Archive for the ‘Nature Walks’ Category

Nature Journaling

Best of the Brave Writer Blog: Nature Journaling

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. ~e.e. cummings

Nature Journaling is an important part of the Brave Writer Lifestyle. Turn the exploration of the great, messy outdoors into a joyful writing opportunity!

The Basics

  • Walk together.
  • Collect little rocks, leaves, twigs, mosses, acorns, flowers, and feathers.
  • Bring them home.
  • Set a few of them on a large sheet of white paper in the center of the table.
  • Using drawing pencils and paper, sketch one or more of the items.
  • Then record a few details about the object or the day. One good sentence about the color, or texture or the memory of collecting it or what it looks like, or what it reminds the writer of, is perfect.

Branch Out!

Here are three blog posts full of tips that will enhance your nature journaling experience.

If You are New to Nature Journaling

Nature Journaling Wherever You Are

Writing Exercise: Make Your Nature Walk a Color Walk!

Also, Brave Writer offers an online class each spring and fall that is designed to make nature journaling a natural part of your life. Click on the image below to learn more.

Nature Journaling

Posted in Activities, Brave Writer Lifestyle, Nature Walks, Writing Exercises | Comments Off on Nature Journaling

Nature Journaling Wherever You Are

Nature journaling

Years ago, I discovered a small idea that quickly became an important one in my life with my kids. Charlotte Mason (the English educator of the early 20th century) believed an emphasis on nature was a critical way to develop into a well-rounded person. Her schools would follow their courses of study in the morning leaving the whole afternoon free to wander in the English country-side (no matter how moody the weather!). She couldn’t imagine that all various ills wouldn’t be cured by fresh air, walking and the keen ability to name all the plants and animals in one’s surroundings.

Unfortunately at the time, I lived in a condo in southern California. We had sprinklers, 80 degree temperatures, chronically blue skies, black crows and palm trees that never change their shape, color or drop leaves. It seemed to me that naming plants could be finished in a matter of moments (ice plant, vinca, pansies, bermuda grass, hibiscus and a few displaced maples). Weather amounted to sunrise and set. Bird watching included varieties of sparrows. The insect population offered us pill bugs and snails.

But Charlotte’s philosophy got to me. She contended that every child had a birthright: to know his or her environment, to love it, to cultivate even a postage stamp garden of one’s own. She believed deeply in the power of getting outdoors and forming a relationship with trees, bushes, wildflowers and the local wildlife (even if that wildlife turned out to be gophers and squirrels). Perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough. Perhaps my years of growing up with a gardener in the suburbs had dulled my appetite for nature. Maybe there were more varieties of everything than I had guessed!

And so, determined to give my children a vocabulary I didn’t have, we bought

  • field guides,
  • sketch books,
  • colored pencils,
  • and maps of our local area.

Amazingly, as is so often the case, once I turned my attention to nature, it erupted into view as the varied, wild, fascinating world I hardly noticed every other day. Likewise, I discovered that just because I didn’t live in England with creeks and moors, woods and rose gardens didn’t mean there weren’t equally wonderful locations to enjoy in Los Angeles.

We went to tide pools at the state beach and met sea anemones. We sketched the pools, named all the barnacles, shell life, sand crabs, and creatures living in the salty ponds amidst craggy rocks. We noted sea grasses and sand pipers, evaluated the tides (low or high), tried to figure out if the beach was pure west (by the sun) or facing south (as some of them are).

We visited a nature preserve near our home (sure the creek was cemented in to keep it from moving into the neighboring housing development, but it was still preserved for us to hike in!). We learned about birds, we looked at acorns and pine cones. We sketched.

We found another huge, empty space of land only walking distance from us. We had no idea it even existed! In this vast empty space bordered by homes, a thicket of blackberries grew wild and we picked them and made pies. We noticed the differences between various spiders and how the webs were formed. Then we made mini books to show what we had learned.

