Fall Nature Study

Fall has finally arrived! The leaves are beginning to turn colors and my house smells of apples and cloves as I bake and diffuse. Although we started school way back in mid-August, many of our extra activities didn't start until late September, so we are really getting into a groove with school, which also makes it feel like fall.



One of our favorite activities for the year is our Tuesday "Home Team" day. We privately homeschool to allow our family more freedom to learn as we choose, and this year, were able to find a semi-local school that provides some wonderful extracurricular activities. One of these is a P.E. Day for my older children. We started going to it last spring, and while my son would play football or soccer with the other high school students, my youngest two and I would sit near a creek and sketch or play.

Kingfisher Nature Journal, courtesy of @raisinglitlleshoots

Because our time there studying nature was so lovely, I wanted to offer a nature club to the other young students in the school. This year, I have a small group of K-3rd-grade students and their mamas, hanging out with us as we observe, draw, and create.

Sometimes getting young children to actually observe nature, requires giving them a craft that involves natural materials. This allows them to slow down enough to actually observe the leaves, bark or feathers that they are supposed to be studying.

One of the resources that we are using this year, is the e-book, Exploring Nature With Children, by Lynn Seddon. This manual includes activities, book suggestions, an overview of the topic and even poem and art suggestions to go along with the theme of the week. 

We have also used the book, Look What I Did With a Leaf for our annual leaf creatures, and one of the girls in our group, made this fabulous horse, using ideas from the book.

Another family fall tradition that we have is a visit to Apple Hill. We don't live as close as we used to, but purchasing fresh apples and fresh apple donuts is worth the drive. 

As I evaluate the activities that we are involved in, and the choices that we make on a daily basis, I am constantly keeping our family vision in mind. As a family, we strive to live within our means so that we can be free to give. This might mean saying no to certain activities so that we can leave room in our budget and in our time to do the things that our dearest to our heart. 

I pulled together my best ideas for saving, and for building a vision for a course that I am offering for a limited time. This course, "Bountiful, Homeschooling on a Budget", will walk you through planning a family vision, creating a budget, getting debt paid off, and living within your means. 

The course includes;

• Recipes and tutorials
• Budget and vision forms
• Interviews with other moms on a budget
• Inspiration to find your purpose

In addition to all the helpful insight you will gain about living on a budget, 100% of your purchase is funding on the ground ministry we are doing this January in Tanzania, Africa. By living on a budget, we were able to save enough to purchase 9 airplane tickets to Africa so that our children can experience loving and encouraging people from another culture and continent. You can accomplish the dreams that God has put on your heart as well, and this course can help you do that.

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Homeschooling; Evaluating What is Working

I took a month long break from blogging, while I had the wonderful This Girl Design create a new blog design for me. I am so excited about the cleaner design, and am excited about beginning to add some of my best conference sessions to the store, as well as developing several other resources for families. 

I have also been regularly contributing to the Wild and Free bundles, both through encouraging podcast conversations with amazing homeschool moms, and through articles and photography. If you homeschool, I would definitely recommend subscribing. It is consistently encouraging. You can also find lots of homeschool encouragement through their Instagram, and I do quite a bit of mini-blogging on Instagram as well.

Oh, and I still homeschool as well. This has been an interesting homeschool year. As we near the home stretch, I am evaluating what is and isn't working. The four oldest children have been taking college classes this year (the first year for my 15 year old), and for some it is going very well, which gives me lots of comfort. The youngest of those four did great last semester, but is hanging on by tooth and nail this semester. It is a good learning experience for all of us. My three oldest care a lot about pleasing people, which makes them very diligent students. This diligence makes up for the holes that there were in their education. The fourth student is a completely different person. If he isn't interested, it is very hard to motivate him, so I am having to be creative (all sorts of threats, and groundings, I might want to try some incentives as well:/) as I try to inspire him to excel in his classes. The college experience in high school, has been a good one overall. My third child will graduate from high school this spring just 1 credit short of his AA degree. This takes a lot of pressure off of our family as he pursues his future goals.

The three youngest children are having a great homeschool year. We have a couple of co-ops that provide fun project days, and science experiments, and this spring we joined a jr. high and high school P.E. class that meets at a beautiful camp in the foothills. This means that while my 13 year old son is playing sports with new friends, the youngest two and I are exploring a nearby creek and pond. We get to see animal tracks in the mud, follow exciting new trails, and rock hop by the creek. They love signing off new projects for their Wild Explorer badges while playing in the wild. It is a guaranteed nature day for us, and a really sweet opportunity for me to connect with the youngest two. Nature is the very best place for connection. 

When we are at home doing school, we are also reading lots of books that go along with our bird study this year. All the nature reading we are doing is paying off as our children learn to be more observant when they are outside. Just yesterday, my daughter was looking for ladybugs, and found a leaf full of butterfly eggs. Such an amazing discovery! She wouldn't even have recognized them if she hadn't read about it in a book.

