In this series, we have shared our heart for nature study through nature walks, nature journaling, and caring well for God’s creation. It is definitely a strong desire at Five in a Row that you and your children all get out and enjoy time in nature! Our main goal is that we support you in your homeschooling endeavors as best we can. Knowing that planning your own nature study can be a time consuming task, Jane has written a nature study for each season to encourage your entire family in your exploration of all four seasons!
Each unique nature study is like a nature resource to be used from preschool through high school. As a whole, they include information on stars, plant life, birds, other animals, water, weather and more. There are life lists where your student can document what birds or trees they’ve seen that season – and add to it year after year! There are tips for season specific nature walks, other outdoor activities, lessons on the colors of the season in artwork and poetry to read and study together or memorize. There are suggested books to read for each season and suggested nature guides, as well as how to use them. There are even songs for one of the seasons! There are pages of activities to do – planned and spontaneous, momentary or lifelong.
One such activity suggested is to be looking often at the stars and in turn, realizing that the constellations you can see in the spring evenings as you catch fireflies are not the same ones that you see in the fall as you sit by a campfire! First you enjoy them, teach your children there are stars in the sky, and then through the years you discover together how the times you can view them change with the seasons. Once you’ve noticed this for a few seasons, your children may want to know why this is so. And without even knowing it, you’re off into deeper learning experiences – lessons that have been lived together as a family in the out of doors!
Included are also printable, season-specific, journaling pages for all ages that can be used more than once each season and year after year. There is a one really great printable set where the youngest nature learners just circle what they see. As they get older they create their own drawings for specific nature items. As they get even older, they choose their own sights and draw them as well. What a treasure it will be to have six or eight or ten years of these to have in a nature notebook to look back on and see how that young four year old asking about squirrels grew into a young adult building birdhouses for a state park!
I would be remiss to allow you to believe that the photo above is a large picture of what is included. Each nature study is completely unique to its season and in its contents. Here are only 5 of the 250 total pages of all four nature studies together! Each one page I chose represents about 10 or more similar pages included in each individual study. More importantly, the nature studies are not all about printables (though I know we moms often think we need proof to say we did school) … they are about the memories you’ll be making as you and your children fall in love with nature and its Creator. You use the study how ever it works for your family.
Each year we want to teach more and more about nature in our regular school curriculum, with the goal always being to help our child fall enthusiastically in love with nature! As I become familiar what’s in the studies, each year as the season changes I will pull out the nature study and focus on a different aspect of the season, poem or Bible verse or add to what we learned last year, deepening our love for and knowledge about that season. Since Jane has provided the wonderful information, activities and printables for each season, The Five in a Row Digital Nature studies free me up to just start enjoying nature with my children, and I don’t know any homeschooling family who won’t benefit from that!
Purchase the Five in a Row Nature Studies here and see all the posts in this series:
[…] written for each season full of activity ideas, book selections, printables, artist study and more! Here’s a post where I describe them in detail, and a here’s a page with convenient links to purchase for […]