Be Inspired, a Nature Notebook Update

Last Friday was our ninth visit to Santee National Wildlife Refuge. It was also our shortest for the invigorating air encouraged us to press on! In spite of bracingly cold temperatures, we could not help but find treasures along the way. We spotted "male" pinecones and searched for the accompanying "female" pinecone. A facebook friend—quite knowledgeable in the natural history of Santee— identified it as a slash pine (Pinus elliottii) and stated that this pine is not native to Santee and were planted at the refuge about sixty years ago. My friend explained to the children how the males pollenate the females (and I love the beautiful illustration of joint attention in the photograph below). So many lovely varieties of pine live here that I think our first formal study from the Comstock book will be on pine trees. Since the slash pine pollenates in January and February—as we have already seen with our own eyes—we could begin with a study of pinecones first.



We heard and saw many geese out in the fields and watched a flock take off. The view was so lovely, I had to stop for pictures with the bitter wind stinging my face.



Starting nature study with children feels a bit dangerous. You never know what you are going to see. What if the teacher cannot answer a question? What if there are things we have trouble identifying? Other than experts, who can really tell one fungus from another? Heading outdoors to study the world is humbling because we realize how little we know.

And that is okay. Children benefit from knowing that adults are life-long learners, too.

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, observes,

More recent research has suggested time spent in more natural environments (whether it’s a park, a wilderness or a nature-based classroom or play space) stimulates the senses, improves the ability to learn, and helps students connect the dots of the world.... Children are more likely to invent their own games in green play spaces rather than on flat playgrounds or playing fields. Green play spaces also suit a wider array of students and promote social inclusion, regardless of gender, race, class, or intellectual ability. One study found that so-called at-risk students in week-long outdoor camp settings scored significantly better on science testing than in the typical classroom. At the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, researchers have discovered that children as young as 5 show a significant reduction in the symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder when they engaged with nature.

I have seen this in action on the trail we adopted last fall! Even the youngest child is eager to explore when given permission. Boys turn water hyacinth lilies into hats and trumpets. Girls get manicures with water hyacinth lily bulbs. Children claim castles in the woods. They climb branches to ride horses. They turn fallen trunks into benches and balance beams. When someone loses a shoe in the mud, they have to apply engineering to retrieve it without getting their own shoe stuck.






We document delightful finds in our nature notebooks. During our walks, I snap many pictures, and I am pleased with the resolution of a Lumix point-and-shoot camera—a Christmas gift. I love the detail of this spider web snapped on a dewy morning!



After we get home, Pamela chooses her favorite memory of the walk and illustrates it in her notebook—something durable of 65-lb. paper or better, for it will store years of memories. We use watercolor pencils, which we bought many years ago. After the drawing is complete, we add water sparingly—I say we because I keep my own notebook. We try to identify the item, if possible, and record the common name as well as the Latin name. Then, Pamela describes what she observed. We make no corrections because this notebook has many purposes: it documents what we saw as well as her progress in illustrating and writing. It builds a sense of seasonal changes and natural history. I do not extract lessons in drawing and language arts, which might rob her of the joy of keeping a nature notebook.

Pamela made entries on butterflies and moths for the first two walks. My favorite free resource for identifying these insects is Butterflies and Moths of North America. I upload pictures and someone responsible for our location identifies it for me. I keep an online record of every caterpillar, moth, and caterpillar captured in film. I have added several species not already identified for our county! Pamela put the cloudless sulfur butterfly and io moth caterpillar in her notebook.



October 26 was an exciting walk for us. When we finally reached the gravel road crossing the trail, we came upon a snake sunning itself. The reptile was all stretched out. We discouraged the children from touching it, even though we knew it to be harmless. Too many nonvenomous snake are easily confused with venomous ones. When the stroller came too close, the creature sidled away into the woods. And, then, we watched it climb vines and saplings. I mistakenly identified it as a garter snake —yes, my silly fear of the things prevents me from spending too much time in their company and I was glad I did not squeal. It turned out to be a rough green snake (Opheodrys aestivus).





I could not identify her November selections. My old camera lacked any decent resolution, and cheetos-colored fungus was beyond me. While the word fungus came to Pamela readily, her challenges with word retrieval made it hard to recall moss and lichen. I supplied the terms to her. She wrote branch, instead of trunk—more vagaries of aphasia.

