Natuer Study/Science - Fall 2009

Nature Study

We have been doing the Handbook of Nature Study blog Outdoor Hour Challenges, and plan on continuing this as long as Barb keeps posting challenges! Sometimes we do write and draw in our nature journals, but mostly we enjoy learning about the world around us.

For nature tales (fictional nature stories), we are currently reading Pagoo by Holling C Holling, and we will read Secrets of the Woods by William J. Long next.

Science

For science experiments we are trying out the Backyard Scientist series for the first time. We've only done it once so far (our official school start was September 16th), but the kids really enjoyed it and have been asking to do more.

We will be finishing up God's Design for Life: The Animal Kingdom this year as well. It is a short book, but with all the other things we do we moved through this really slow last year. I like that it is told from a christian viewpoint (acknowledging the world and all its creatures are God's creations), but there are some ideas that I'm not completely confident about, so I carefully pre-read and leave out what I don't want to include. Also, it can be "textbook-y" so I keep it really short- Yesterday it wanted us to label a pie chart - why? Nothing against pie charts, but I can just say insects make up the majority of arthropods, we don't need to label a pie chart to get it.

I am still waiting on a couple books from amazon, and Science: 100 Scientists Who Changed the World is one of them. It gives (can you guess?) a brief biography of 100 scientists whose work changed the world.

We are also reading another book that is similar to 100 scientists, called The Story of Inventions, but this focuses on inventors and inventions of the last 200 years, while the 100 Scientists includes other time periods (such as the one we are studying this year - the Renaissance & Reformation).

For science tales we will be reading Look at the Sky and Tell the Weather, which is a collection of stories about "a single air mass traveling from the Canadian Rockies to the northeastern United States (back cover)."