Nature Journal for Kids
The summer is upon us. Time to set up that holiday Nature Journal for kids.
Every holiday I’ve ever been on as an adult I’ve taken a sketchbook with me, most of the time the promise of putting pencil to paper is always sidestepped in favour of doing something else (usually wine). Or the sheer expanse of whiteness on the page has left me put off and overwhelmed.
Nature journal for kids with a difference
Discovering the joy of collecting natural items changed this for me and the sketchbooks became scrapbooks of natural findings interspersed with a few sketches or annotated drawings.
This year I decided we were all going to have nature holiday journals and to have only the number of small pages to equal the number of days away- or less. I compiled the pages myself using different papers; tracing paper or graph paper to break up the monotony of the white page. The whole process took less than 10 mins per journal, cutting paper and roughly stitching pages in.
We shared a morning by the pool drawing flowers or petal shapes. Sometimes just colouring in the graph squares. Taking photos of the salamanders then drawing from the pictures.
Collecting as Journalling
Holiday Nature Journals for kids need only be collections of natural objects not usually seen on the everyday. Boxes or containers as a place to save that seed pod from an unknown mediterranean tree. Or a storybook with flowers pressed into the pages. Or a map with findings stuck on showing a journey as well as nature.
It doesn’t have to be art led, scrapbook led is a great way to observe too.
Geometry Nature journal for kids
Being slightly obsessed with shapes mine was geometry led. I decided to make it a geometry nature journal. Which gave me a theme for the nature observations.
To add another dimension to our observation and to really connect the shapes and nature together, we cut geometric shaped holes in the pages to see the drawings through.
to read more on geometry in nature and particularly triangles read The Smart Happy Project’s Summer magazine – Triangles in Nature
