18 Sep First Nature Journal Entry
Mom, if you’re reading this, you should probably stop now. I mean, it’s really cool and about your grandchildren and honoring God’s creation and I certainly wouldn’t want to miss it, buuuut you definitely don’t want to see this. I’ll tell ya about it later.
So a couple posts ago, I mentioned how we found this snake skin on our walk. We’re approaching school in a very classical manner, memorizing lots of facts (we call them foundational “pegs” in Classical World). But when it comes to the arts and nature, we appreciate Charlotte Mason’s perspective. I’d love to geek out more on names and acronyms (maybe you’d love it too), but I really just wanna show you what these kids did!
We found him completely intact, head to tail. You could even see where his eyes and mouth had been covered!
(I’d already cut off his tail for their journals.)
I asked the kids to draw something that reminded them of their walk.
Corban drew a map. (He’s super into maps these days. Mostly treasure maps, but also zoos, malls, and homemade anythings.) I labeled the parts he identified for me and wrote a summary sentence.
Then I cut a piece of the snake skin for each of us, and we glued them on our papers, wherever we wanted. For a little artistic fun, we got some old stamp pads out (I knew they’d come in handy someday) and pressed the snake skin into the pads and then onto our papers. (Corban’s is green/teal up there. Jaeda’s is yellow down there.)
The Jaeda Darling isn’t the most gentle of creatures, as you can see by the piles of crushed snake skin under her arms.
She saw me drawing the patterns of both sides of the snake and imitated it on her own paper.
She even tried to paint the snake to produce the pattern. She’s always thinking out of the (my) box.
My boardwalk drawing didn’t show up here very well, too light, I suppose. But I added a little poem. I’d love to use different/better paints someday and keep improving my skills.
After creating such beautiful work, I knew in that moment that we had to keep them. And not just on our hanging art string. These needed to be recorded, kept intact. So we found three old binders (perks of attending conferences and YES I wanted my own binder) and lots of old protective sleeves to slide our work into. Then I printed some fun cover pages and let the kids get crazy with colored pencils, markers, stamps, glue, stencils, and colored sand (leftover from the Art Gala several years ago!). So fun, so them.
And just for kicks and giggles
BOO!
(Why in the world am I not afraid of this but am terrified of a puny spider?)
((My skin just shivered at typing that word. Ick.))
Alisha Miller
Posted at 16:17h, 19 SeptemberYou already know this, buuuuuuut…. I love this post. I love that creepy snake skin. I love your Charlotte Mason-y side coming out. I love all of the different artwork. The different personalities and abilities between children just fascinate me! Keep up the awesome homeschooling!