are so filled with detail that doing one book in one sitting is just entirely too much so once a week we pull out one of these books and I'll read for anywhere from five minutes to 15 minutes it kind of depends on how engaging the story is and how much information is on one page so if it's maybe telling about pollination for instance and then it shows the types of parts of the flower I'll just stop there and we'll just look at that those details more closely and I'll have my children tell me back what they heard and then it's more of a discussion another tip that I love and use regularly is just asking them one new thing that they've learned from the reading and this helps create a sense of just yeah you don't know everything and also that back and forth discussion that I would really like to begin to foster even in the young ones they could just say one thing that they remember that was something new that they learned okay so another great tip I have for doing nature study with small children is that after you've done that really great reading then you get your nature journals out and you do a narration drawing in your nature journal from the reading now again this needs to be looked at more holistically that we're also getting outside regularly but it's also okay to go ahead and say well you learned about the parts of the flower so now let's look at this picture we're gonna take this diagram and we're gonna copy it into our books or perhaps that it was a story about a tree and how people interacted with the tree it could be that maybe they would grow the tree and turn it into a hope chest once the child turns 20 years old well then the child might draw the tree and then draw the hope chest see how there's an opportunity to have a little bit of variety in our nature journal entries when also we're using not just nature that we're finding outside to copy into our journals but we're also allowing for the use of books in our nature journals so I like to start with the reading and then do a nature journal entry after the reading for small children again just to get them in the habit of using that nature journal and then we're not distracted by nature debris everywhere and they also I like to and I'll leave a link in the descriptions I like to have some type of a coloring page from the thing that we're studying so that the super tiny ones I'm thinking like five years old and younger or the ones who get frustrated can either just color in and then cut and paste that into their book or they can trace it into their book so that the small ones who get frustrated more easily or big ones who get frustrated more easily have some tools to get something in their journal that day so this kind of leads us into that you were in charge or going to tell your child what you're going to draw now I'm talking about small children who are just learning how to use a nature journal now remember earlier I said that we want to train our children one of our goals is to train them to get in the habit of using their journals over time so that when they're older they can use their journals on their own so what we're doing now is we're saying this is what we're putting in our journals today now some people frown on this because they want it to be child lead but what I found in my family is that usually there is some pushback and as we have the habit of doing these nature journal entries that pushback goes away and they start to delight in and even ask for some ideas on what they can do in their nature journals so what we're doing is we're giving them a broad wide array of types of journal entries that they can do and there is in my ebook that I have linked down below there's I have a list of all the different types of nature journal prompts that you can give you can write you can copy you can draw you can talk about the weather you can just do a description so there's all different ways that we can do nature journal entries and I want to expose my children especially when they're little to some various ways on how to have how-to input into a nature journal not just watercolor which again that's a skill that they're going to learn separately from doing their nature journal wow they're little which leads me to okay so what do you use what what can we use for our nature journals I love to use just a regular old pencil with an eraser for starters the reason I do this is because it's much more simple there's not a lot of mess and it's a less of a barrier for me just to get started so again we're talking about really small children getting started they're perhaps doing an art lesson separately which is called scaffolding when they're learning how to mix paints and just they're really just messing around with them in the medium and the materials first so in their nature journals they can just use a pencil and then often I'll let them after they've done the outline drawing I'll let them then color it in with the colored pencils if they'd like to but again the point is getting them using their nature journals on a regular basis so now you might be thinking well that's all good and dandy but my kid is really messy and some children are just they care more or they have more attention to detail than other children so I have and for my child who is a little bit Messier and likes to rush through the work I have had to just slow this child down and say okay let's go through the steps together but don't get ahead of me and let's just draw the stem and we're working off of a coloring page or a line drawing of the image that we're trying to put into our book usually and sometimes we'll work off of an actual object but again I'm finding that with a smaller child that gets frustrating so then maybe we'll say okay let's draw the stem and we'll draw the stem okay we've got that now let's draw the leaf now let's draw the flower so we're just walking them through just trying to help slow the Messier child down because you're not got anywhere else to be we're gonna be right here while we're we're just gonna be together doing this you don't need to run off and go play with your toys right now so that just kind of helps everybody slow down and then I love to also turn on some music maybe it's the composer that you're doing for composer study I also enjoy doing some folk songs around the topic that we're learning about I always find that fun and I'll link to Elizabeth Mitchell has a lot of really great folk songs about nature so I just love her stuff so when we're listening to those songs then it kind of helps calm everybody down and we all are getting into a little bit of a groove we have maybe five ten fifteen minutes where we can peacefully just input into our nature journals color improve on what we've done and then it's over that's it it's no big deal now this whole thing might take 15 minutes if you do five minutes for your story and then ten minutes for your journal time again we're talking about really small children here so really keeping the lesson short and simple and then another lesson separately might be using the actual object that you drew so say you did flowers now you're going to get a lily from the grocery store if it's the middle of winter and you're gonna cut it in half and learn about all the different parts of the flower that's totally fine but I would do that in a separate lesson and then they can nature journal that entry so it's okay for us to say ahead of time what we would like the child to put in their journal and then we can help give them the tools along the way for them to succeed so that it's not us and them having a conflict it's us leading them to truth goodness and beauty that they can discover for themselves don't forget to like this video and subscribe if you want more videos about nature study and getting started with nature journals for beginners see you next time

Channel: Joy Cherrick

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Keywords: nature study, charlotte mason homeschool nature study, what is nature study, nature study with kids, charlotte mason, homeschool, homeschooling, nature journaling, nature studies with kids, nature journaling with kids, nature notebook, homeschool nature study, homeschool nature journaling, nature study curriculum, how to nature journal, how to nature journal homeschool, nature study with small children, nature study kindergarten

Id: xFTuzzXER9c

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019