How I Homeschool Science From Nature Up With Our 15 Children

Imagine sitting on a soft tuft of grass, watching billowing clouds drift by as you listen to the trilling of a red-winged blackbird with your children around you taking bites of a picnic lunch while sketching in their nature notebooks.  

This, my dears, is science. 

Or, imagine you want to have a backyard barbeque with extended family, but there seems to be a hoard of hornets ready to attack, so your 11-year-old observes their habits, does some research, and gets rid of them. 

This also is science.  

Science is knowledge; science is discovery; science is ingenuity. 

As we have discussed in our last podcast together, we have been taught that true science is best left to the “experts.” We explored the reasons those at the top of the food chain do not want us to discover our own scientific powers because they could not stand the competition. We found out that our decision makers deem us too stupid to be trusted with true scientific ingenuity. 

We also reinforced the truth that Jesus is still in charge, and that God will open the treasury of His creation to anyone who is willing to be curious enough to follow Him and “think His thoughts after Him.” 

Today we are going to talk about real life ways to become scientists with our children as we homeschool them.  

(Incidentally, even if you aren’t able to homeschool your children, you can do many of the things I am sharing with you today.) 

First of all, let’s talk about what we will call “Nature Study.” 

This is something all Charlotte Mason enthusiasts know much about, because this is something she strongly promoted. 

In essence, nature study is a natural thing we all have done in one form or another. Every child, unless they have grown up in a concrete box, has been curious about the patterns of sunlight, or clouds, or tiny insects.  

Almost every mother has been handed a mangled bouquet of dandelions by her toddler in early spring.  

When we are training our children to be life-long scientists, we take the natural inclinations of our children to enjoy and be curious of nature and we capitalize on them.  

In subsequent springs, as our children age and are able to comprehend more, we talk about dandelions. We look them up in books such as Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study (affiliate link). We search about them on the Internet.  

Then we give our children nature notebooks and have them draw and write their observations down about them.  

This is the beginning of learning the process of scientific practices.  

As time passes, we go on nature hikes, and we teach our children to take notice of what is going on around them.  

When our children were young, I would go to a local nature conservatory, one with long trails, and I would teach them to be quiet and observe. At different intervals, I would have them become completely silent and listen. Then we would discuss what we had heard, and from where and from whatever creature we thought was making the sound.  

After our walk, we would visit the nature center where a number of exhibits gave us incite as to what we had just observed.  

Later, we would sit at home and draw and write about our experiences in nature notebooks. Some would add in a bit of poetry, either as copywork or as their own expression. 

Sometimes we would bring samples home, such as the time one of our children brought home different parts of a yucca plant, including the root, the stems, and the flowers. Then she did research and discovered how the different parts of the plant have been used for hundreds of years by native people in the Americas. This included making shampoo and using the fibers of the stems for cloth. She even did some experiments trying to produce some of these products herself.  

A number of summers we caught mourning cloak butterflies and watched them build their cocoons on a stick in a jar, then watched as they hatched and dried their wings.  

One of our sons had a great affinity for tiny creatures, so he spent hours and hours studying them. At one time, we had a number of ziplocs filled with frozen specimens that he had gathered; huge dragonflies, various butterflies, and the like. He would go to the marshes in our neighborhood and lie in the grass next to them for hours observing the different creatures. He brought back snakes and lizards and all sorts of interesting things.  

Then, he would draw them. He is a truly gifted artist, so his renderings went beyond what most of us could produce. This eventually led him to study Art Nouveau, an art movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which positively affected the direction of his artistic endeavors.  

Nature study is where we lay the foundation of a life of discovery and enjoyment where the fire of scientific discovery is ignited, but it doesn’t stop there. It allows curiosity to be rewarded with answers that spur on other thought, and as each thought is connected, it produces a pattern of inquiry leading to ingenuity.  

This is the goal of the homeschooling parent.  

It’s different from the “learn science to get a high-paying job” mentality. It’s a whole-person approach which includes the idea that each child is uniquely loved and created by a God who cares and includes us in His plans.  

Of course, there will be a time when a child must grow up and apply themselves more rigorously, but if a true foundation has been laid, it will not be at the expense of them as individuals and will increase the satisfaction of all other relationships in their lives; both with God and with other human beings, as well as with their environment. 

