Google "phenology". This is EXACTLY what I need! Very exact instructions and a reason beyond my own needs to collect data. I keep gravitating towards paganism to get my seasonal fixes, but I think phenology might be a better fix, than religious rituals. The rabbit trails of googling "phenology" lead to some excellent observations on shadows and where the sun and moon are in the sky, which are excellent activities for winter city dwellers. Also collecting data on ice build up on water. There are nearby rivers. The study of the rising, setting and placement of the sun and moon and logging atmospheric conditions looks to be great preparation for the busy spring activities of logging migration and budding. My first project is to try to find the most accurate way to measure temperature on my balcony. I could make this into an experiment, maybe. I've never had an accurate outdoor thermometer set up. The buildings blocked my view of the moon from my balcony most of the warmer months, but I'm looking forward to increased viewing ability this winter. I need to purchase a compass and whatever that thingy is that measures altitude, so I know where and when to look for it to peak out from the clouds. I also want to buy a door mat and some boots to put by my balcony sliding doors and start taking the time to step outside and view things every couple hours. During the summer the sun rose in the same break between buildings where the moon is now starting to rise, and I got into the habit of sipping tea out there while watching the sun rise. hot cocoa while watching the moon rise, will be nice. I'm excited about all the little projects I'm stumbling on that are perfect for winter studies to fully ready for the spring projects. What else can I measure accurately from a balcony? Pressure. Humidity, but not rainfall. There is much I can just look up online to at least get into the habit of logging conditions EVERY day no matter what.

This has been a great thread! Today I got The Nature Connection an Outdoor Workbook by Claire Walker Leslie, for free, at Borders with the coupon and Borders Bucks holiday special they were running. I like it better than her books for adults. I too love graph paper composition books! That is what I will be using. The nature journals as a time keeper is a good idea. I have a lot of memory loss problems due to my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I use a modified form of the morning pages and Franklin Covey worksheets to try and stay on track, but...I still often feel lost in time. I think taking time to document the seasonal changes in an organized fashion might help. Binoculars are now on my wish list :-) I need to look more into groups to join. I think that will be good for me. I was starting to do a lot of TAW artists dates in the spring, and starting to make contact with resources, lectures, etc...but had a bit of a relapse during the summer and just got all off track. I'm still working through the links and other online explorations. I also bought a book on bird watching at Borders for $1.33 and ordered another by a woman about her pet chickens. I have a workbook I started on birds last summer. And the library has a good documentary series. I think I want to do bugs first though.

I really like the look of the Penmanship to Praise capital letters.

I always figured that going from Koine to Attic might be like going from inner city street language to ivy league college language, but isn't that light years ahead of trying to enter an Ivy league with no English at all? To be accused of having bad habits, you have to know quite a bit of something!

Thanks everyone for all your input! Martha, I have the textbook Real Writing 2nd edition (later additions are very different). It has very detailed checklists for writing every different kind of paragraph, and some of the types are very applicable to science writing. I want to learn to explain, describe, compare, etc in my field notes. I would like to work on my art a bit too, but...that is not where my current fascination lies. Nan, I'm learning now that what I want to do isn't a nature journal, but more of field notes and lab journal. With my youngest child, we spent a lot of time on manipulative experiments, and as I read some of your old posts, I'm remembering we included purpose in addition to, and in place of hypothesis too, and we studied real lab journals and how different they were from the average high school experiment. Like you, doing what scientists did on the job, scared me, making me feel like it was too easy, because any lesson plans that included it were for junior high and elementary. We too ended out starting out with simple experience, but I learned to relax when my son would finish the 1st round of experiments and then come up with a whole new level of more sophisticated questions, that again led to even more sophisticated questions and experiments, and more research. I've forgotten a lot of what we did, but as I read more of your posts it's coming back. But we did mostly manipulative experiments, and I'm struggling to adapt this to observational experiments. I ordered the Creepy Crawler book and am hopeful it will be helpful. And yes, this is all self study with no time limits or anyone looking over my shoulder. My children are grown and were accelerated and entered college and employment quite early, and finished homeschooling 5+ years ago. Studying is my favorite way to self-soothe when stressed. Especially researching and organizing what I plan on doing, even more than actually carrying out my plans :-) So right now...I'm interested in applying the scientific method to nature journals/field notes/lab journals/natural history. Thanks for all the links. I'm having a grand time reading them.

I stopped using Saxon and then went back to it, later on, as we hit calculus. I should have stuck with it. I do like supplementing with the word problems in the Aufmann math texts, if i as willing to take 2 years to cover what scope and sequences say should be covered in one. If I were committed to a traditional high school scope and sequence, I'd use Saxon exactly how it is written to be used. There was a movie about a 1980s teacher who coached a whole class of low income minority students through the AP Calculus exam, using Saxon. He then went on to coach many more classes of students through the exam. Saxon works for many, many students. When people tried to tutor me and my son a bit, I think one of the reasons they didn't like the text, is that it covered so many topics per lesson, it was hard for them to quickly review the lesson before helping us.

Nan I am very interested in further discussion about this. If I'm gone from the forum for a bit, I'll be back. I might be suddenly offline for at least a few days, without any notice. In the meantime I'll do a search for natural history posts.

