Fall leaves nature journal

The leaves are finally starting to turn riot in Central Park. Watching them turn always reminds me of a tradition C.Z. and I had in our early days of homeschooling. Anyone could think of it, no doubt, but what I like about it is that though it is extremely simple, it isn't dumbed down or silly in the least. A child (or even an adult) can do as much or as little with it as he likes, and it's a good exercise in observation. I think Charlotte Mason would approve!

• The procedure is simple enough. You take a walk in the park and gather a few leaves. Of course, C.Z. preferred to gather a few hundred, but after a while I'd say, "Well, okay, but you'll have to carry them, and...hmm, do you suppose maybe we should leave a few for the other children?" (Young New Yorkers have to learn very early to share with a few million people.) So, we tried to come home with only our very favorites.

These was one of the last leaf pages we did, after C.Z. had already learned to mix colors pretty well.

• When you get home, have the pencils, watercolors, field guides and paper ready. Children soon learn that leaves shrivel overnight, and parents soon get busy with other things, like dinner.

• Place a leaf on a piece of paper. Sometimes we used sketch pad paper, but often enough, we used printer paper, because that's what we had. After a while, we learned to arrange several leaves on the paper to create a composition. Trace the leaf's outline with a pencil.

• Get out the colors and try to imitate what's going on in the leaf. Here, it might help to know basic color mixing. Not only do blue and yellow make green, but they look better mixed loosely on the paper than dutifully colored with a straight green pencil. Brown leaves usually have a lot of bright yellow shining through. And a touch of contrasting color, like red or blue, often makes the shadows look interesting, but too much muddies the color. But don't be afraid to mess up. Experimenting is half the fun, and the beauty of it is, you can always get more leaves and paper!

• Sometimes we used more pencils, sometimes more watercolor, and sometimes we used both. And sometimes we looked at D'Aulaire books for color-mixing ideas. I feel fairly confident suggesting that you can do this, because C.Z. doesn't consider herself to be a particularly good draftsman, but tracing the leaves gave her just the right amount of encouragement to do the rest.

• After you've done all that observation through tracing and coloring, identify the leaf. Many leaves are easy enough to identify with a field guide--the maples, the oaks, and gingkos, for instance. But we eventually came across a few that stumped us, like the ailanthus that hung over our old building's back patio. Eventually we learned to bring home a bit of the seed pod from the park if it was available, or to take a good look at the tree's bark. Since we were usually in a public park, and at any rate shared all our trees with others, we only took leaves that were on the ground, and we didn't shave off any bark. So we had to be very observant on the spot.

To be honest, we're still not 100% sure this is an ailanthus leaf, but we learned a lot about shapes and pods while trying to identify a branch that fell onto our building's patio!

• Then we wrote the name of the leaf below the drawing. C.Z. was not enthusiastic on the subject of penmanship or spelling as a young child, so sometimes this was the hardest part, but it did give her practice using something real, and to this day we know what some of these leaves are only because she took the trouble to label them the day we brought them home.

• When we finished, we simply slipped the pages into a small notebook with plastic sleeves. We added a few pages each year for three or four years. In the end, we had a nice little leaf nature journal, and lots of happy memories of crunching and sloshing (depending on the weather) through leaves on fall days in the park.

The opening page to C.Z.'s old leaf notebook

(You can tell she already had strong opinions about the colors of her letters.)

I'm sure New York City isn't the first place most people think of when they consider nature education. (For one thing, kids aren't even allowed to climb the trees, and even the prospect of jumping in a pile of leaves can be unsavory considering some of the trash one finds underneath.) And I've heard more than one New Yorker proudly claim to have no interest in nature whatsoever. But our family has always liked nature, and the challenge of finding nature in New York City rather invigorated us than defeated us. We've always been a little contrary, but really, it's not nearly so much the pleasure of being obstinate that drives us outdoors as the smell of wet leaves, and the jewel-like contrast of bright red maple leaves with their gray surroundings of fog, looming park rocks, and sodden sky.

You know it's fall when...

...you see the Winter Wren

...you go to the park and all the fall birds have arrived--White-throated Sparrows, Juncos, and Titmice. The ubiquitous and year-round House Sparrows have started flying around in puffed and close-knit flocks, and if you look closely, you see a migrant or two, like this Black-throated Blue Warbler, stopping on its way south:

The little Winter Wren (at top) is only 4 inches long. When it stretches out its neck at the foot of a tree (they're bush dwellers), its whole body moves. It's not really big enough to move just its head. Luckily, its tail sticks up for balance. I saw one Tuesday--a real treat, because I've only seen one once before!

Some birds are just around in unusual numbers, like the Phoebe and the Blue Jay. The Robins haven't left yet, but the Grackles have arrived, and so has the Sapsucker. Even the Pigeons are flying around in circles instead of barely getting out of the way of the buses. It's a gregarious, bustling moment.

