May. 13, 2009 - Nature Study -- Close to the Ground and Seasons
I am not an outdoors girl, despite the best efforts of my mom. (Mom grew up on a farm, while Dad grew up in the city, and I seem to have taken after Dad!) However, I do want Beth, Matthew, and Nathan to feel comfortable in and learn about the beautiful world that God has made.
That is why I am so glad for the focus on nature study and the weekly "Exploration Day" that are a part of My Father's World First Grade. A week ago Monday was our first Exploration Day, and we spent a couple of hours outdoors looking at ants, worms, and snails. We put a piece of bread soaked in honey near an ant hill. It was amazing to see the ants scurrying around carrying little pieces of bread. Then we lifted up two large rocks in our flower bed and found three snails underneath. One had been moving recently, so we saw the silvery, slimy trail that it left behind. We didn't find any worms under the rocks, so we dug in the flower bed to hunt for worms. Fortunately for us, last week was rainy, so we found several worms fairly close to the surface. I accidentally cut one worm in half with the shovel, so Beth and I talked about how it might be able to grow a new tail. We talked about and observed how worms moved, and looked for the setae on the worms' segments that help it move. (I have to admit that neither Beth nor I actually touched the worms -- I just scooped them up with a small garden trowel to put them into our worm habitat.)
I loved all of the book suggestions for the week. I learned so much about ants, worms, snails, moles, and mushrooms. (My husband laughed at me when I told him how much I am learning from Beth's first grade books.)
I also love how the first week's books seem to have helped Beth to be more interested and aware of ants and worms and other things that live close to the ground. Last week at the park we noticed a lot more ant hills, and Beth asked if we could repeat our experiment with the honey bread at the park sometime. I love how Beth stopped to notice something we hadn't taken the time to notice before and is showing curiosity and interest in it.
There were no experiments scheduled for Exploration Day this week, but we did read several books about the seasons. (We had read books about the seasons in the past, so much of this information was a repeat for Beth.) We did take another piece of honey bread outside to watch the ants again. Our first Exploration Day was a little bit overcast, but this week it was sunny. I wonder if ants are more active on sunny days, because this time we put the bread near an ant hill (a different ant hill with a different kind of ants than last week) and the ants immediately swarmed to the bread. It was amazing how fast the bread was covered with ants!
We enjoyed our first two Exploration Days, and have even begun a nature journal. The curriculum even helps nature journals seem doable, since they suggest drawing or tracing illustrations from the books we read to add to a science notebook or nature journal. I'm not much of an artist (yet), but I did trace pictures of ants, worms, and snails for our notebooks. I still need to find a picture to add for our study of the seasons. We are looking forward to starting on a new science topic tomorrow.
