Nature Study for More Outdoor Fun

Spend any time around a homeschooling crowd, and you’ll hear the term “nature study” tossed around. What is nature study? Is it just for those crazy (or not-so-crazy) homeschoolers? Can it work for me? How can I incorporate it into our lives? These are just a few of the questions that I’ll answer in this post.

Child sitting in chair on a porch painting with water colors. — Nature study can encompass many different activities for children. In this post, we’ll share some of our tips and tricks for incorporating this into your outdoor adventures. In this photo, my daughter is painting a map of our backyard in preparation for observing where wind concentrates and is blocked.

This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate and member of other affiliate programs, if you purchase something through one of these links and use the discount codes provided, we may earn an affiliate commission at no cost to you.

All products and brands recommended are hand selected by our team, so thank you for supporting us by clicking through!

What is Nature Study?

Nature study is a catch-all term that is education about the environment. It can mean from making observations about the environment around you, identifying plants and animals, learning to survive in nature, and everything in between.

Nature study can be extensive, but it can also be really casual. You can choose whatever works for your family.

Some of the benefits of nature study include your family feeling more connected with nature, more time outdoors (and away from screens), and generally happier kids (and adults) because of more time outdoors. It’s also really fun, and satisfying, to start learning the names of plants and animals that you regularly see in your environment.

Why Do Nature Study with Your Kids?

Nature study brings a deeper appreciate for nature, basically by definition. When we see nature primarily from the outside, and don’t think about how things connect or work together, it’s easier to ignore the effects of our actions on the environment. Once we see ourselves as a part of nature, rather than apart from nature, which often happens from better understanding of the world around us, we are able to be better stewards of the environment.

Nature study gives you and your kids a stronger sense of place. With so much of life taking place indoors, and so many people who move frequently for work, children don’t develop a strong identity connected to the place they are from. Learning about your local environment can help build that sense of identity. This also helps us better appreciate the place that we are.

On the flip side, when we travel to new places, spending time in nature and making observations can help us to understand those places in a way that we wouldn’t if we weren’t making such close observations.

Finally, as a science educator, I strongly believe that everyone should learn the core skills of science research of asking questions and making observations. Science can be done by anyone, and the earlier we hone the skills of close watching (observation) and asking questions, the better we are at future science work.

How Can You Incorporate Nature Study into Your Family?

Nature study is really broad, so it’s definitely possible to find easy ways to incorporate nature study in your family routines.

I’ve sorted the resources below into ways to educate yourself or inspire your kids (books), casual or sporadic nature study ideas, systematic short-term ideas (one-off activities/curricula), longer-term curricula for systematic study, and courses for nature study (online and in person).

Whether it’s a daily practice of sitting outside and observing the world around you or a junior naturalist patch from a park you visit, your kids will enjoy their time outdoors and learn more as you incorporate nature study into their lives.

Books for Nature Study

Books to Read With Kids

Check out the TMM posts on spring, autumn, summer, and winter books for inspiration. I also really love the booklists on What Do We Do All Day.

An early 20^th century educational philosopher, Charlotte Mason, suggests that children should learn most of their material from “living books” and time in nature. A living book is simply a book that tells an engaging story. (For more on Charlotte Mason, I read a Philosophy of Education, but lots of others interpret her ideas into a modern society.) Thus, the intersection of these two ideas has led to many curated lists of living books for nature study. Here is one that has a broad range of ages from Simply Charlotte Mason.

Last fall, I discovered the Arthur Ransome books, which are available for free on Project Gutenberg and Archive.org. My daughter (10) especially enjoyed Pond and Stream and The Children’s Book of Seasons.

Arabella Buckley is another classic author who wrote living nature study books.

Another fun thing to do is read nature-related poetry. Non-fiction poetry is a fun way to learn about nature and also read poetry. Poetry has a great advantage for read aloud of not being very committing. I read Superlative Birds to my kids a few springs ago, and we all loved it. It’s a series of poems about birds, each of which has a special characteristic (longest migration, fastest speed, largest wingspan, smallest, and so on). I found the book in this excellent list of spring poetry to read aloud from What Do We Do All Day. For more of a feeling about nature poetry book, we enjoy collections of Robert Frost’s poems.

Books about animals, set in nature, can also be fun. For fans of Winnie the Pooh, we loved The Very, Very Far North and Just Beyond the Very, Very Far North. We all also loved Watership Down, which is definitely aimed for slightly older kids.