Hmmmm....I think I might have latched onto something. AP environmental science webpages. Here is a goldfish experiment, that has started my brain working. http://tnst.randolphcollege.edu/Jubilee/jubilee10/Gold%20Fish%20Lab%202010.pdf

I get so frustrated with finding high school level resources for science that use the scientific method for anything outside of a laboratory. Sigh!

Thanks for the Rainbow Resource lead :-)

Yes, thank you :-) I really want pretty handwriting....and in the style "I" chose! Handwriting says so much about us. but if we submissively adopted a style forced upon us, it says something about the person who forced it on us, not about us. It is time that I take ownership of how I write.

I will look for that!

Little House on the Prairie has the story about Mr Edwards meeting Santa in town and taking the presents to Mary and Laura, in a bundle on his head, while he swims across the river naked. They get so little and think it is so much. It's my all time favorite Christmas story.

I would really like to learn Spencerian. What are the best books?

I reposted the link. It looks like Ellen Booth church had a few versions of her "7 steps" articles.

Awe-manac Tarot for Writers Take Ten

I learned a LOT from Write Like Hemingway and reading his short stories. WLH says his short stories were of better quality than his novels. WLH led me to focusing more on short stories, rather than novels.

I have a friend who is a retired professor who taught math and science at several diffferent high schools and colleges. Despite her strong maths background, she LOVES the math book in my signature, and has been having a lot of fun with it lately with my girlfriend. They are doing proofs or something with it :-0 I don't know, but it's over my head :-0 I just am using the book as it is. Ancient Greek is fun :-) I have severe memory issues now...so need to pick fewer things to study, so I can do the repetition necessary. But I just love the Greek alphabet. My youngest really enjoyed his Greek lessons and despite his horrendous English handwriting, had a very pretty Greek handwriting. Check out the Learning Company for all sorts of DVD and audio courses in every subject. There are LOTS of literature curriculums. I really like the Masterpieces of Short Fiction curriculum. It uses the book the Story and it's writers I really like my new text Art in Focus A lot of the things my children learned best were the things I had a passion for and taught while we lived daily life, rather than those we set aside to tackle as a school subject. And learning...just kinda spreads out like ripples from wherever you start, and the whole pond seems to just get covered somehow, by the end. What makes your heart beat a little faster, when you think about learning?

Should we be applying the scientific method to nature journals? I found this article meant for younger children, but think it might be useful. Is there anything better? http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=639

I home schooled 2 children into junior college. Now I'm self educating just for the fun of it. My signature has listed the resources I'm using right now. I recommend working on increasing basic math speed and accuracy, and THEN hitting some high school textbooks. I like Saxon and Aufmann (remedial junior college texts) the best. The faster and more accurately you can do basic math, the more quickly you will move through high school math. I have found that intensively studying short stories, rather than novels, is a more efficient way to learn literary terms. As well as the Teaching Company lectures listed below, I really like Robin Wilson's Those Who Can and Paragons as a light supplement. The Teaching Company lectures I have listed under reading can be downloaded and put on an iPod. They frequently go on sale for $34.00 or less. I think I was sent a coupon and only paid $12.00 for one of them. I really like the book, Science Matters and I encourage Intensively studying the scientific method. Good luck, and enjoy the holidays with your precious little ones :-)

When I was after schooling I concentrated on math and biographies. And my younger child loved playing around with a little Latin, but I didn't try to accomplish anything significant. There just wasn't time. And people will probably think I'm nuts...but...I'd make time for a formal drawing curriculum, if I had it to do over. I read books about teaching writing, and taught writing by helping with their homework, not by having my own curriculum. Sometimes during the summer, we tackled a bit of writing. Math and biographies were the core of their after schooling. And we were conservative Christians at the time and did family devotions twice a day, that led to a lot of talking about a lot of things.

Skills and attitude, not knowledge, are what is most needed to plow through the high school subjects. A huge amount of knowledge can be acquired through video games, videos, fiction, etc. Maybe not with the accuracy and "correct" worldview of some of the favorite curriculums used here, but enough to create a base to start the high school texts on. For science, all that really needs to be covered...in my opinion...is a rock solid understanding of the scientific method. For history, it just happens, if the children are reading, or being read to, and talked to. So much of history was covered with my children, before and during high school, when we did family devotions. We covered a lot of church history and Christian biographies. I'm a STRONG believer in mastering the skills, and winging the knowledge.

We would do units on different sports. I would buy or get books from the library on a sport and I would devise drills that would improve the child's ability to play the game in a group, if he got the chance. For example, basketball drills included practice in shooting hoops and dribbling while standing in place and dribbling while running, and I'm not sure what else. We also had charts for cardiovascular fitness and strength training exercises. Sometimes I even devised tests for the units, both on the reading material, and the drills. Sometimes I found videos too. I took PE quite seriously, with my younger child, as we were not able to afford any outside activities in this area when he was in his teens, and he was quite the couch potato. We had a well thought out unit planned for each month, even when I was so burnt out I was just popping in videos for history.

My library had this one http://www.amazon.com/What-World-Eats-Faith-DAluisio/dp/1582462461/ref=wl_it_dp_v?ie=UTF8&coliid=IEJNL2FGTWLX1&colid=CLM5X0RGFFOI It was VERY interesting!

Those Who Can and Paragons are Science fiction short story collections, where the stories are broken up by the elements of fiction, and after each story, the author talks about that element of fiction.