Nature journal

Last year (here) we started nature journals where we drew things we saw on our hikes or bike rides. We also used them to sit and sketch from observation and it was really a fun project to do together.
This year we will go a little deeper with our journal and add some writing to our observations, reflecting and making connections as the seasons change. We will also continue to add to our collection of found nature objects for our science box and we will use some objects we found to create a nature shadow box for each season, inspired by Joseph Cornell's boxes.
I just bought an amazing new book by Claire Walker Leslie called "The Nature Connection" (here) and I loooooveeee it!
Claire walker Leslie is very well known for her love of nature and nature journals and has a various of books on the subject.  They are a must for any nature lover .
What I love most about this book is the ideas she gives children to help them observe particular seasonal changes and she gives activities to enhance those findings.
We started with September and I will share some favorite activities later on.


















Here are some pages from last year's journal entries...
Sunflower observations.





A plum tree





Here's the same plum tree THIS year shedding it's blooms.





A sun print with herbs from our garden.





And some recent drawings .
A paper wasp nest.





A little robin in our yard .





Our butterfly bush .





And here is another great thing we have started ...
A question box!!
( because mama unfortunally does not have all the answers!!). We made it together after realizing that honeypie had more questions that I could NOT answer and actually i found it a great opportunity for researching the answers together.














Questions and decorations by honeypie .





We are focusing more on earth and sky as the science part of our homeschooling curriculum this year, planets, constellations, and our environment.