We would have never come across the lovely golden silk orb weaver (Nephila clavipes) had we not decided to walk the trail backwards. Starting at the end enabled us to see many things we had failed to see on prior walks. We went right under the web following a deer path to the water. She was quite lovely, and we all wished we had a cricket on hand to feed her!



And lest you think the size of these fungus is exaggerated, check out the photograph. The thing was the size of a soccer ball.



The first walk of the New Year startled us with an exciting find: a dead Eastern red swamp crayfish (Procambarus troglodytes) lying on the side of the trail, not far from the platform for observing migratory birds. The creature was in perfect condition, and it was ginormous! We all gathered around it and studied it carefully.



Pamela's drawing of the crayfish was absolutely stunning! I can hardly believe that being handed a pencil and paper made her tantrum when she was six years old. We wondered if we would ever see it again—and we did not! However, a friend of mine walked the trail with her husband the intervening Sunday and all that was left was obliterated bits and pieces of shell strewn on the ground. Pamela thinks an eagle might have eaten it.

Why? Well, last Friday, we were standing on that same platform for observing migrating birds and watched an American bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) fly across the field, heading toward us. The bird flew right over us into the woods. Later, we saw it soar above us closer to the tree line and heard its distinctive chatter call offered here at another one of my favorite sites for bird study. Pamela and I recited one of her favorite poems together ("The Eagle" by Alfred Lord Tennyson). As my friend Megan reminds us, nature has a magic that is deeper still and, when outdoors, poetry comes to mind. Since I had trouble spotting the eagle in my camera, I took no pictures so Pamela relied on her memory for this entry.



Then, I saw the most spectacular sight—and, unfortunately, everyone else was too far behind to enjoy it with me. I watched the bald eagle fly through the trees across the walkway pictured below. And, for a moment, I was memorized like Bilbo Baggins when the eagles rescued him and his unexpected company.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Why Read Challenging Books? (Day One of Exam Week)

Pamela loves exams, or what she calls her term finale. She is still working on her ability to narrate orally and continuing to improve her communicate—imagine! She is in her early twenties and is making progress in her language! We keep questions pretty simple: tell me everything you know about . . . This first clip features snatches from some of the folk songs, hymns, and classical compositions from the term.



This year, Pamela read a couple of biographical picture books: one, a tall tale about John Henry, and two about Sojourner Truth and Sitting Bull. Because we have been doing exams at the end of every term, Pamela knows what is expected of her. Thus, she realizes that her daily narrations are not fodder for short-term memory because she will have to recall what she learned in the future.

Again, I see progress. Pamela's language is clear enough, and her train of thought is more connected. I think that even folks who do not know her can understand what she is saying. She can tell about a person's life from beginning to end (the Sitting Bull book focuses only on his childhood). She continues to supplement her words with gestures and emotion, strong emotion for Sojourner Truth, which we finished reading about six weeks ago. Now that Pamela is showing the ability to sequence in her narrations, I plan to focus on descriptions of people and places. At the end of the Sojourner Truth narration, I asked a few questions to tease out a description of her appearance.



Some books are very difficult for Pamela. Skeptics might wonder the point of reading material at the very edge of her ability to comprehend. But, then, I recall descriptions of Helen Keller's delight in books with language far, far, far beyond her ability. One of the teachers at a school for the blind noticed how much enthusiasm Helen had for reading a book in French when she had only a small vocabulary in the language,

Often I found her, when she had a little leisure, sitting in her favourite corner, in a chair whose arms supported the big volume prepared for the blind, and passing her finger slowly over the lines of Moliere's Le Medecin Malgré Lui, chuckling to herself at the comical situations and humorous lines. At that time her actual working vocabulary in French was very small, but by using her judgment, as we laughingly called the mental process, she could guess at the meanings of the words and put the sense together much as a child puzzles out a sliced object.

