Journaling the turtles at Independence Lake

I wrote about our Independence Lake excursion in the blog journal yesterday. It was a great trip and we had a great time. My only disappoint was that, after get a-hold of nature journals and remembering to pack both them and colored pencils, it was too wet to get them out. When we got home, though, Calvin was quick to jump at the opportunity. So these are not nature illustrations the way that I had them in mind, with the two of us sitting and sketching what we see (and oh, how often will it occur that I imagine an event one way but have to be content with another outcome), but they are his images of our hike today. The first is his sketch of us eating lunch on top of a wooden lookout. The second is his sketch of the trail as seen from above. Then the jounral entry is about the organized turtle presentation part of our trip, which happened first, and I was surprised that he didn't add a picture, but if he does so in the future I will come back and add it.

Nature Connections in May

May was such a strange month here. Disappointing, really. It's usually such a beautiful month of gentle warming, blossoming flowers, and soft breezes. This year it was cold for a long time, then wet. We had more than twice our average rainfall for the month of May, and most of that in the last two weeks. Serious flooding is a concern for many, and general saturation has kept us from visiting many of our favorite places, even with rain boots. We still connected with nature quite a bit, still spent a lot of time outside with plants, animals, birds—but mostly in our own yard by planting trees and plants and enjoying wildlife, and also on vacation by spending hours on the beach, and lastly in a few other places.

I like to join with other moms in linking my favorite nature activity of the month at Nature Connections, but this month our experiences warrant more of a general summary, I think, so this was how we enjoyed nature this May of the strange weather.

Planting for Arbor Day

On vacation, enjoying the sun and the lake.

Just being outside whenever we could, enjoying our favorite activities, like reading, games, or make-believe, outside where we could also enjoy the sound of the wind in our new trees, or the sight of wildlife nearby.

We planted native plants, mostly for butterflies, in all our new garden space.

We visited the garden store near our house where they always have tadpoles in their pond.

We got our edibles garden started

Journal entry—orioles

Arbor Day sketches

Yesterday being Arbor Day we did a lot of talking about trees—about how they invite wildlife to our yard, about how they provide us with shade, about how they clean our air and beautify our space—and we did a lot of looking at trees, too, so we decided to try sketching them. With lead and colored pencils in hand we set up our chairs in the front yard and started sketching. In her illustrated version of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, Susan Jeffers wrote about growing up with her artist mother, about learning from a young age that shadows are not simply black, that the tea kettle on the stove was not a solid color after all, the reflection in it not merely a rectangle. What we actually see is difficult to commute onto our paper, and to get started we first have to see. To actually see. We talked about shapes—is a tree really a ball on a stick? We talked about colors—is a trunk really brown? I haven't sketched like that since my days of wildlife observation in college, but it was something I always loved and it felt special to share it. We had a good time.

Journal entry—waterfowl hike

After their waterfowl hike yesterday, Calvin came home and wrote about the experience in his journal. I still think we maybe need to make him a nature journal, but for now it's all in one.

This one, obviously, is completely unedited. When we first started the journal last fall I helped him sound out all words and get them spelled correctly. Over time he gained confidence and proficiency, and a desire to shrug off all outside interference, and a couple of months ago he started writing the entries on his own. When he finishes I usually read them out loud to him, in part to enjoy them together, now that I'm not part of the process anymore, and also to help him catch any glaring phonetic errors. My goal is not for him to spell everything correctly, but for him to have a good grasp, over time, on the general rules. This one I didn't read until today, and it is clear to me that he has made a lot of wonderful progress all on his own. It's hard to say which came first and encouraged the other, the reading or the writing, more they were simultaneous and co-dependent, but I am so happy about both his progress, and how it has happened—not with lessons, or practice sheets or even with many easy readers, but mostly just with practice and use. As my dad always says, nobody told him he couldn't read, and nobody implied that it was a difficult process that required systematic help, either, and so he just did it.