Nature Portfolio
Throughout The Year
Nature Notebooking for Ages 6 - 10
I conceived and designed the Nature Portfolio as a gentle and creative approach to exploring the natural world. The Nature Portfolio is designed especially for the 6 - 10 year old group as an introductory living science course, with images to color, vocabulary words, puzzles, and as much or as little writing as is appropriate for each child.
Through the process of reading, and building the pages of the Nature Portfolio, your child will be recording the memories of their journey and creating a one-of-a-kind keepsake; a book to treasure!
It is my hope that this book will bless you, and will help you carve out a special time with your young homeschooler.
Barbara Shukin
Scroll down to see sample pages.
The Notebooking Pages:
The first section in the Nature Portfolio contains the student notebooking pages, printed on heavy weight paper. This section is divided into four chapters according to the seasons, and further divided into five double page spreads focusing on general ecosystems; Yards and Gardens, Woods and Fields, Ponds and Streams, Desert Lands, and Along the Seashore.
The Parent Guide:
This section contains resource materials and the teacher's guide, to be removed from the binder as you work. Here you will find cut-and-paste images and suggested multi-level writing assignments, including narration, copy work, and vocabulary, for each notebooking page. For your convenience, I include reproducible forms and lined pages, and a detailed reading schedule presented in an easy to read table.
Throughout this course, there is no single book that is a "required text," however I do suggest a few that would be quite valuable to have. The Handbook of Nature-Study, by Anna Botsford Comstock, is a classic; copyrighted in 1911 and continually reprinted until today.
I suggest two field guides entitled Fun With Nature: Take Along Guide and More Fun With Nature: Take-Along Guide. These books provide a nice introduction to the process of identifying plants and animals.
I am very enthusiastic about The Wonders of Nature Sketchbook, by Colleen Monroe. This book gives simple step-by-step "how-to" instructions for drawing a number of common animals; an indispensable part of creating a nature notebook.
To read about most of the plants, and animals outlined in the Nature Portfolio Table of Contents, I recommend a number of picture books and readers. Of the sixty subjects presented in the Nature Portfolio, you can read about twenty of these subjects within the pages of the Christian Liberty Nature Reader, books 2, 3, and 4. Some excellent picture books are the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out books, the Animal Lives books, the Life Cycle books by Bobbie Kalman, and others. Though you may decide to purchase some of these, you will undoubtedly be able to access many through your local library or through interlibrary loan. Of course, your library will have other books on the shelf which can replace or supplement the list I have provided.
You will notice that I don't always have a book to recommend for a given subject. There you might use a children's encyclopedia, find a book on your local library's shelf, or use Google.
Copy Work:
On the provided copy work pages, the writing spaces are lined, ready to hold a poem. To help alleviate guess work on your part, I chose an appropriate poem which is guaranteed to fit in the space provided. You may decide to write it out for your child on another sheet of paper, and have them copy it onto the copy work page. Alternatively, for ultimate ease, you may decide to have your child use the provided poem printed in grey dashed lines in the Getty Dubay Italic font.
Full Page Coloring Image:
To add a nice touch to the Portfolio, you might like to photocopy the full-page coloring image onto watercolor paper. Your child can paint the image, cut it out along the line, and paste it over the provided coloring page. Or, punch holes in your watercolor paper, and pop it into the binder.
The Corresponding Page From the Parent Guide
Examples of Completed and
"In Progress" Notebooking Pages
Example of a poetry copywork page, in progress
Example of a coloring page, in progress.
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