Creation Notebooks
My Nature Journal
Charlotte Mason believed that young people should spend as much time as possible enjoying nature. It was not until I read The Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola that I completely grasped the idea of keeping a nature notebook or journal.
Inspired, we began keeping one. I say “we” because I have one as well as my three oldest children. We have many opportunities to be in nature since we live in the country. In addition to raising animals and tending a garden, we have acres of land to enjoy, creek bottoms to explore, trees to climb, and wild animals to observe.
Keeping a nature notebook makes you pay more attention to the subject before you. Seeing a wild animal or an oddly-shaped cloud makes you want to know more about it. You have to sort through all the information you already know with anything you have recently learned. Then you have to choose the most important information to record.
Drawings of tracks, information, and a quote from the Bible decorate this page.
For example, we see deer almost daily. My son, Jake, checked out some non-fiction books out of the library on deer. He read several of the books and excitedly relayed the information to me. The books helped reinforce what Jake and my other children already knew about deer. For instance, my children can easily identify their tracks, they knew baby deer had white spots, and they knew how gracefully deer can jump fences. The books also gave them explanations and interesting facts on deer and their behavior. We can now identify deer tracks by whether the deer was walking or running.
So now excited about deer, my children and I worked on our nature journals. It surprised me how many school subjects combined to make a great notebook. Science, art, copywork, etc. can be found on our pages. We drew pictures of deer from photographs. We wrote down interesting facts about deer. We looked through the Bible, poems, and literature for a quote we could use on our page about deer.
Kyla thought about deer during hunting season and quoted part of Psalm 23.
I enjoyed working together with my children. We learned together, shared with one another, and had fun. It is funny to see the similarities between our notebooks, but at the same time to see how different and original each one’s is. Since making pages on deer, we have added other pages as we come across something outdoors. I have also read Robin Sampson’s book Heart of Wisdom. She prefers calling nature notebooks, creation notebooks. She would rather her children be cognizant of the fact that God created nature. Giving Him the glory by naming it after Him. Personally I prefer the title, “Creation Notebook.”
Regardless what you call them, try recording what you see in the world around you. It makes you more aware of your surroundings and is a springboard for wanting to dive deeper into an area of interest. Your notebooks will be treasures worth saving to help remind you how much fun you had learning.
Jake drew a baby deer and copied "On the sixth day, God created deer."
These are gorgeous, and I love your name for them.
Those are excellent drawings! Great idea to put Bible verses in your journals, too. I like the idea of calling them Creation Notebooks or Journals also, and considered doing that, yet when labeling them it seemed like it was giving the wrong idea when put with our names. “Bethany’s Creation Journal” sounded like it was referring to her own creation, which was not quite what I was looking for, lol. I also do want them to know that most of the world calls it “nature” and “nature journaling.” I figured we can redeem that label for ourselves, understanding that it’s all created by God, of course, and referring to it regularly as the creation when we “walk by the way.” So ours are labeled as nature journals, for now at least. I do appreciate Robin Sampson’s priority emphasis, though, and have found her book helpful.
[...] Study, we are going to enrich the video course and our understanding of Biology. Filling up our Creation Notebooks with our observations, experiments, lab notes, etc, my son will have record of what he has [...]