Hello! Hey! It's the middle of the week! And I'm writing on the blog! What do you know! I missed writing a weekly update last weekend...and perhaps the one before that. I'm trying, I really am. But cooking dinner and spending time with my girls is a bit higher on the priority list than blogging. And I just can't do it all. So you'll have no choice but to put up with my random and meager blog posts. You'll be fine though. You've got bigger priorities than my blog too. At least you SHOULD.
Anyway, we had so much fun today with our nature walk that I thought I'd through it out there for y'all. And who knows, maybe it will become a regular thing...sharing our weekly nature time. Or maybe this is a one time deal. But I'm not gonna stress over it.
With our homeschool we have quite a bit of mish-mash going on with our curriculum. We use lots of free resources online, things we've picked up at the Dollar Store and Target dollar bins, garage sale finds, etc. However, even though our curriculum is pulled from all over the place we are attempting to follow the Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling which focuses a lot on nature study and reading "living" books. (You can read more about it here.)
Wednesday is one of our favorite days of the week because we devote most of our school day to nature study. Of course we do our math, reading and writing as usual, but for the most part, our Wednesdays consist of taking a nature walk, making observations, recording in our nature notebooks (drawing, painting, writing), and just enjoying being outside.
That does become a little more difficult in the winter because, well, it's just too cold sometimes! But we still attempt to get out as much as possible. You know, shoveling snow when it's below zero. Taking a walk around the block on icy sidewalks. The possibilities are endless...
Today, though, the weather was absolutely gorgeous for the middle of January. I never paid attention to how warm it got, but it was warm enough to start melting the great polar ice cap on the neighborhood streets. And we didn't need to bundle up to the point where we could hardly move. Which made taking a nature walk so much easier.
This term in our nature studies we are focusing on weather. Of course, we never limit ourselves and we will study and observe anything that tickles our fancy. Like today. We watched a Mister Roger's Neighborhood show about wind and weather stations. Read about wind in a science book and even did a little experiment.
But the wind wasn't actually blowing outside today. at. all. So when we took our walk today we observed that the wind was definitely not blowing. And then we just enjoyed the sunshine, the snow and everything else. Animal tracks in the snow. Shiny snow crystals. A flock of birds singing sweetly. Bare branches of the trees highlighted by the blue, blue sky.
It was glorious! And I highly recommend spending some time out in nature every week. You won't regret it.
Blessings!
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