As an aside, there is no reason to stop reading to your kids. I still read to mine, and they are 10 and 12, and quite good readers. It’s a fun together time. Read aloud is something we do when other families may turn to screens. It connects us and doesn’t feed the craziness of constant connectivity. When we are on backpacking or bike touring trips, we always have a read aloud going (ok, well we do all the time, but especially then).

Be sure to check out books we publish here at Tales of a Mountain Mama.

Books to Educate Yourself and Inspire You

These books just are the tip of the iceberg of possibilities for learning about nature study. Be sure to check out TMM post on outdoors books to educate yourself. The classic is Anna Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, but there are hundreds of other books that you can choose from.

For more reference books, we like the National Geographic Book of Animals. Locally focused plant, animal, and rock ID books are great to have for reference.

Yes, you can scan something with your phone and see what it is, but there is skill in formal reasoning (logic) and close observation that is lost when you just find out what something is from a photo you scan. If you have posters or books for kids to look up species on their own, they will learn a lot more, and remember the species better.

We have a Peterson’s Backyard Birds of the Midwest poster up on our kitchen wall and refer to it regularly.

That being said, we do love Seek and Merlin in our house and use both regularly. Check out the TMM post on apps for outdoors for more ideas.

Nature study can include survival skills as well, at least in my view, so learning more about those topics might be helpful.

Child looking at a jar with bugs in it. — Looking at bugs in a jar is an easy way to start nature study.

Sporadic or Casual Nature Study for Kids

Outdoor Free Play

At the most basic level, encouraging outdoor play is a great way to start nature study. If the outdoor play can be minimally supervised, then children have more freedom to explore their environment. My children were super nervous to go into the woods behind our house the first time, but once we took them back there once, it became their favorite place to play. They become detailed observers of the environment around them from repeated visiting. As a bonus, their play in the woods has them doing some of the risky play now recognized to be really important for childhood development (cite anxious generation), including going to high places (they swing on grape vines and build bridges).

I had heard of the idea of a “sit spot”, but didn’t want to try to incorporate yet another thing into our lives. When my daughter started coming inside to report what she had seen in the woods (animals – both common and less common, plants – including invasives), I realized that the woods had become her sit spot. She doesn’t go to a single spot and just sit, but she is there often enough (nearly daily) that she makes interesting observations.

Sometimes my kids must be pretty still out there, because animals come quite close to them; one day they came in reporting that they had watched a snake molting. Other times they must be too close to hawk nests they don’t notice, because both have been dive bombed by a hawk. We were skeptical of our daughter’s story, but then found scabs in her head. My son got away without any actual scratches. Both were totally fine, and love the stories of being dive bombed by a hawk.

Child building constellations with marshmallows and toothpicks. — Nature study doesn’t need to feel like “school”. Here, one of Cece’s children is building constellations from marshmallows and toothpicks.

Book of Firsts

Our absolute favorite nature study tool is our Book of Firsts. This comes from Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding. I took a notebook (requires at least 366 pages) and labeled each page with a day of the year. I put in 12 post-it tabs on the side for easy navigation. When we observe something new (for the first time that year/season), we put it on the date, with the year noted.

This year, when we noticed snowdrops for the first time, we were able to go back and see that they were two weeks later than last spring, confirming our suspicion that we were having a colder winter than previous years. This led to an interesting conversation about weather vs climate and how they are different.

Bird Feeder and ID Poster

One light touch nature study idea is to set up a bird feeder by a kitchen window (ours is strung from the kitchen to porch on photo frame wire) and to have a bird ID poster or posters inside. We love watching the birds. They often end up in our book of firsts near the start of a season. We have a Peterson’s Backyard Birds of the Midwest poster on the kitchen wall and some printed out ID sheets from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Citizen Science

The bird feeder also helps us participate in my next suggestion for nature study: citizen science projects. We often participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, but also have their Urban Bird citizen science kit. Other citizen science projects include precipitation monitoring and snow depth (see our Winter Unit Study post for more winter nature study ideas). This can be sporadic, short-term, or long-term.

Child looking at a moon phases diagram made out of cream sandwich cookies. — Both Cece’s family and mine have made moon phase diagrams from sandwich cookies. Here is one of Cece’s children working on this project.

Hiking

Another casual nature study suggestion is to go for hikes as a family. When you go hiking, you can take time to observe nature. One year I took my kids and a friend on a short backpacking trip. My friend is a biology professor. She and my daughter were checking all the ferns for spores, identifying mushrooms, and just generally observing the nature around us. My daughter learned so much about plants on that trip. We didn’t actually ID anything out in the field, but looked up some of the most surprising observations later in books and on Seek.

For ideas about how to get your family hiking, check out TMM posts on hiking with kids, including Hiking Safety for Kids, 50 Hiking Games for Kids, and Best Hiking Gear for Kids.

