Nature journal example Archives

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Barb — 4 Comments

Oregon Coast Hiking – Picture Perfect

I just need to face the facts and accept that my boys are now the family leaders when it comes to hiking. They shoot ahead and find all sorts of things to be interested in as they hike along together. My hubby and I take a slower pace but then again, I am always stopping to capture some of the images that inspire me.

This is a photo Mr. B took while we were hiking down to the beach. The rabbits like to hide alongside the trail and since the boys were ahead of us, they spotted the cute little beach bunnies first.

The trail winds down the cliff and the wild azaleas are amazing in June. The pink against the blue backdrop of the ocean and sky is dazzling. This is at Harris Beach State Park….our favorite.

Here is one of the many types of berries that are to be found on the coast trails. Twinberry Honeysuckle is such a great shape and color. I am going to be drawing it in my nature journal this week as I catch up on my journaling.

We hiked another section of the Oregon Coast Trail which leads down to the Indian Sands. This area of dunes leads down to a rocky steep coastline and the views both north and south are amazing.

Here is a better look at the dunes covered with wildflowers in June. Indian paintbrush, clover, beach strawberries, Douglas irises, lupine, dandelions, yarrow, and many more are found growing low to the sand….it is always windy here so be ready to be blasted with sand if you hike down to the edge.

Here is a close-up of one of my favorite plants…salal.

It made it into my nature journal on this trip. After dinner, I would sit at the picnic table and review with my field guide all the things that we saw that day. I then would pull out my nature journal, watercolor pencils, and my Sharpie Ultra Fine Tip pen and I am all ready to record a special subject from our day. It only takes a few minutes and it is a wonderful way to add another layer to your hiking experiences.

So there you have a glimpse into our coastal hikes which I think we ended up putting in about twenty miles over the course of four days. I can think of no better way to get to know an area.

You can read about our tidepool adventures in this entry: Oregon Coast-Tidepools of Wonder.

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Barb — 6 Comments

Our June Bird Study: Lesser Goldfinches Eat My Sunflowers

6 27 11 Sunflower Leaves - Eaten by Finches

Sunflowers in our garden (self-seeded). Tasty snack for the goldfinches.

Bird Study for the June Newsletter Challenge

We have a beautiful songbird in our backyard that sings to us as we garden. He often is seen in our finch feeder but he also has another part of his diet that is interesting. The Lesser goldfinch eats our sunflower’s leaves! They must be so very light because they can land on the leaves and they hardly dip under the weight. They nibble the green parts of the leaves and leave holes and skeleton leaves on the plants.

I found this video on YouTube.com that shows what we observed in our garden.

Lesser goldfinch eating sunflower leaves

5 11 11 Garden birds Goldfinch in the Birdbath

I caught this Lesser goldfinch in our birdbath….bathing and singing.

There is a lesson in the Handbook of Nature Study (Lesson 10) and a previous Outdoor Hour Challenge (Yellow Birds) for the goldfinch which includes this link: Get Gorgeous Goldfinches! The article gives you tips for attracting and then feeding your own goldfinches. If you would like to hear the goldfinches song, you can listen at AllAboutBirds.com.

We used a photo and the notebook page from the June Newsletter.

We read on AllAboutBirds.com that the Lesser goldfinch sometimes makes its nest in among grapevines to shade the nest from the sun. We think our finches are nesting in our grapevines that are near our back birdfeeder. I never thought to look there.

We love these little birds and even though they cause a little mischief in the sunflower patch, we hope they stick around for awhile.

This is the last of our June Newsletter Challenges. We were able to complete all four this time.
Here are links to the other three:
Garden Critter: Honeybee
Tree: Sitka Spruce
Crop Plant: Corn

Now for our Tweet and See list for June 2011
Backyard and Neighborhood:

Turkey vultures
Steller’s jay
Oak titmouse
Lesser goldfinch
Anna’s hummingbirds
California quail
Western scrub jays
Mourning doves
Acorn woodpecker
Common raven
Wild turkeys
Cooper’s hawk
White-breasted nuthatch
California towhee
Spotted towhee
House finches
American crows

Trip to Oregon-There were more birds that I didn’t know so I can’t list:

Osprey
Brown pelican
Song sparrow
American crows
Turkey vultures
American robins
White-crowned sparrows
Western gull
California quail
Black oysercatcher
Winter wren

Happy Birding!

