How Our Homeschool Nature Study Teaches us to See Beauty Everywhere

“Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?” said Mr. Andrews to one of his pupils at the close of a holiday.

Oh—Robert had been to Broom Heath, and round by Camp Mount, and home through the meadows.  But it was very dull.  He hardly saw a single person.  He had much rather have gone by the turnpike-road.

Presently in comes Master William, the other pupil, dressed, I suppose, as wretched boys used to be dressed forty years ago, in a frill collar, and skeleton monkey-jacket, and tight trousers buttoned over it, and hardly coming down to his ancles [sic]; and low shoes, which always came off in sticky ground; and terribly dirty and wet he is: but he never (he says) had such a pleasant walk in his life; and he has brought home his handkerchief (for boys had no pockets in those days much bigger than key-holes) full of curiosities.

He has got a piece of mistletoe, wants to know what it is; and he has seen a woodpecker, and a wheat-ear, and gathered strange flowers on the heath; and hunted a peewit because he thought its wing was broken, till of course it led him into a bog, and very wet he got.  But he did not mind it, because he fell in with an old man cutting turf, who told him all about turf-cutting, and gave him a dead adder.  And then he went up a hill, and saw a grand prospect; and wanted to go again, and make out the geography of the country from Cary’s old county maps, which were the only maps in those days.  And then, because the hill was called Camp Mount, he looked for a Roman camp, and found one; and then he went down to the river, saw twenty things more; and so on, and so on, till he had brought home curiosities enough, and thoughts enough, to last him a week.

Whereon Mr. Andrews, who seems to have been a very sensible old gentleman, tells him all about his curiosities: and then it comes out—if you will believe it—that Master William has been over the very same ground as Master Robert, who saw nothing at all.

Charles Kingsley (Madam How and Lady Why)

I used to be deathly afraid of spiders.

Even the merest mention of a spindly leg, fuzzy body, or more than two eyes was enough to make me run for a shoe or, even better, a vacuum with a really long cleaning wand. I hated them.

I can’t pinpoint any moment in my childhood that triggered this particular fear, but it existed as far back as I can remember. I had a strong aversion to anything that crept or crawled, but spiders, in particular, were my apparent nemesis.

This fear didn’t magically go away when my son was born, and as he got into the toddler years, he began mimicking my squeals of fright any time I saw a spider, which morphed into a dislike of insects in general for him. This made me so sad and also caused me to rethink how I reacted to these little creatures. I still didn’t like them, but I managed to get into the habit of controlling my outbursts and squishing them without drawing attention.

And then we started homeschooling.

It’s incredible to me the myriad ways homeschooling has changed our lives for the better. I could probably write a year’s worth of blog posts sharing all of these positives, but nature study would have to be close to or even at the very top of the list. Nature study changed how I look at the world.

I think it really started when we began paying closer attention to birds in early 2015 for our preschool “curriculum.” As I mentioned in my backyard birding post, up to that point, all birds were the same in my mind. They were mainly grayish-brown, pretty much the same size, made the same sounds, and they all ate worms. They also all built nests, and every single one of them flew south for the winter. They were sort of like extras in a movie, just flying around in the background and sometimes making noises while we humans lived our lives. Of course, I knew there were variations within this. Obviously, ducks and geese were different and blue jays were blue, but in general, all those little songbirds were pretty much the same.

And then we got a birdfeeder that we put right next to the window on our deck, and it blew up all of my preconceived ideas of birds. I learned that I knew nothing about birds, and I grew to love watching them, getting to know all of the different kinds, and really seeing them. Getting a new bird at the feeder was like adding to a collection, and now I can identify quite a few different species by sight and/or sound, which is not something I ever thought I would care about.

So going into our homeschooling journey, I loved birds and decided that nature study, whatever that looked like (because, honestly, I wasn’t really sure in the beginning), is a good thing because birds are neat. Fittingly, when we started Year 1 in 2017, the first nature study topic on the AO schedule was birds. In my planning post that year, I said I could handle birds, so I went in very confident in the nature study department.