But I'm holding out for the Golden-crowned Kinglets, my favorites of all the songbirds. They usually pass through in flocks at about this time:

All photos from Wikipedia Commons

UPDATE, October 11: We saw our Kinglets today! They were all over the North Woods of Central Park, both the Golden-crowned and the Ruby-crowned. They were extremely cooperative, hanging upside down off branches at close range and at eye-level. They almost seemed to be following us!

We also saw another Winter Wren. We were actually there because someone had reported a Sedge Wren, a bird which hasn't been seen in NYC in forty years. We knew where it had been seen this morning, but alas, it was a no-show. Still, a lovely day with lots of birds!

***

Whenever we've had a moment this week, C.Z. and I have been looking at everything we can find under the microscope. I doubt this is systematic enough to "count" as lab science, but it's really fun! This week we've seen hair, mold, an onion tip, leaf cells, bacteria, diatoms, other unidentified micro-organisms, and a Euglena. I suppose high school science teachers wouldn't be impressed, but I thought it was hilarious when C.Z. put down her violin right in the middle of Nutcracker practice, put her eye up to the microscope and started talking to the light-shy Euglena, whom we had to constantly chase down, "Oh, you're so cute! I see you found something to eat. That's great!" And who knew that protists could dance to "The Waltz of the Flowers"?

School year so far...

One skill C.Z. has picked up this year: How to read on a moving train.

So far this has been the school year of logistics. Honestly, I'd rather be doing something cozier, and I still think we can get there. But a mother's job is also to provide her children with the skills they'll need as adults, and right now I'm trying to help C.Z. to budget her time wisely, so as to open up those (very important!) opportunities for adventure, serendipity, and yes, even coziness.

During the past two or three weeks, I'd noticed that C.Z. is having to spend the whole of Sunday afternoon catching up with assignments instead of family. So yesterday I added up her workload for each day, and consistently came up with over seven hours per day, including the music school day. I hadn't realized this before because she had been doing her own schedule on iCal, but I made my own spreadsheet so that I could see it better. Our first job was to get a true picture of the situation, so we could figure out what to do about it.

Now, I know that some people would say that the typical high school student is supposed to study more than seven hours each day, that of course they study on Sunday, and that we need to be realistic. But (respectfully) our family is not going for the typical Manhattan-style achiever described in The Organization Kid. We are realistically admitting that we can't do everything well. And that since the default direction of our culture is towards over-scheduling, it takes active planning to avoid it. So here are my first draft thoughts (feel free to add to them):

A lot (even most) of C.Z.'s current busyness is violin-related (even injury-related), but a good bit is also related to outside academic classes. And some of our busyness was quite unpredictable, as busyness often is. I'm so glad we said no to some perfectly good classes and activities that we were considering! Even so, I have identified one class that we could possibly drop if necessary. Also, there are some very creative books and activities that I'd love to add to the mix for depth, but I know from experience that adding them now would just compound the logistical emphasis, which would defeat the point.

Also, despite the fact that this fall's schedule is not my ideal one, there are some decidedly good things that are coming out of it. They are, in fact, just the kinds of things I was hoping for when we allowed more outside classes, and more formal classes, this year. Here are a few:

• C.Z. has found that she can write, and even likes to write. She has a kind, but firm, and really intelligent literature teacher, who "velocitizes" the kids, as my husband would say. Each essay gets just a little longer, until they're writing full length expository papers with confidence.

• She's learned to read on the subway. For years, C.Z. said she couldn't concentrate well-enough to read on the train, but I think necessity was the mother of a new skill, and now she enjoys it. Last week she even read Great Expectations while "surfing," because the train was so crowded she couldn't find a bar to hold on to! This is a good development, because we've been spending a lot of time on trains lately.

• She seems to find textbook biology easy. I was somewhat surprised, as I didn't ever think we were doing what I'd call "enough" science. It was mostly an informal hobby of ours, and mostly hands on. I'd expected her to know, say, bird species already, but not polysaccharide chains. Where did that come from?

• After a long hiatus, C.Z. is taking music composition again! (Even though she has very little time to work on composition. But she can take things she's already done for critique, which is a good start.) I like to see her taking composition, because I think it's such a strong interest, and it's not always easy to find opportunities for it.

• Generally, C.Z. seems up to the challenge of this year, even though the work is taking a lot of time. It helps, no doubt, that she chose the classes. And it shows me that informal education in the early years can lead to success in formal work once a child is old enough to want to.

I'm still looking for a bit of cozy learning this year, but we'll find it somehow. Ideally, what I'd like to see is that C.Z. realizes she can work hard, sees the wonderful opportunity for leisure (in the true sense) that the next four or so years hold, and goes beyond the presently necessary emphasis on logistics into the realm of very real, connected, and deep learning.