We did all this before we moved to Ohio where nature journaling and walking were as easy as breathing. Once we moved here, we became avid birders, measuring the times they fed, looking up the best feed for the ones we hoped would visit our feeders most frequently. We took hikes in gorges and through woods. We skied mountains and had picnics in glorious state parks.

In all of these events, nature journaling had merely been the door that we nudged open through a suggestion by an educator. We did keep journals, with sketches and notes, trying to copy The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. But mostly, we learned to love nature:

  • to name it,
  • to observe it,
  • to know it.

thumb-nature-journalingIf you would like to enhance your love of nature, Brave Writer offers a wonderful course designed to make nature journaling a natural and joyful part of your life. What I wouldn’t have given for a class like this back in the dark ages before the Internet! I would have loved to have guidance, to have shared our work, to have experienced the process in others.

Posted in Nature Walks, Online Classes | Comments Off on Nature Journaling Wherever You Are

When You Want to Give Up

What to do when you want to give up

It’s April. Spring break is just around the corner, and happens to come at the right time every year (the moment when I want to collapse from the drain of winter quarter)… except for one thing. Sometimes when I allow myself to let down during the break, I lose all my energy to finish the year strong. Our homeschool dribbles to the end of May and ekes into June with just enough sluggish energy to feel we have completed the year’s work. Or in those “let’s just hurry up and get to summer” years, the dribbling and eking maybe didn’t even occur and we hope no one from the state shows up at our door in July looking for work samples from seven subjects.

I used to put it this way:

  • In the fall, I was a classical educator.
  • In winter, I shifted to a Charlotte Mason-unit study kind of school style.
  • By spring, radical unschoolers.

If this is you and right now you’re wondering how you can get to the end without the end coming too soon, here are a few Brave Writer suggestions that may help.

Change the routine.

Maybe you let everyone sleep in longer than usual and you start the day outside (weather permitting). Start with an entry in a nature journal or tending seedlings you plant. If you usually begin with math, start with grammar. Save math for later in the day. Maybe you can kick a soccer ball before you do any school work at all!  Do something utterly different than you have been. Look at the Brave Writer Lifestyle to trigger ideas.

Get ready the night before.

Best piece of advice, hardest to follow. Don’t labor over it. Before bed, pick one thing to use as your centerpiece the next day. It might be a book of poetry, perhaps flowers to plant. Maybe you find a DVD that the kids can enjoy in the afternoon, or you decide to bake brownies so that during read aloud time, there are fresh munchies. Stay simple. Just plan one thing (maybe all you do is stack the school books on the table so they are easily found and no one has to complain that they “can’t find the grammar book”).

Play music.

We forget how powerful music is in creating mood. If you’ve got an iPod and a speaker set, put that out the night before. You can throw it on shuffle and let the tunes roll, or you can be more deliberate and create a morning playlist conducive to studying. You might even pick a song (instrumental) to use for either freewriting or free drawing. For freewriting, allow the mood of the music to guide the writing. For free drawing, put a variety of writing elements on the table (markers, crayons, colored pencils, high lighters, pens). Your kids will express the mood of the music as they listen.

Poetry.

Perhaps you’re already good at poetry teatimes. If you’re not, this is meant for you. Spring is the perfect time to develop/cultivate the habit of reading poetry, sipping tea and eating treats. Read about it here.

Shakespeare.

May is the month of Shakespeare in Brave Writer. Take advantage of the fact that we have already structured into our world a focus you can usurp and use in yours! We have a Shakespeare class for high schoolers available and we offer some suggestions of ways to introduce Shakespeare to your kids in the Brave Writer Lifestyle. The blog will also feature some specifically Shakespeare-y kinds of things to do with your family too.

Take classes.

We have good ones. Kidswrite Basic, Kidswrite Intermediate and more. Don’t miss your chance to get these in before the year ends.

Take a day off just for you.

Plan a hike in the local hills, go to an art museum alone for a morning, see a movie no one wants to see with you, spend a day wandering a labyrinth, get a massage, get a mani-pedi in bright red. Do something to recharge that takes you away from the burden of daily planning. You deserve it. You’ve been working hard all year.

