Using the Handbook of Nature Study

Barb at the Handbook of Nature Study blog, has just posted an excellent piece on Nature Study in Home Education and making use of Anna Botsford Comstock's wonderful resource, Handbook of Nature Study.

Fall is a great time of year to give nature study a try if you haven't already been doing it, and a wonderful season to explore more deeply if nature study is part of your family's identity already.

Comstock's book is full of narrative descriptions of plants, animals, and insects, but did you know that she even has chapters on soil, minerals, and climate?

You can find Handbook of Nature Study through most home education retailers, on Amazon, and, for those of you who want to take a look but aren't ready to buy, you can get a free download of entire book from Internet Archive, including the diagrams and illustrations!

I want so much to reflect on our first meeting of the year, but my children need me! One is down with a fever and sore throat, the others are floundering...

Thoughts and reflections will come, but until then: thanks Karen, for opening your home to us again, and for starting us up so beautifully; thanks Liz for your thoughtful questions and input about the relevance of CM today; thank you Christine, for sharing your experiences and knowledge of scheduling, and for offering the freedom for each to find what works in their own family; thanks to each woman who attended, participated in the discussion, and made the meeting worth having; thanks Helen, for getting the library started smoothly and putting together the bookmark-schedules; thank you to all who brought desserts to share.

Here we go! Another year!

2009-2010 Library Listings now linked on the blog

After spending a day in late August with three other women going through the entire WHHE library collection, there were bins of books stacked in my living room, front porch and hallway! Now all 30 bins of books have all made it to Karen's home and have been subjected to the first sign-out time of the school year.

Thanks to those who worked on inventory with me: Sandra, Laurel, and Sandy. And thanks to Helen for stepping in to fill some of the void in library management.

If any of you, as members of the group, are willing to volunteer for library tasks (one time or ongoing), please leave a comment or email me (talsma at cyg dot net). We need help with set-up, check-out, clean-up, ordering missing parts for games, book repair, etc. Please indicate what kind of involvement you'd like to have, and we'll match you up with the right position.

There is now an up to date listing of WHHE books available for you to look at. It is organized by genre or subject and I hope you will find it easy to locate what you are looking for. Sign out of books will continue to be first come first served after the meeting - no holds will be permitted. Please look through the list, and if you are interested in a particular item that you don't see listed, put it in a comment on the blog and we'll do what we can to order it if it is suitable for a Charlotte Mason library. (Please note that we do not have books which are easy to find in the public library system - Dickens, for example.)

This morning I managed to get the current listing of library books uploaded to Keep and Share. This is a file sharing website that allows anyone to view a file, but not edit the shared version. To access the Library Holdings file, click the link in the right side-bar and Keep and Share will open, asking you if you want to download the file. It isn't a big file, and on my non-high speed Internet connection it took less than 30 seconds to download, so it shouldn't be onerous for most of your computers to handle.

Our First 2009-2010 Meeting is Coming Soon

You are warmly invited to kick off the school year with the Whole Hearted Home Educators’ Chocoholics Extravaganza on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The evening will feature a much requested discussion on how to plan and schedule your homeschool day, led by Christine Gayfer, home educating mother of 6 children ranging from 17 months to 15 years old. Christine, a popular speaker at the KWCHEA conference, has “a passion to encourage moms that the CM method is wonderful and doable in the midst of their busy lives”.

We will also be introducing this year’s wonderful book, When Children Love to Learn, by briefly discussing Chapter 1. As always, our extensive resource library will provide you with an abundance of the best materials available to support you as a homeschooler.

This year promises to be an exciting one, as we add in breakaway sessions for those who are home educating highschoolers. Eleven years ago, our group began to pursue a vision of educating our children at home in a way that would create a love for learning, rich in good literature and ideas, using the Charlotte Mason approach. This year, we want to explore how to do that with our highschoolers. How can we prepare our children in these final years of home educating in such a way that they can gain entrance to the future of their choice without losing their love for learning? How can we prepare our teens to be world changers who have been equipped for the purposes to which they have been called?

Our goal is to provide a stimulating evening in which home educators with children of all ages will be able to come away with fresh vision and skills. We wrap it all in a welcoming atmosphere with lovely refreshments to give a special night out to all of you deserving home educating mothers.

Please email Karen at rkpowell at 295 dot ca if you need directions.

Last year my family participated in this Monarch Rearing program and it was a fantastic Nature Study experience for us. We're doing it again this fall, and heard from Wings of Paradise that they still are able to accept orders for the kit.

(If you want to see some of our fun with the caterpillars and butterflies, click on the link to PeaceLedge in the sidebar, and then in PeaceLedge's topics list, choose butterflies.)

I couldn't upload the pictures from the email they sent me, but if you go to the Wings of Paradise website, you can find lots of info about the Monarch Rearing Program.

Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits are still available!

Order yours today!

• Last order date is September 11, 2009
• Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits are available while supplies last.
• A limited number of kits are available

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Once again we are taking orders for Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits - everything you need to Raise, Tag & Release your very own Monarch Butterflies!

Be amazed as your caterpillars miraculously develop into beautiful Monarch butterflies! Plus, this kit provides everything you need to RAISE, TAG & RELEASE your butterflies and track their migration to Mexico as part of the MonarchWatch international research project.

• AVAILABLE BY PRE-ORDER ONLY
• PRE-ORDERED MONARCH KITS MUST BE PICKED UP AT WINGS OF PARADISE ON SEPTEMBER 12th, 2009 between 10am and 4pm
• RECEIVE FREE ADMISSION FOR YOU & up to 3 GUESTS WHEN YOU PICK-UP YOUR KIT ON SEPTEMBER 12th, 2009 between 10am and 4pm

EACH KIT INCLUDES everything you need to RAISE, TAG & RELEASE five Monarch Butterflies: 5+ Monarch Caterpillars 1 Potted Milkweed Plant 1 Deluxe Collapsible Cage Caterpillar-Care Manual Lifecycle Poster 1 Pack of Milkweed Seeds 5 MonarchWatch Tags Monarch Watch Datasheet & Info