When it came time to study invertebrates in 2018, however, I was a little more wary. Spiders were still my nemesis, and also, what was there really to study? They were all creepy-crawly and brownish-black and made webs, and a few of them had red hourglasses on their abdomens and could kill us. Was there more to know than that?

I mentioned that I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when I began to fear spiders, but I can pinpoint a moment when I began to be fascinated by them. It was the first time I really paid attention to a spider and, in particular, the beauty of a spider’s web. More specifically, it was the first time I saw this video:

This was the video that changed my view of spiders and inspired me to actually see them. I now actually stop to look at the beauty of their webs and observed their patience as they wait for prey and then rebuild their webs where the prey ripped them apart. I have seen holes in the ground where their little multi-eyed heads have popped out instantaneously to see if their meal had arrived. I have carefully stepped over enormous wolf spiders and false tarantulas on walks (that my old self would’ve reacted to quite loudly) and taken pictures of them to share with the world. I don’t know that I can say that I love spiders now, like I love birds, but I know that I at least love to observe them.

And I have nature study to thank for this. Whereas before, I saw a creepy-crawly, brownish-black blob frantically running across a wall, I now see an architect. An eater of bugs. Something that not only builds beautiful nets but also benefits us by keeping the insect population under control. I no longer squish them when I come across one, but usually, I just let them be or move them to a better place. This has even extended to the ones with the red hourglasses on their abdomens (which we have a lot of around our house) as long as they’re not in a heavily trafficked area.

It’s not just spiders that I have been able to see in a different light, but also the place where I live. I moved to Colorado from Minnesota in 1995 and have almost continuously struggled with the climate here. The verdant world of my youth included 10,000 lakes, a wide variety of trees, and the ability to germinate a seed just by popping it in the ground and letting mother nature do the rest. Colorado, on the other hand, is a semi-arid climate with a thin atmosphere and around 250 days of bright, blaring sunshine a year. In my mind, this meant that it was not really a place where the natural world could thrive.

But I was looking for the wrong natural world. A few years ago, after I observed how my kids came home with pockets full of rocks after every nature walk, I decided to schedule a term of geology study for my son’s science option. Again, my thinking with geology fell along the lines of the birds and the spiders in that rocks are rocks, and there aren’t very many variations within that. Not only did the book we read and the object lessons we did that term completely prove my thoughts wrong, but they also opened my eyes to appreciate the amazing rock formations in the field just down the road from our house that we visited every week. I didn’t actually see them until then. (It also didn’t hurt that many of the places mentioned in the geology book, like Pike’s Peak – my favorite mountain – and the Great Sand Dunes, are in Colorado!)

…many persons who live with the sky right over their heads, with the dawn breaking right into their bedroom windows, have never seen the sky or the dawn to think about them, and wonder at them! There are many persons who have never seen anything at all that is worth seeing.

Dallas Lore Sharp (The Fall of the Year)

I definitely was one of those persons who never saw anything that was worth seeing because I wasn’t really looking. I wasn’t actually seeing. I was just going through every day focused on what was right before me, and everything else around the edges of my vision was superfluous.

But there is joy in seeing. There is joy in noticing. Whereas I grew up running away from bugs, my kids stop their bikes to help a grasshopper across the sidewalk or even to give it a lift. They raise giant beetles and praying mantises in cages in their rooms, faithfully feeding them even when the season has changed and their food is harder to find. They notice the beauty of a beetle’s shell and come running to tell me that the meadowlarks have arrived in the spring.

Watching the patterns of the clouds in the sky and the deep blue of the dome above us can be breathtaking when you really look. Getting up early to see a lunar eclipse is humbling in many ways (and a solar eclipse at totality is even more so). Happening to come along as a caterpillar makes its way up a leaf stalk can be truly fascinating when you slow down and stop to watch. Observing the flight patterns and calls of tree swallows as they dodge and dart through the air above our yard is something we look forward to every spring. Warbling back and forth with a flock of wild turkeys is just plain fun. These are simple things, but when you open your eyes to see beauty in simple things, you can see beauty everywhere.

Nature study is a gift and opens our eyes to the things that are truly worth seeing.

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