Bottom line: Each year feels like you re-invent your homeschool. That’s because you do. You’ve got kids changing ages and stages, your income fluctuates, your home routine is up-ended by some sports schedule or dance or acting. You find that what worked one year is just not going to work the next. You’re at the end of one of those years now. What things can you do now, that you may not ever get to do again? What opportunities does this year offer that will vanish come September? Do those now. If that means going to Disneyland while you still have kids under 10, do it. If it means having teatimes outside in your backyard because next year you’ll be living in a condo, have as many as you can. If it means that you have leisurely mornings now but next year will be driving someone to school, enjoy sleeping in and reading together in pajamas these last few weeks.

Whatever phase of life you’re in, savor it. Look ahead and consider today. What can I do today that makes a memory, that preserves what I love, that enhances our well-being? Then do that. Math can wait (unless of course math IS that thing).

Be Good to You: Self Care Practices for the Homeschooling Parent

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, Nature Walks, Poetry, Shakespeare, Unschooling | Comments Off on When You Want to Give Up

Tired of Writing? Make a List!

Writing Lists

Writing wears kids out, have you noticed?

Children may get that burst of linguistic energy working for them (when the inspiration strikes, they’re hard to stop!), but when they’re done, they’re done. Sometimes after a successful writing project, all anyone wants to do is lie about doing nothing.

While taking some time off, or while your kids aren’t quite proficient enough to write lengthy passages of prose, you might try writing lists. Lists can be an incredibly therapeutic way to interact with language. For one thing, there is no shortage of topics for lists.

Here’s a list (ha!) of what you might list:

  • birds
  • roller coasters
  • Lego sets
  • favorite lines of poetry
  • seeds to plant in the garden
  • items to purchase for a bedroom redesign
  • hairstyles to try
  • funny jokes
  • not-so-funny jokes
  • words that rhyme with…
  • famous lines of Shakespeare
  • the original old English vocabulary in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (with translations)
  • items in a junk drawer
  • all the vocabulary needed to sew a quilt
  • favorite TV shows
  • past American Idol contestants and when they were voted off
  • types of tanks used in WWII
  • American Girl trousseau items

As you can see, there is no limit to what can be listed!

Lists allow your kids to continue to work on handwriting, vocabulary development, categorizing, ordering, and information gathering. They also offer a place to house disparate thoughts or ideas or fantasies. It’s nice to keep a list of all the things you’d buy if you had $100.00. Cheaper than spending the dough-re-mi!

Lists can be kept in notebooks, on white boards, on sheets of paper. My daughter kept a list on her bedroom wall (all the friends she had and something funny about them).

Lists often mushroom into sub categories too: birds in my backyard, birds I saw on vacation in Florida, birds I saw at the zoo, birds that live at the beach.

So get out a notepad and start a list.

P.S. I love the little moleskin notebooks that fit inside a purse for listing, jotting down words, keeping my thoughts together so that anywhere I am, I can write them down. Your kids might like that too – a portable list!

The Homeschool Alliance

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Copywork Quotations, Games, Homeschool Advice, Language Arts, Nature Walks, Unschooling, Words!, Writing Exercises, Young Writers | Comments Off on Tired of Writing? Make a List!

Project Feeder Watch


Yellow finch in winter drab
Originally uploaded by juliecinci

My family has joined the ranks of birders who report to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology the birds that frequent our feeders. You can join or read more about birding by visiting their wonderful site.

If you are new to bird watching, here is a great site that has tips for how to identify birds you don’t recognize. One of the benefits of bird watching is that it s one of the easiest ways to teach careful observation and identification by details. Kids train themselves to be patient, to look carefully and to make distinctions (does the wing on the chickadee have a pale white stripe or not? Black-capped or Carolina?).

Additionally, keeping a log of all the birds you see, particularly what is called a “life list” where you note the very first time you see each species, is a great way to exercise those handwriting and listing skills.

I’d love to see photos of your bird watching! Send them to me. We’ll post them here.

Posted in General, Nature Walks | Comments Off on Project Feeder Watch