Child trying to light a fire with a fire stick (friction method). — Although lighting fires is part of other outdoor education, it can be nature study as well. Finding the wood and learning what types burn well, thinking about where to find dry wood, and setting up a fire in a safe place can all fall into the category of nature study.

Junior Ranger, Junior Naturalist, and Other Ranger/Volunteer Programs

These are programs typically aimed at 5-12 year old children visiting a park, forest, or backcountry location for a short period of time. Often the children need to complete some activities in a book, and then they earn an award (often a badge). My kids have done the Junior Naturalist Program run by the Appalachian Mountain Club a few times while staying at their huts. They have separate programs for younger (5-8) and older (9-12) kids, as well as for the winter.

I have also seen this type of program at national parks and national forests.

Sometimes parks won’t have a particular badge kids can earn, but will instead have scavenger hunts or other interactive ways to teach children about the local environment.

Many parks hold ranger talks in the evenings at campsites, and these are usually worth checking out. I’ve had a lot of fun running them at Appalachian Mountain Club huts, and can say with certainty that it’s always exciting to have people join the programs.

Child sitting outside in front of pack boards working on a workbook. — Here is Colby at age 6 working on the AMC Junior Naturalist book. He was so excited to be recognized at breakfast the next morning.

Professional Organization and Agricultural Extension Office Educational Materials

I am a geologist, so I know specifically about geology programs, but I am confident other field-based sciences have organizations that produce these kids of things.

The American Institute of Professional Geologist produces lessons for Earth Science Week that they will mail you FOR FREE if you just ask them nicely (aka fill out a form). These are materials for classroom lessons, but they can easily be used at home. They have other K-12 learning materials on their website as well.

Similarly, agricultural extension offices usually have educational materials. Again, they are often targeted for classroom use, but they can usually be adapted to home or community use. One year, we had incubating eggs at home because they accidentally got too many. I introduced the extension outreach coordinator to our local children’s librarian and then we had hatching chicks in the library for several springs. Super cool!

Systematic Nature Study

Nature study can happen over short periods of time or in casual ways, as we’ve seen in the previous section. What if you want something more structured? Although the recommendations in this section start to delve into the world of homeschooling curricula, they are by no means limited to homeschoolers. Many are set up to be one subject among many that students study, so they likely will only take an hour or so a week. A few are more in depth, but could be fun for summer or school holidays. You can always pick and choose what parts of a curriculum work for you and which don’t work.

But before the recommendations, first a word on homeschooling philosophy. If you start to poke around the internet looking for nature study, you’ll quickly run across references to the early 20^th century educational philosopher, Charlotte Mason. Among the ideas she promoted is the idea that children should spend as much time outdoors, in nature, as possible. She recommends 4-6 hours a day on days when the weather is “tolerable”. Her definition of tolerable is pretty broad, given how bad access to quality outerwear was at the turn of the last century.

Last fall, I decided I needed to actually read one of her books to understand her philosophy better and not just be working off other people’s interpretations of her philosophy. I learned that she didn’t just expect kids to stay outdoors and run around like crazy people. She expects that the caregiver (in her world, this was always the mother) would send the kids off with missions (“find a new flower”) and the come back to her to get a short lesson (disguised as fun) about the thing they are bringing back.

I almost fell over when I read her describe how it would be straightforward to teach a child to pace distances and then make scale maps of his or her surroundings while out in nature, simply because they have had these sneaky mom lessons their entire childhood. We are not there in our household, for sure! On the other hand, teaching some basic map and compass skills can be fun for you and your kid. Our post on Basic Navigation Skills for Kids is a great way to get started.

Blossom and Root

This is a Charlotte Mason-inspired curriculum that we are testing out this spring (sort of) with our daughter. To be more precise, we are using the nature study, art, and science (oceanography) sections. She is 10 and would be in 5^th grade if she were in school.

The nature study component can be purchased separately for all levels. It is a digital curriculum, but they have partnered with a printing company if you want to get it printed. We did that so that we don’t have to use screens to do all our schoolwork. I also find it much easier to keep us organized if I have physical copies of books. However, the digital nature could be a bonus for people who are traveling. You can either print the nature study notebook, which has metadata (header information) printed in a template or buy a notebook to use.

What I’m describing here is the level 5 nature study; I don’t know if others are set up similarly, but I think they are.

Two pictures showing measuring snow water equivalent in a water bottle. — Measuring snow water equivalent is an easy, but really powerful, way to understand water storage in snowpacks.

