Monday, August 11, 2008

Our Nature Notebooks: Challenge #21


This is from my oldest son's nature journal. This was just about the time we started using journals in our family...

We have been plugging away, page by page, for years. I have a whole row of nature journals lined up on the shelf in our school area. It gives us a lot of pleasure to pull them down and to page through them and relive some of the memories.

I thought I would just share some pages that are favorites that I don't think I have shared before. I will add them onto the bottom of this post so you see some "older" nature journal pages and some of the variety of ideas the boys have had over the years.

We are all trying to reach thirty pages by the end of the year.

Here are our tallies so far:
Mom=11
Amanda=1
Middle Son=0
Youngest Son=2
(We just started our school term a few weeks ago and the boys have been super-dee-duper busy with high school stuff. It looks like I need to schedule in some nature study time each week.)

If you are working on your notebook challenge, please post and link in Mr. Linky on Challenge #21 and let us know how it is going for your family.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Here is the first page in my oldest son's nature journal. It isn't anything fancy but it was a start. He would have been twelve years old when he drew this.

I thought it was interesting that he spelled "orange" correctly but not "shirt". I never corrected their spelling in their notebooks.

Here is an example of how my son drew what was important to him at the time. He wrote, "cat on top of the ruff of dads shope". Priceless.

This is an example of how sometimes they would just make a list of things they saw during our nature time. I have no idea what the orange boxes are for. I am sure there was a reason. Love the spellings of the words.

I made up little "scavenger hunt" cards (you can see it taped to the side of the journal) to help us with our nature study when we seemed to be going through a slump. They would try to find something from each category and draw it in their journal. You can find similar ideas on my daughter's blog. You will need to scroll down on her sidebar to her "Free Downloads" section and click on either Summer Nature Walk Worksheet or Fall Nature Walk Worksheet.

This is from my oldest son's journal. I don't often share his stuff but I thought I would today. He has a great sense of humor and it comes out in his nature journal. He also likes fine tip colored markers instead of colored pencils.

Just another from his journal....check out that date!

I know everyone always likes to see examples from our journals so this post is for your pleasure.