First Day of Autumn

Nature education was one of the areas I have been most excited about sharing with Bean.  We hope to instill in our children both an appreciation and a respect for the natural world.  Living in a climate where we get to experience four seasons, our boys will have the opportunity to see Mother Nature transform the outdoors four times a year.  I had been trying to think of some way to celebrate all the changes that each season brings.  I decided that seasonal nature journals might be what I was looking for to help me do this.  I even took it one step further and thought that it would be neat to assemble a kit we can take with us on our nature walks that included his nature journal, a twig pencil, magnifying glass and his binoculars.  I'm sure we'll be adding to this kit as we think of more things. 

To assemble the nature journal I took two pieces of brown foam and punched three holes in each of them.  I then cut drawing paper to the same size and hole punched that as well.  I used small rings to finish assembling the journal and then used some old scrapbooking sticker letters to spell out "Autumn" on the front.  Today was the first day of autumn and so I presented Bean with his new nature journal and let him decorate the front cover with an assortment of autumn themed scrapbooking stickers I had in my stash.  I explained that a nature journal will be a great place for us to keep all of our observations about the season.  For autumn, we can do leaf rubbings, glue in interesting leaves or seeds we find, glue in photos we take of trees changing colors, write down (dictate to Mommy) what we think animals, plants and people do during the season and draw pictures of things that we observe during fall.  He was so eager to use it he asked if he could start drawing autumn nature pictures right away.  Below are some of his pictures he drew today.  It's a good thing I have the ability to add more pages to this journal as I think we just may need them!