Level 5 is divided into 4 seasons with 3 categories of activities for each season. Each category has 4 weeks of activity. This comes out to 48 activities for the year. I don’t think it is really designed to be done independently at this age, but that’s how it goes in our family, and it is working fine.

My daughter has a watercolor notebook that she decorated. To make the metadata easier, I made labels with each of the 48 prompts, so she can just stick them on the page and fill in the date, location, temperature, and weather. Writing is hard for her, so this helps with that barrier.

Each week she chooses a topic, reads the prompt and directions, puts the label on the page, and goes out to make her observations. Some are little experiments while others are just observation based. She records her observations with painting, drawing, or, very rarely, actually taking notes.

At this age, I am more concerned with her making the observation than with whether she is taking good notes on them. Given that she does this on her own, I can’t set the bar so high that she won’t get the work done. Charlotte Mason really promoted kids learning to paint nature, so I figure I am sort of working in that spirit (with the caveat that she believed kids should paint well and I am totally unqualified to provide such instruction and therefore do not try to enforce that).

Two photo set showing child calibrating a homemade barometer and the homemade barometer. — One of the fun projects my kids have done this spring is to create and use a homemade barometer. Here, my son (now 12) is calibrating it.

Treehouse Schoolhouse

TMM member Cece recommended this curriculum. She has used it with her kids and loved using it to explore nature. It is more of an all-in-one curriculum set in nature, so depending on your needs, it may be a bit more than you want. On the other hand, if you want to do some nature-based homeschooling or supplemental work during the holidays, it may be a perfect choice.

Wild Earth Lab

These beautiful science units are affordable, digital curriculum that you can purchase and print at home. They are totally gorgeous! I bought the snow geometry and snow science/hydrology ones for my kids a couple of years ago (then ages 8 and 10) as part of our Winter Unit Study. Today, I used part of them with my college students and they complemented the materials. Amazing! My implementation of these units in my winter unit study is explained further in that post.

These materials are actively being developed, so there are many more topics than I remembered, and I am excited to try some more for my family (and college students).

Wildwood

This is a totally free, online, secular Charlotte Mason curriculum. The authors have made a point to go back to primary Charlotte Mason sources and to try to translate her exact recommendations to a modern, secular curriculum. After reading a primary source myself and looking through this curriculum, it is the closest match I have found. Plus, it’s free! So you can try out bits and pieces and see what works for you.

Wild Learning

This is an elementary school math curriculum based around nature. It has all the main topics you would find in a typical elementary math curriculum, but completed in nature. It has levels from kindergarten through fifth grade.

They are also developing a language arts program and currently have two levels.

Harbor and Sprout

Harbor and Sprout is another nature-based homeschool curriculum. It is more of an all in one curriculum, so you will get a lot of subjects with it. I have heard great things about this curriculum as well.

Child dissecting flowers. — TMM Member Cece’s child is dissecting flowers as part of their family’s nature study.

Nature Journaling

Nature journaling can be a low barrier to entry way to start engaging with nature. The journal can be answering prompts (dozens of books of nature journal prompts are available online) or can be less structured. For example, you can give your child a notebook and ask them to go outside and sit for 10 minutes, then write down what they see around them. This can be a way to teach close observation, as well as teaching the skill of being alone with yourself.

Nature Art

Nature art can be an excellent way to engage your kids with the outdoors. Charlotte Mason recommends teaching kids to watercolor paint from a young age. To be perfectly honest, I am not remotely artistic, but my daughter loves art. We use her nature study (from Blossom and Root) as a way for her to explore her art interests in a nature setting. Another option is Wild and Free. They have monthly activity packets that are always gorgeous and include many nature-based art activities.

Child drawing in a nature journal. — Cece’s children, like mine, also keep nature journals.

Courses for Nature Study

If you want to take a course from someone else to beef up your skills, or get your kids out of the house, definitely check out our post on Outdoor Education Courses for Kids and Families.

Be sure to look at what your local park system has as well. They likely have courses ranging from drop in daytime activities for homeschoolers and preschoolers to week long summer camps. They may run youth outings programs as well.

In addition, look for forest schools near you. These are often targeted at really little kids (pre-school age), but sometimes have programs for older kids either as a day away from a traditional classroom or for homeschoolers.

As a plug for a particularly cool program, Inspiring Girls. Someone I was in graduate school with started the Girls on Ice program, which has grown to multiple programs in several countries over the years. They take girls on adventures with a scientist, a guide, and an artist for fully funded courses. The girls learn skills from the three co-leaders while completing an epic outdoor adventure. The first courses were on a glacier on Mount Baker, Washington.