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Barb — 2 Comments

Nature Study while Learning to Draw and a Reminder

Tree Study Sketches

“Correlation of nature-study and drawing should give excellent results to both subjects. The nature-study should afford objects in which the pupil is genuinely interested; the drawing should aid in focusing the observation and making it accurate. Drawing should be encouraged primarily for the purpose of discovering what the child really sees. As the child sees more, and with greater accuracy, the drawings improve. So the drawings become the approximate measure of the progress of the pupil. Do not measure the drawings merely as drawings, or from the artist’s point of view. We are likely to dwell so much on the mere product of the child’s work that we forge the child. Too early in the school life do we begin to make pupils mere artists and literators. First the child should be encouraged to express himself; then he may be taught to draw and to compose.”
Liberty Hyde Bailey The Nature Study Idea pg 225

Don’t forget to send in your Outdoor Hour Challenge blog entries for the Blog Carnival. The deadline is June 29, 2011 and I will post the carnival on 6/30/11. If you have trouble entering, please feel free to email me your link but try to use the form first. Several of you are receiving errors when you submit and I have no idea what the issue or how to fix it.

Here is the link: Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival
You will need to scroll down to the “submit an article” button.

Added incentive: Every entry submitted will give the writer a chance to win the June Newsletter Challenge Giveaway for the Squirrel-Buster Birdfeeder!

Make sure to download the June Newsletter before 7/1/11.

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Barb — 10 Comments

Our Tree Study – Sitka Spruce in Oregon

Jedediah Smith Redwoods – Boy Scout Tree Trail June 2011

Our camping trip to the Oregon Coast was glorious. The weather was perfect without even a sprinkle or a cold day! We enjoyed sunshine, sand, and trees all up and down the southern coast of Oregon. Although I could fill a complete post with our adventures, I want to focus on our tree study that was completed right in our campsite.

We were prepared with some notebook pages and a field guide so this was not only an easy study, it was informative and interesting. The campground had a brochure that discussed the common plants and trees to be found so it was our starting point. We read through the brochure and decided to focus our tree study on the Sitka Spruce. Turns out our campsite was surrounded by them!

We looked up the identifying marks of the spruce as well as looked at the images of the needles, the cone, and the trunk. We discovered that the Sitka Spruce is found along the fog belt of the coast of North America.

They are not quite as tall as the Coast Redwoods we experienced most of the week but they are still very tall trees. The photo above is my husband showing how large the base of this Coast Redwood is on one of our hikes. These trees make you feel small and insignificant. We would hike along and one of these ancient ones would come into view and it would make you stop dead in your tracks. Breathtaking.

Even though the Sitka Spruce is not in the HNS, we looked up the information for the Norway Spruce and used the suggestions in Lesson 186 to learn more about spruces in general. We observed the needles, the cones, the bark, the shape of the tree, the roots like buttresses, and the way the limbs droop.

NotebookingPages.com – Nature Study Set. I like to embellish mine a bit with colored pencils.

Somehow I misplaced the photos I took for our study so now I am glad that we did the sketches on the notebook pages for our journals. We enjoyed our simple vacation nature study….one of many we did on this trip.

Here are some other things we observed and read about: harbor seals, trillium, fuchsia, gumboot chiton (sea creature in the tidepools), Winter wrens, huckleberries, and owls. There is a story to every nature study we did and if I had time I would relate them all but for this entry I will stick to our tree study.

Here is the best shot I have of the Sitka Spruces around our campsite. We could have spent our week focusing on the many plants, birds, and trees of this place and not run out of interesting things to think about. Eating and sleeping under the spruces made our study even more meaningful.

Okay, do you love my new tent? It is 6 1/2 feet tall and even my really tall husband and boys can stand up inside it without rubbing their heads on the ceiling. I love the hinged door too! This was our first outing with it and I think it is going to serve us for a long time.

Just a pretty shot I took one night while we were out for a sunset walk…the moon was incredible the whole time we were camping, a natural nightlight.

So there you go…our vacation tree study. Wish every tree study could be this up close and personal.

Well maybe not that up close….my boys have decided Planking is rather a fun activity.

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Barb — 2 Comments

Hedge Bindweed – Handbook of Nature Study

We have hedge bindweed growing under our birdfeeder. I am guessing the seed came for our seed mix and now it is establishing itself under the feeder. It is such a pretty pink flower that I am tempted to let it grow but I am a little concerned that it will spread into other parts of the yard.

