Exploring Nature Around the Year: 365 Days of Nature Journaling
Our family starting using the Exploring Nature with Children curriculum FIVE years ago, and repeated it year after year! That guide has served us well. So well. It taught me right alongside of my kids. We delved into the nature topics, trained our eyes to see the beauty in creation, and became budding naturalists.
But after 5 years, it was time for something different. I am pumped that author Lynn Seddon has another guide for nature exploration, with a similar name, Exploring Nature Around the Year: 365 Days of Nature Journaling!
After purchasing and using the curriculum myself, I became an affiliate. This post contains affiliate links.
This has got to be the best bargain in the homeschool world- the guide is 423 pages long and costs less than $15! And on sale for $11.20 through 8/20/23!
So, what is it?
As the title suggests, this guide has a nature journaling focus for every single day of the year. However, if I’ve learned anything from using that first nature curriculum, it’s that the curriculum is there to be my guide and I can dip in and out as I please! I definitely don’t have my sights on completing a journal entry every day. In fact, I am planning to use this with our nature co-op one day a week. I’ll be combining a week’s worth of prompts into one lesson/theme.
I love that this focuses the kids’ eyes on noticing intricacies in nature, often revisiting themes in different seasons to observe patterns and rhythms. For example, they will record changes in where the sun appears in the sky, measure shadows, record changes in daylight, what creatures are observable- and do this every few months to compare. Other topics within the first few months are rocks, wind scale, fungi, weeds, and spider watching.
<<get Exploring Nature Around the Year here>>
A sample day: after the kids have gone scouting for rocks and have selected a particular one to sketch, the next day they’ll consider their rock more closely. They are led through a series of questions, noting the coloring, (if the layers of minerals are visible, if the color changes when wet), formation (smooth/bumpy, sharp, layered, any folds), texture, grain, air bubbles, cracks, lines, how it reflects the light. Then students do a hardness test, which is explained in geologists’ terms with a hardness scale.
Personally, I didn’t know there were so many things to observe in a rock!
As the weeks go on, the kids return to familiar topics in different seasons and celebrate the passing of months with seasonal poems and quotes.
I’m excited to jump in! I’d love for you to follow along on our journey by subscribing or following my socials instagram / facebook.
I’d love to work on my own nature journal this year, too. In the past I enjoyed creating a phenology wheel. You can read about that in this post: Creating Phenology Wheels With Kids for Nature Study (Raising Little Shoots has a wonderful guide on this as well!).
To read more about our first nature curriculum, Exploring Nature With Children, read my post here.
Happy exploring, friends!