Education is experimental in so many ways. What nets good grades, doesn't necessarily create students who are good problem solvers, and an imaginative student might have the mental resources to solve world problems, while lacking the diligence and moral character to follow through. Having parented for 22 years, read tons of books on the subject, and swung wildly in my parenting methods, I have seen some of the best and worst of several methods. As well, no two children are alike, so one parenting or schooling method might work entirely differently with different children. 

What I know is this; I really like my children. They are some of my favorite people to talk to, they try hard to honor God with their choices, and they are generally kind and hard working. They have ideas in their heads and they take steps towards making those ideas a reality. Although there are many things that we are still working on, and many opportunities to feel weary or discouraged, overall, this book and conversation heavy, but workbook light, method of homeschooling seems to be working. 

Some of our favorite nature resources this year;

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Homeschool Co-op How To

I have had some form of a homeschool co-op for many of the 17 years that I have been homeschooling. I love being around people, and I love the accountability and enrichment that homeschooling with a co-op has provided. 

Although space limitations have kept our co-ops very small, I dream of one day being able to meet in a facility where I could join with more families in my community to learn together.

In past years, we have only met once a month, but this year with no baby nap schedules to worry about and with fewer students to manage, I have two co-ops that meet every other week. This means that I have a co-op meeting each week. My children and I never have to go too long between an inundation of time with friends. Hooray for that!

One co-op is especially geared towards teaching writing and science and I am having a great time teaching the Apologia Flying Creatures class to my students. We scavenge for feathers, build bird feeders, and mostly draw, paint and read books. It is loads of fun. Meanwhile, friends who are better at teaching the upper grades are doing biology and general science with my older kids. It is a wonderful situation where we all get to see our children learn and have fun.

I recently joined Periscope, a very interesting app for live broadcasting, and my son and I have been making videos, with my broadcasts or with iMovie. The video here is a broadcast that I did on Periscope which explains exactly how to start your own co-op.

Some of the specific steps that I talk about in the video are;

Find a group to co-op with

Pick your subjects or classes

Meet together to create a schedule

Designate who teaches what and where you will meet

Then, just do it!

It isn't too late to start a homeschool co-op this year. It could be as simple as a play date with a particular theme, or as complex as hosting multiple classes. Book clubs, sewing bees and adventure clubs are all wonderful ways to get families together for fun and learning.




If you don't have a group of homeschoolers to gather with, check out the Wild and Free groups page here, or look up your state's homeschool association. Somewhere there is a group of families waiting for you to join them and learn together!

If you have questions about how to start a co-op, feel free to post them here, or e-mail me at jennpepito@yahoo.com

This blog post also has some great detailed advice on starting a co-op.

If you want a comprehensive book that explains how to start a co-op, check out this one.






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Nature Journaling

I have always tried to include nature journaling in my homeschool. I have a photo of my children, taken ten years ago, of them at a historic site journaling their lovely surroundings. Old notebooks are filled with drawings of trees and whales from those early days of nature journaling, and nature guides such as the Golden Guides were frequent companions on our forays into the wilds.

Our nature journaling has gotten a boost in the last few months with the addition of just a few amazing resources. 

The first resource that has helped us in our nature journaling efforts is the amazing artwork of Kristin Rogers which is featured in the bundles from the Wild and Free homeschool community. Kristin is a photographer and artist from Southern California who is an avid nature journaler and homeschooler. Her artwork has inspired more nature journaling in my homeschool, but it has also inspired me to take the time to nature journal. My artwork is pretty basic, and I often want to pass it off as that of one of my youngest children, but I have so enjoyed sitting with my children and visiting together over paints and paper, instead of just giving them nature journaling as an assignment while I go on with other tasks.

The other resource that has made nature journaling more fun in our homeschool is the beautiful resource from Simply Charlotte Mason, "Journaling A Year In Nature". This is an amazing resource which has given us some great prompts to guide our nature study. The journal is spiral bound card stock, organized by season. The hard cover and spiral binding make it very convenient for travel, and the heavyweight paper holds up well to watercolor painting. The journal is organized by season and has pages specific to different kinds of natural wonders. 

My son and I drew crabs in the section on animals and insects, and my daughter and I painted tall trees in the section on trees. The journal also includes inspiring quotes to give you "something to think about" while you are journaling. We took the journal on our recent ten day family camping trip and filled it with drawings and paintings of the natural treasures that we found.

We saw so much natural beauty on this trip; soaring trees and wafting ferns, tiny crabs hidden under rocks, and beautiful rushing waterfalls. I took lots of pictures, but we also enjoyed sitting quietly in the trailer after a day of exploration and recording our finds in our Simply Charlotte Mason Nature Journal. 

We have incorporated drawing and painting into every subject of our homeschool. We do written and illustrated narration in place of book reports, draw and paint narration for history subjects, and paint our way through science studies. Resources that help us become more proficient at recording what we are learning, such as "Journaling A Year In Nature" are a welcome addition to our homeschool.

If you are looking for some supplies to go along with your nature journaling, these have been recommended by artists that we follow.

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