We looked it up in the Handbook of Nature Study (Lesson 129)and here are some points we gleaned:

When the bindweed doesn’t find something to support it up in the air, it will grow in a mat on the ground. Anna Botsford Comstock says that it makes an “exquisite pattern”.
She says that it winds itself in a clockwise manner as it twines around its support. We had to go look.
The leaves are arrow-shaped, glossy and perfect.
The flower bud is twisted….another great thing to observe!
She wrote that the pollen is white and looks like pearls under a microscope. We took a look at this too.

She suggests two things, one we did right away and one we will be doing as an on-going project.

Watercolor for the nature journal

Compare the hedge bindweed to the morning glory. We have a pot of morning glories started on the front deck so as the vine appears and we see how it attaches to the railing we can make some comparisons.

This was another quick and easy nature study using the Handbook of Nature Study.

I also found the notebook page from NotebookingPages.com’s Weeds and Wildflowers set to be handy to quickly jot down the points we observed in our study.

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Barb — 5 Comments

Honeybees and the Great Sunflower Project – Nature Study Using the Handbook of Nature Study

Our choice for the Garden Critter study this month is the honeybee. We have been building a bee, butterfly, and bird habitat in our yard this year and it seemed fitting that we take a few minutes to read in the Handbook of Nature Study (Lesson 99) about this welcome guest to our garden.

We have planted many bee attractive plants and every day, rain or shine, they come to visit. Their favorite spot in the yard is the center square filled with lavender. If you sit close by, you can hear the buzzing of wings and you can watch their activity among the flowers.

Water for the Bees – Lavender and Baby Lemon Queen Sunflowers

We read recently online that bees need water as part of their habitat. We found a shallow pie pan, filled it with an assortment of local rocks we had on hand, and then filled it with water. The rain has kept it filled but now that the weather is looking like it will remain dry, I will just replenish the water when I water the garden. Here is a really informative article about Planting a Bee Garden.

We found this webpage very helpful: California Habitat Gardening and this one too: Bee Friendly Gardens.

This is what we are aiming for…image from two summers ago in our sunflowers. Can you believe that pollen?

We will be taking part in the Great Sunflower Project later in the summer. I highly recommend this nature activity which is fun and simple to do as a family. Click below for more information.

Don’t forget to post and then submit your June Newsletter nature studies to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. Here is THE LINK. If you need to find the link quickly, it is at the top of my blog in a couple of places for easy access.

Jami’s Tuesday Garden Party meme is open from Tuesday to Thursday so there is still time for you to jump in and participate!

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Barb — 6 Comments

Nature Study and Summer Travels – Four Steps to Prepare

The difference between a good outdoor experience and a great outdoor experience with an opportunity for nature study is sometimes just a matter of preparation. Summer nature study is a perfect fit for most families with the weather being more enjoyable and with longer days to enjoy. Whether you are visiting a new city, exploring your own city, or taking a road trip, including nature study in your plans can make your time more fun and interesting. Our family tries to include some element of outdoor time to each traveling experience.

California Tiger Lily

Four steps to preparing for nature study as you travel this summer.

1. Do a little research ahead of time for the habitat you will be visiting. Determine what you will encounter on your trip that might make for interesting nature study. I linked some ideas below along with some simple nature study books to get you started. Make sure to use your local library to find more books to prepare your family before your trip so you have some things to look forward to seeing in real life. For example, if you are going to be visiting an ocean beach, learn what plants, birds, and animals make their home there. You can also use the Handbook of Nature Study to read about things you think you might encounter during your summer travels.

Beach play and nature study….a nice balance

Habitats Might Include:
Seashore
Woods
Desert
Pond
Deciduous Forest
Boreal Forest (Northern)

Roosevelt Elk – Northern California

2. Find resources such as field guides or other nature related books to read or bring along with you. I suggest a good bird field guide, a wildflower field guide, and perhaps a tree field guide as a basic set of resources to have with you. Check your library for books you can borrow and take with you. I have complied two lists of suggested field guides: Field Guides for Beginners and Field Guides for Families To prepare, you should page through the field guides before you leave on your trip to be familiar with the layout of the book and perhaps to glean a few things ahead of time to be looking for as you go outdoors.

Nature Journals done on the trail do not need to be fancy.

