I have been continuing to think on the subject of increasing our children’s awareness of the natural world. Just last week I came across some suggested reading that I have found to have many excellent suggestions for helping children interface with nature:
Sharing Nature with Children: The Classic Parents’ and Teachers’ Nature Guidebook By Joseph Cornell
This week I have been introducing activities designed to heighten the children’s powers of observation. We focused on the sky. The first day our observation of the sky brought our attention to a daytime sighting of the moon. Because I eventually want the children to use nature journaling, I drew them over to our painting easel and I demonstrated how to outline a crescent moon shape with sky blue paint and then to paint the paper all blue so that we had a white crescent moon within a blue field. Not only did the children participate in an observation of nature but we also chronicled our observation with the art medium of paint.
The next day we observed the sky, we observed big, white, fluffy clouds. We chronicled our observation on blue card stock with white cotton balls to simulate the clouds. Later on in the morning, when we were outdoors, we observed the sky again and noticed the clouds were turning dark gray. We came over to the painting easel, and using black and white paint, we chronicled our gray clouds in paint by exploring the mixing of the colors of black and white. Later we can explore how to make gray with different shades with different colors but today I used the paint to tell a story of why clouds turn dark. I started by applying white paint to my paper. I explained that clouds begin as water vapor begins to accumulate in the air. Then I took a dab of black and began to mix the black into the white. As the gray began to appear I told the children that as clouds accumulate more and more water vapor and small dust particles, they become darker and little rain droplets begin to form. Well, then everyone wanted to make a rain cloud and tell the story! We had a lot of fun and learning with our rain cloud observation!
Another day we came outdoors and noticed bird tracks all over the sandy ground. We grabbed our magnifying lenses and got some up close observations of the tracks and the sand! One comment of the bird tracks was, “it looks like a flower.” Another comment about the sand was, “they look like little rocks “. After savoring the moment, we discussed how sand was once larger rocks and the ways rocks can break down into smaller and smaller pieces.
The beautiful thing about all of this is we accomplished all of this in our own backyard! Nature is all around us- whether we find ourselves in an urban setting or in more rural settings. It just takes a moment to take a look around and…observe!
Until next week!
Lorraine
