keeping a nature journal

 We just started today, keeping a nature journal.  I am so excited about this.  We did it for a little while when Ruby was in kindergarten, but it's time to start again, all of us.

 

 The idea is so simple.  To sit and observe nature, and to capture some bit of it, record a slice of time, a feeling, a new bud, a bird family...

We will grow and learn.  We will learn how to see, how to draw, how to hear, how to be quiet.  We will also learn to love nature and all the things it contains, to make life long friends with the birds, the plants, the water.

I am enjoying thumbing through Keeping a Nature Journal by Claire Walker Leslie and Charles Roth.  I am also reading Pocketful of Pinecones by Karen Andreola, to myself (and excerpts out loud to the girls).  It is a fictional account of a homeschooling mother and how they incorporate the art of nature study into their schedule.