Handbook of nature study lesson plans

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Read our updated privacy policy for more about what we do with your data, as well as your rights and choices - including how to manage cookies. Handbook of Nature Study. Yesterday's Classics Nature Reprints. Christian Liberty Nature Readers. Just Like Us! Nature's Beautiful Order. Discovering Nature Series. Grades PK-2 Discovering Nature. Grades Discovering Nature. Reason for Science Camp. Narrow Results. Author Anna Comstock 1. In addition to their You Are An Artist website , Tricia also runs The Curriculum Choice website that has been a valuable resource for homeschoolers for many, many years.

She also shares her personal homeschooling wisdom and journey on her Hodgepodgemom blog. The content will be in very capable and loving hands. We aim to have the website transferred and ready to go by the end of the year. Please be patient because we all know that stuff happens behind the scenes when making changes to websites.

Have you ever wondered how to use The Handbook of Nature Study? Does one look at it have you feeling completely overwhelmed? Here are some thoughts that I have now that I took the plunge and started using this wonderful book:.

Anna Botsford Comstock suggests that nature study be only 10 minutes to half an hour in length. We all feel so much more refreshed and it has actually helped us be more focused when we are doing our indoor homeschooling. There are numerous resources available for you to help create the habit of nature study within your family. So you have The Handbook of Nature Study on your bookshelf. Are you wondering how to use it? Having used it for a number of years in my homeschool I have a few tips to share with you to help put this fantastic resource to good use!

Disclosure: Affiliate links in some blog posts. If you click through and make a purchase, the owner earns a small commission at no extra cost to yourself. There are the obvious benefits of adding time in nature to our homeschool days think kids outdoors and burning off all that extra energy! But more than just getting some fresh air and taking an outdoor break, there is significant educational value in the study of nature.

One of the best resources I have found to help guide and cultivate our homeschool nature study is this guide! Try those steps as a good place to start until you get more familiar with the book. Are you ready for more? There it is… The Handbook of Nature Study, sitting on your bookshelf. Now what? It can be intimidating to say the least. Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Please see our Disclosure Policy. My own copy of the Handbook of Nature Study sat on my shelf for a couple of years and I finally sold it on eBay.

Yes, you heard me right. You must be wondering what happened to bring me around to where I am now? Simply put, I stopped fighting it! I decided to check it out from the library and took some time to page through it. I read blogs where families actually used the book, encouraging me to give it a real try this time. We already had a love of nature in our family but we really wanted to have a better way of studying things in nature in a little more systematic way.

Maybe it was not the book that was the problem for us. I went to their nature study page and read the whole thing, then I read the information in the Charlotte Mason volumes about outdoor time and nature study. Finally, I read other blogs that used the Handbook of Nature Study. In other words, I did a little bit of homework and came up with a plan for our family.

Yes, I finally purchased the Handbook of Nature Study for the second time! I am happy to report that this time around it is getting used weekly. I had tried to use the online version by printing out only the pages I needed but that was too much work.

Having my own copy at my fingertips has been a blessing this past term. We don't follow a special order, but we check them off as we go. Every few years we revisit a subject but learn something new about it. I used to be very haphazard about our nature walks, but whenever I chose to 'unschool' in an area, the children became bored and real learning fell by the wayside.

In providing a particular area of study on a regular basis, I've learned that we are sure to expose ourselves to a variety of plants and animals. We can also allow for interruptions and changes in the schedule if we discover an unexpected creature or have an opportunity to visit an area where the flora and fauna were not in our plan.

Prepare I quickly realized that this book wasn't designed for children to use. Instead, it is a teacher's guide to the natural world, a "living book" for adults, if you will. We are to personally glean from it and pass our knowledge on to the children while they are observing nature firsthand. So, after choosing an area, I familiarize myself with the general information. For example, let's say we are going to study insects; before I meet with the children, I look over the first few introductory pages about insects and jot down interesting notes that I will want to share with the children.

When we gather together to go outside on a nature walk, I condense and paraphrase this information for them so that they will know what to look for. This takes just a few minutes. Find Now that we know what to focus on and we have a little bit of background information, we gather a few collecting jars, take a walk and look for insects.

If we find a praying mantis, I look it up in The Handbook of Nature Study while the children try to find it in a field guide of insects that they took along.