A Nature Journal

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post,  I am humbled by your kind and thoughtful words.  I love all the suggestions you made, it is exactly what I hoped would come out of these posts.  I do hope these conversations will continue for months to come.

One of the topics in that post was learning, regular readers here will know that this is a big part of my life as we home educate our children, the day to day responsibility for this falls to me.  Cameron was recently asked by someone if being home educated was better than being at school, he had no idea how to answer this as he has never attended school.  I often get asked what we do each day and how education looks in our house.  When people say to me that they could never teach their children the things they need to know for their exams (in the UK these are taken at 16 and 18) I usually keep quiet and maybe smile as they chatter on.

I realise that, like anything in life, when you have little or no experience of something it is hard to imagine what it is like.  I can offer you snippets here but unless you were to become a fly on the wall in my house it is hard to give a complete picture.  My idea of what learning and an education can and should look like have shifted all over the place in the last eleven years, back at the beginning I had images in my head, partly from things that I had read and from my own experience, of what I thought we should get up to.  The reality has been completely different and most, if not all, of those ideas have been quietly shelved and not returned to.

Learning is not something we do intentionally, we don't sit and have times when we learn and times when we don't.  It is a part of our everyday life along with eating, sleeping etc.  In the past, we have spent most mornings working on things for a set amount of time, I have prepared things for the children to get on with.  That worked for a time but we have stopped that now, that is the beauty of it you can tailor it to your life, your needs and your children's needs at any given time, another home educator would tell you a very different story of their journey and what home educating looks like in their home.

About five years ago we were offered the opportunity to attend a forest school.  It was being run by a home educating mum on land belonging to a friend.  It was free and we were responsible for our own children.  The mum running it had recently moved to the area and was trying to find her feet in the forest school world here, she had decided she would not pay for insurance yet, hence us needing to be around and stay for the sessions.   We all loved it.  We went for two years, whatever the weather, until sadly it had to stop.  I thought about trying to do something nearer to us, but knew it would not be the same, sometimes good things come to an end and are replaced by other good things which are often completely different.

Whilst we didn't continue with a forest school we did carry on with one of the elements of it.  We would have a theme each week, one that was chosen by the children themselves based on the seasons and our local environment.  Each family would have a particular role to fulfil to carry that theme and we had a forest school book to record what we had done and found out.  Cameron and Alice loved it when it was our turn to bring the book home and complete the page on behalf of the group.  They loved it so much that that was the one thing they kept asking if we could carrying on doing when the group folded.  Once I found the right book, it had to be the same as the one we had used at forest school, we made a start.  I mentioned it here and had visions that I would continue to do so, but seven months later I stopped blogging for three years so it trundled on unrecorded on here. Four years later, almost to the day, we filled the last page of seventy in our nature journal.  Each topic was chosen by one of us in turn, we would spend two weeks working on it, the first doing the research and writing some of it up and the second finishing it off and illustrating.  In the early days we would also spend the rest of the day going for a walk to find what we were learning about in the wild, this has happened less lately as our week has become filled with other activities.  We still walk, a lot, just not on the same day.

I am not usually one for turning learning into a tick box exercise.  However if I was to look at this project, which has resulted in a rather wonderful journal, along the way we have leant, writing first in capitals then cursive/joined up, how to use an index in a book, reading, how to choose the words that we want to include in our journal, drawing, painting, observation skills as we went and found each subject in the wild where possible, Latin names and Linnaeus classification including kingdoms, class, order, species and families, measurements in metric and imperial and being able to visualise the sizes, life cycles, the seasons, the differences between deciduous and coniferous trees, identifying trees in Winter, and many more which I am sure that I have missed.  They are all equally important to help to cement a life long passion for not only for the outdoors but learning too.

We love the book we have created so much that we are going to start another, we are waiting for them to come back in stock and then we will be off and again we have no idea where it will take us.

Apologies once again for a very long post.