Nature Stories

I have a subscription to the neatest magazine that comes four times a year called the Home Educator's Tutor that gives a quarter's worth of enrichment material for a 'liberal' education (like music appreciation, art studies, nature study, handicrafts, classical readings etc...). It's a great resource and I highly recommend it.

This morning we were reading a story from it, called 'The young minnow who would not eat when he should". It's a selection from a book written in 1900 called 'Among the Pond People' by Clara Dillingham Pierson. As we were reading through it, E and I discovered the joy of what Charlotte Mason calls learning from "Living Books". It truly is a living book, because it's not just a happy dumbed-down kids book about happy little fish. It has lots of neat facts woven into the story about the pond creatures. We learned so much from the story, and it spurred us on to seek more knowledge about pond animals.

I searched for the book online and to my great joy, found out that it's part of a collection of classic children's books that have been scanned and put on the internet for all to enjoy. The website is called The Baldwin Project, and there are many many good quality books there including a whole series of books written by the same author. We read another chapter from the book, this time about frogs, and then made a notebook page about the story. The picture on the left is from the story we read, and the typed story on the top right is her narration to me. The picture she drew is a frog in rainbow land :-) We are going to make a new notebook page for each chapter of the story and then put it together as a book.

Now we are off to the library to get some books out on frogs and fish to learn some more. I love the excitement of children learning new things... it's contagious.