3. Bring along your nature journal or some pre-printed notebook pages. During down time it is nice to have supplies on hand to make a nature journal entry to record your nature study as you travel. Basic art supplies like markers or colored pencils are easy to pack. I also like watercolor pencils for nature journal entries. Keep it simple and light. Digital cameras are a lot of fun for children to use as they document their own view of the trip. Encourage your children to take photos of things that they observe for future reference in identifying or including in their nature journals.

My suggestions for nature journal supplies and then nature journal ideas can be found here:
Nature Journals-Ideas and Tips.

In preparing for your trip, you could also look up a few of the Outdoor Hour Challenges before you travel, the first five challenges can be applied to any habitat. If you have the first Getting Started Challenges 1-10 ebook, you can have that loaded on your laptop and reference it as you travel.

My boys love to climb and this time they discovered banana slugs and salamanders.

4. I also like to look up nature centers or nature trails in the areas we visit. A good nature center visit can take an hour or two and can provide a spark to capture the interest of everyone in the family. The staff is usually knowledgeable about the local habitat, giving you advice on where to go and what to see. They also can help identify anything you have observed but can’t put a name to as you try to make your journal entries. Most nature centers have bookstores that can provide additional resources to follow-up your nature study time. I found this list of Nature Centers in the United States. (This list does not look complete but it will get you started.)

We are preparing for a camping trip of our own and I have used the suggestions above to gather ideas and resources ahead of time. You know we will share our results when we return from our coastal trip where we are hoping to find tidepools to explore, sandy beaches to walk, and redwood forests to hike in. We have some time before we set out so we will be thumbing through our field guides and looking up some additional information and redwood forests while we wait.

Hope you have the chance to spend some time outdoors this summer with your family AND include a little nature study.

This post is going to be a part of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival for nature study. You can submit your own entry HERE and the deadline is 6/13/11.

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Barb — 3 Comments

May Mammal Nature Study: Bats…Revisited (+Who gets the Watercolors?)

Sunset – time for mosquitoes and almost time for bats.

We have been on the lookout for a mammal subject for our May nature study. I included it in the May Newsletter suggested study because I was really hoping to see our fox friend in our yard this month. I have been wanting to do some research on him, but he has only left some scat behind and we haven’t actually seen him.

What would we study for our May mammal?

Well, remember a few weeks ago we had a bat visitor inside the house? My husband suggested that we learn about bats. Sigh. I don’t really like bats and we already had done a quick study with OHC #49. I wasn’t convinced until night before last. We were sitting outside eating dinner for the very first time this year…our normal spring/summer routine….and the mosquitoes were driving us crazy! There is an abundance of these pesky little critters right now and I commented that we needed to do something about them. My husband mentioned that we should encourage the bats because they eat lots of mosquitoes and they would help keep the population down.

Aha! A positive reason to study the bats!

We spent some time at dusk sitting outside to wait for the bats and they didn’t disappoint us. They came in and swooped at head level, zooming around the yard with amazing agility. We did some reading in the HNS and online the next day and here are some of the points we gleaned about our flying mammal friends.

Members of the family Chiroptera, meaning winged hand.
Only real flying mammal.
Most North American bats are insectivores, eating about 1,200 insects an hour or approximately 6,000 insects a night.
You can attract bats in several ways- build a bat house and/or leave a light on so the insects cluster, making a dinner spot for the bats.
We found this website informative for our local area: Northern California Bats

May Newsletter journal idea – Fill In The Circle (bat drawn by Mr. A)

I have had a few readers ask me what kind of nature journal I use to watercolor in and I will give you a link to an entry where I discuss my choice: Autumn Series #1. Well there you go…our May mammal study finished and just in time to start thinking about all our June nature study subjects. Our family is really loving the new format of the Outdoor Hour Challenge and the freedom it has given us to pursue a variety of subjects as they have come up in our daily life.

Don’t forget to send in your nature study entries by 5/30/11 for the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. You can submit your entries HERE.

The winner of the giveaway from last week’s watercolor sketch entry is Corrine from Boston!
(I used a random number generator to pick the winner.) Corrine chose the Koi Water Colors Pocket Field Sketch Box! Congrats!