So, where do we begin with nature study? 

In our own backyards. 

(Even if you don’t have a backyard, you can access park lands and walkways right around where you live.) 

Here are some things you will need: 

• Open eyes to pay attention to what is around you.  
• Ears to hear the sounds nature makes. 
• Hands to gather specimens of every type. 
• Something to keep the specimens in.  
• Something to draw and write about your observations and discoveries in. 
• Some sort of camera to capture actual pictures of specimens. 
• Basic office and art supplies. 
• A big table to spread everything out on. 
• A way to display your collections.  
• Some nature guides and reference books; the Internet for research. 

One reference work that will aid you tremendously is Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study (which I mentioned earlier). This one book will lend you hours and hours of interesting study. Not only does it include all you need to know about common plants, insects, birds, etc., but there are snippets of poetry; even charts and maps for understanding weather patterns. (If you can’t swing your own copy, you can read it for free online.) 

There are all sorts of modern nature guides as well. At one time we purchased a trio of books; one devoted to rocks, another devoted to insects, still another devoted to birds. I used a wicker basket with a handle and filled it with a number of pocket-sized guides for easy access. 

Next, there are living books which help encourage scientific pursuit. There are some “nature readers” which reveal the lives of creatures in a natural, narrative style that we thoroughly enjoyed over the years.  

But the very books we enjoyed were biographies of scientists we appreciated, such as John James Audubon and George Washington Carver. 

Along with reading good biographies, we also assigned various scientific topics for notebooking pages. The children would either choose a topic or be assigned one and then would do research and come up with a notebooking project to be presented to the rest of the family.  

When our children reached high school ages, then the real scientific studies began. One of our children pursued physics to create realistic reactions in his creation of video games (even though we did not own any gaming equipment!–He later went on to become the lead website developer for a college with a number of campuses). Another pursued human anatomy in order to draw the human figure more realistically. Still another studied all the systems of the body for a future pursuit in the field of medicine.  

“But what about preparing for a STEM degree,” I hear you asking, “Don’t STEM degrees require all sorts of formal scientific, high-school level studying with multiple labs?” 

Great question, and one which has bothered me a time or two. After research and experience, I have found there are numerous ways to help your children prepare for STEM degrees, but none of them are absolutely required.  

Why? Because it is rare that even public-schooled students come from high school prepared to take full-on STEM-centered college courses. For this reason there are numerous “bridge”classes offered for those who need to catch up, so-to-speak.  

Even so, there are some things a teen could do to help: 

1. Practice science notebooking. This is something that all scientists have done for ages and ages. 

2. Learn higher math. Even if you haven’t gone through a calculus course, a calculus prep or “advanced math” course is recommended. For those so inclined, Saxon is one of our go-to’s. 

3. Hack a textbook or two. Grab an older biology, physics, or chemistry textbook (preferably one written from a Biblical worldview) and read the chapters, taking notes and delving further into different subjects as you go along.  

4. Look into those trade paperbacks on the typical science topics, such as Biology or Physics for Dummies, or Biology Made Easy. These books boil all of the information down to its essence so that one can become acquainted with the subject matter in a fraction of the time it would take for a full-blown course. 

5. Buy some science kits. The website, Homesciencetools.com is full of different ideas. Do some dissections, look at some slides, build molecules with a molecule set, etc.  

6. Look into the literature-based science on Guest Hollow. One of our daughters did the free biology course and enjoyed it.  (It is literature-rich, but if you can’t afford to buy all of the books suggested, you could check them out from your local library.)

I hope you are starting to see here just how easy and enjoyable learning science with your children can be. We are all scientists, and we are all observing and hypothesizing daily, just some of us are doing it in a more technical way than others.  

Our job is to listen to God and help our children to develop the curiosity and ingenuity they will need to face the problems they will encounter throughout the rest of their lives, whether in a career, a ministry, or just daily living. 

If this post has answered some of your questions and has been an encouragement to you, you might want to check it out as a podcast by clicking the links below:

iTunes: Homeschool Science From Nature Up

Spotify: Homeschool Science From Nature Up