Researchers are finding that poetry and classic literature spark more electrical activity in the brain than abridged and modernized versions of the same. Unusual words, surprising phrases, and difficult sentence structures light up the brains of readers. Could novelty be part of the key? After the initial blitz, the brain shifts into high gear and is revved up for further reading. Poetry affects the area of the brain that processes episodic memory as readers "reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read." What did "the young and the staid alike" read? Passages from Shakespeare plays, including King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus and Macbeth . . . William Wordsworth, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes . . . The researchers will aim their next efforts at the reading of Charles Dickens. They conclude,

This is the argument for serious language in serious literature for serious human situations, instead of self-help books or the easy reads that merely reinforce predictable opinions and conventional self-images.

Walt Whitman was on the menu because of our readings connected to the Civil War. Pamela found his poems hard to memorize. In my efforts to learn "Aboard at a Ship's Helm", I completely forget "A Clear Midnight." Pamela, however, remembered the first few lines of it. While the poem about the sailor was too thorny, she captured the spirit of the poem in her narration. Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill was another challenging read. The last two chapters seemed particularly obscure, but Pamela persisted. She likes finishing her books, however difficult they may be. While typical students are able to glean far more than Pamela, she was pleased with what she did learn.



Thus, as we enter a new year of new books, I definitely plan to keep Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Robert Frost on the menu!

Taking this thinking a step further, we also read a book that had very difficult scientific ideas in it. While we were reading it, I wondered if Pamela would glean anything. Even though many concepts were beyond her grasp of science, Pamela picked up a good bit of vocabulary and understanding. In addition to being able to talk about the astronomer featured in the book, she could say something meaningful about supernovas, black holes, invisible rays, light, and the big bang theory. Can you?



One major point of reading living books is to develop lifelong interests. Pamela asked me if she could go to a planetarium. One of my homeschooling friends told me of Dooley Planetarium and Francis Marion University Observatory only forty-five minutes away. The planetarium offers free shows open to the public two Sundays a month (yes, I said FREE)! The observatory also has periodic open house events that we plan to attend in the coming term.

Hey, Pamela, I know you are reading my blog. When would you like to go?

It's All Relative

Braving a thermometer that regularly read in the teens, we spent the Christmas and New Year holidays in Kansas. One night driving home from seeing The Hobbit—for the second time—we watched the temperature gradually drop down from 15º to 5º! Driving back to Carolina, the weather felt down right balmy at 45º.

Tired of typical fare grabbed on the road, we decided to try Domino's gluten-free pizza. While their food labeling clearly states it does not reach the uber-scrupulous standards for celiac disease, Pamela usually has no problem with gluten-free food that might have a little cross contamination. We wanted to find out whether an occasional pizza would cause a reaction (skin rash, irritability, foggy thinking, incontinence, etc.). I had forgotten that this pizza establishment was not a sit-down restaurant, so we ended up eating at a rest area five miles down the road.

Both the temperature and level of gluten exposure have one thing in common: relativity. Compared to Kansas weather, we felt warm basking in the sun while eating our pizza. Compared to a regular pizza, the gluten-free pizza offered such a miniscule amount of the wheat protein that Pamela had no reaction.

Everything is relative.

Sometimes, hearing about autism-spectrum folks doing great things makes me fret about much far behind Pamela is. Online viewers of the Miss America 2013 competition chose Miss Montana, who still has residual speech anomalies in spite of having come far after getting diagnosed with mild autism eleven years ago. Lexi Madden is planning to major in art therapy in the fall. She is so far beyond where Pamela is and, believe me, Pamela has worked just as hard to come as far as she has.

And, then, I come across a post by Greg Lucas about finding joy in scrubbing urine off the bathroom floor.

It's all relative!

So, rather than succumb to grumblings caused by comparing my situations to that of others, I'm going to ponder moments of joy. Think of this as a virtual gratitude jar. Pamela . . .

• . . . thinks it's funny when I make a mistake. We had her leftover burger and fries boxed up before we left the Mexican restaurant. When she realized I had left her leftovers behind, she cracked up and laughed at my forgetfulness.


• . . . is so excited about starting a new year's worth of books that she drove me to homeschool during our break and on weekends. We started the term finale and she is the one coming up with the daily schedule.


• . . . on her own initiative, entered page numbers for our daily readings for the last day of the week in a spreadsheet. She even knew how to change the highlighting of the cell from green to white to show what is ready to go (white) and what still needs work (green). Then, she told me, "I did the schedule!" with great joy in her efforts. Talk about an "Elves and the Shoemaker" moment for me!