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Barb — 8 Comments

Bird Study May 2011: Black-headed Grosbeak

We have a new feeder bird! I changed up our seed in the feeder and I started to catch a glimpse of a new colorful bird coming to visit. I could hear a new song in the backyard trees as well and I knew it sounded a bit familiar. It finally occurred to me that this was the same song that I heard earlier in the month on our hike to the natural bridge. It was the Black-headed grosbeak!

Sure enough….there are three that come to our feeders now.

They are such beautiful birds and I know now why they are called songbirds.

My field guide says this, “Song, rising and falling passages, resembles a robin’s song but more fluent and mellow.” This is the perfect description of their song. You can hear it in the video in THIS ENTRY or at this link on AllAboutBirds.

NotebookingPages.com has a great free resource for those of us who live on the West Coast…free bird notebook pages for the following birds: Red-tail hawk, Western scrub jay, Spotted towhee, House finch, Black-headed grosbeak, and Black-capped chickadee!
Here is your link: Free Bird Notebooking Pages

I took advantage of the free page for the Black-headed grosbeak and used it for my nature journal.

What a thrill to add a new bird to our backyard bird list….we started off the month of May thinking that our Tweet and See list was going to be sparse. Boy were we wrong! We not only have a large number of birds but a new one to report as well.

Another great week of nature study….another topic from the May Newsletter completed. We have our mammal still left to find but we may just revisit a wildflower instead if we can’t come up with a good mammal to study using the Handbook of Nature Study. Remember to submit your entries to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival to share your links just like you would for Mr. Linky.

You can really do any topic for your entry….I am hoping that you pick at least one thing from your own backyard and that you give the nature journal idea a try.

Don’t forget to use my discount code:
Use discount code = discount5 to save $5 on your $10+ purchase at NotebookingPages.com
Use discount code = discount10 to save $10 on your $20+ purchase at NotebookingPages.com

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Barb — 2 Comments

California Poppies – Using the Handbook of Nature Study and a Nature Journal Tutorial

The California poppies are late this year but right on time for our May Outdoor Hour Challenge for wildflowers. (See the May Newsletter for all the May topics to choose from.) We have both wild and cultivated poppies in our yard, hoping that the ones we planted with seed will self-seed for next year’s crop.

As the state flower of California, you could expect that there would be lots to see in the spring and this year there are many.

There is a section of our walking trail that has a large garden of poppies in various stages of development. One of the interesting things that we have noticed about poppies are the way the petals unfold when it is ready to bloom. The “cap” comes off and reveals the flower underneath. After the flower blooms the petals fall and a pod is revealed that looks sort of like a bean pod. Here is look at it close up.

We took the idea from Lesson 155 in the Handbook of Nature Study (#7) and looked closer at the pod. We cut the seed pod open lengthwise to examine the seeds with a lens. We observed the ribs and how the seeds were attached inside.

Here is a close-up through the magnifying lens of the seeds inside the pod….amazing! All of us were fascinated with the way the seeds are in the pod like you see in a pea pod. We are going to continue watching the pods as they dry up to see exactly when they become black because we know the seeds we planted were not green but black.

Here is Mr. B’s sketch of the dissected poppy pod.

Mr. B and I worked on notebook pages for our nature journals using the California Poppy pages from NotebookingPages.com. I highly recommend the Wildflower, Weeds, and Garden Flowers set because it has every flower listed in the Handbook of Nature Study…perfect companion to your nature study. If you own the Treasury Membership it is included so take a look for it in your files.

Fill In The Circle Tutorial

Many of you asked to have me give you more step-by-step tutorials on how I put my nature journal pages together. Here is one for the Fill In The Circle idea that is found in the May Newsletter. (All supplies are shown in the Amazon widget at the bottom of this blog entry – you may need to click over to the blog to see them.)

I started off with a large pencil circle for my poppy sketch. I also used pencil lines for the poem stanza that I wanted to include in this journal entry. I don’t always draw lines so it is up to you whether you need them or not.

I added watercolor pencil to the poppy and then made a larger box with pen around the two pages I am working on. I like the “window frame” look to tie two pages together. I copied the poem onto the page using a black pen. I used Prang Semi-Moist watercolors to paint the yellow background….sort of a wash technique using just a little color. I decided I wanted some funky bubble letters so I added those next.

I printed one poppy photo to include on the left page and used watercolors to paint the bubble letters. I added the date to the bottom corner. You can use this idea with any topic you want to include in your nature journal. I would love to see your results so post them in your entry and then submit it to the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival.

Tag: Nature journal example