• . . . gets the mail every morning and even brings books that come in the mail to me. How thoughtful!


• . . . found great delight and exclaiming loudly "REMEMBER THE ALAMO" while reading the book on that topic in our final week of the term.


• . . . reminisced about all of our favorite horses when the topic came up in one of our books: Shadowfax, Goblin, Chùcaro, Pegasus, etc.


• . . . is adamant in her proclamations that she is NOT college, NOT high school, NOT middle school, and NOT elementary school. She is Charlotte Mason (our style of lifelong learning). To respect her repeated announcement, I decided to shift the names of all my computer documents from "Year 6" to "Year 2013" since we are beginning a bunch of new books in January 2013.

Kicking-Off Our Study of World War I

Pamela is delighted that we are on the verge of studying the 20th century, focusing on the Great War, based on Ambleside Online's recommendations for this timeframe. In addition to our overall history narrative (the final volume of The Story of the World), we are going to read Rilla of Ingleside to see how war affects the homefront. We will also read the exciting book Falcons of France to understand a new type of warfare (this book is pricey because it was once be out-of-print). Over the Christmas holiday, Steve suggested we visit the National (yes, National) World War I Museum, which just happens to be in Kansas City, Missouri. The museum exceeded our expectations and you can bet we will come back after Pamela has grown more familiar with the landscape of the war. Even though it is pricier than our beloved Nelson-Atkins museum, we visited on Wednesdays when tickets are half-price (seven bucks per person, instead of fourteen). Tickets are good for two consecutive days.

I really like the thought put into organizing the collection. We began by watching a short movie that explained what factors led to war. We walked to the right side of the building, which focuses on the first half of the war. That side offered another movie about the war itself. The opening of that clip had haunting music and written descriptions that brought to mind Tolkien's description of the dead marshes. A veteran of trench warfare, he poured the images of dead bodies lying in mud and muck into the hobbit's nasty trek to Mordor. Underneath the screen was a static display of soldiers in the field with a German Focker hovering above in the dark of night. During the film, light and sound effects in the field below heightened the feeling of doom for those poor men.



The artifacts are organized into categories like any other museum. What I appreciated most were the scenes in which you could peek into a peephole and imagine soldiers in action. The very first display was the trench itself.


Contrast the dirt and grime of the trenches with a peek into a clean, peaceful hospital room.



We walked inside the crater of a bombed-out home. This reminded me of my mother who was born in Berlin in 1940. Her family lived in an apartment complex with a bomb shelter underneath. They heard the bomb sirens sound and ran to the shelter, which was full. After being turned away, they found room in the one across the street. After the dust cleared, they were horrified to learn that their apartment building had collapsed, killing everyone in the shelter.



Because we will focus on the first examples of aerial combat, I took a few pictures in the aviation section. Someone clever showed footage taken during a flight onto the floor, which inspired Pamela to flap and pretend to be a bird.




We also enjoyed the soundproof booths for listening to audio from that era: speeches, musics, poetry, and prose.


I chuckled at the Navy uniforms women wore in that era and tagged my sister, an electronics technician in the Navy Reserves, in the picture I posted on Facebook. I snapped pictures of Pamela standing near a mine and a torpedo.



Of course, even this Naval Academy graduate cannot neglect the army, so I took pictures of life in the trenches for soldiers: gas masks, an ambulance, and a tank.





We could not leave without making an entry in Pamela's book of centuries. She chose a machine gun, which was rather fitting since it was invented during the Great War. A year and a half ago, we had purchased a very durable, beautiful journal especially designed with Charlotte Mason homeschoolers in mind: it is holding up beautifully.

Leaving a museum without touring the bookstore is unfathomable. I looked for the book Dreadnoughts by Robert K. Massie for my personal reading and ended up having to download it on my Nook. However, I did find a postcard that was a blast from the past. Back in the early 1990s, the U.S. Navy decided to go all politically correct and banned this poster from recruiting stations. I, of course, seeing the folly of it, bought one for myself. When I posted a picture of it on Facebook, two friends chimed in: one has a small version of the poster and another friend's wife, who was a classmate of ours at the boat school, bought a coffee cup with the contraband picture. I love my friends!