Has anyone done nature study in high school?

[Slache]

What resources did you use and what advice do you have? Thank you. 

[historically accurate]

Kids did Build Your Library 10 in 9th and 10th grade (2 kids together). It has Biology paired with "Nature Art".

 

BYL has the following resources scheduled:

Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling

The Curious Naturalist: Nature's Everyday Mysteries

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (although I don't think this was a book when my kids did it a couple years ago). 

 

I wasn't too involved, as I had just started working again. They just followed the guide mostly for that subject with some input from me, so I don't really have any helpful information. 

[Eos]

We did:

Ecological communities: they learned to look for and see the flow of energy throughout an ecosystem, how to analyze succession.

Dichotomous keys: they learned to use guides and keys for taxonomic classification.

Phenology: we keep a permanent Nature! list on our fridge and write what we observe with the date and occasionally weather. We get inspired to look up new things we see but also to look back on previous years to see when those same things arrived or happened.

Nature journaling: using a lighted hand lens and good quality colored pencils, they did similar to what they did as kids but with Latin names, ecological significance, and more detail.

They learned to key out, draw, and the Latin and common names, ecological significance, and life cycles of the following local phenomena: birds, mammals and skulls, invertebrates, fish (only lightly), trees, winter weeds, forbs, woody shrubs, mushrooms, moss, and lichen (lightly), tracks, ferns, geology, amphibians and vernal pools. We also did some foraging and made tinctures and teas.

Some of the books we used: Forest Trees of Maine, Sibley's and Peterson's guides to birds, Newcomb's wildflowers book, Reading The Forested Landscape, Bark: Field Guide to Trees, Nature in Winter, Naturally Curious, A Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (for inspiration.) Some of these are New England-based but I'm sure you can find specific, relevant books for your location.

A couple of good apps: I-naturalist, Merlin. Obviously now there is Picture This and the google version but a) we didn't have those and b) the process of keying by hand and book makes you really look closely at what's in your lens.

We had a field bag with binoculars, hand lenses for each person, colored pencils, notebooks, a few books - usually a bird, tree, and forb key - snacks, water, wool socks for the inevitable cold feet, a first aid kit, bags to collect things into.  We also had these and a little watercolor set https://www.amazon.com/Coloring-Watercolor-Painting-Powdered-Attractive/dp/B0C2KFZC8B/ref=asc_df_B0C2KFZC8B/?

Seasonality is really important to understanding nature so we went to the same places in different seasons to compare and draw. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 11 by Eos

[ScoutTN]

3 hours ago, Eos said:

We did:

Ecological communities: they learned to look for and see the flow of energy throughout an ecosystem, how to analyze succession.

Dichotomous keys: they learned to use guides and keys for taxonomic classification.

Phenology: we keep a permanent Nature! list on our fridge and write what we observe with the date and occasionally weather. We get inspired to look up new things we see but also to look back on previous years to see when those same things arrived or happened.

Nature journaling: using a lighted hand lens and good quality colored pencils, they did similar to what they did as kids but with Latin names, ecological significance, and more detail.

They learned to key out, draw, and the Latin and common names, ecological significance, and life cycles of the following local phenomena: birds, mammals and skulls, invertebrates, fish (only lightly), trees, winter weeds, forbs, woody shrubs, mushrooms, moss, and lichen (lightly), tracks, ferns, geology, amphibians and vernal pools. We also did some foraging and made tinctures and teas.

Some of the books we used: Forest Trees of Maine, Sibley's and Peterson's guides to birds, Newcomb's wildflowers book, Reading The Forested Landscape, Bark: Field Guide to Trees, Nature in Winter, Naturally Curious, A Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (for inspiration.) Some of these are New England-based but I'm sure you can find specific, relevant books for your location.

A couple of good apps: I-naturalist, Merlin. Obviously now there is Picture This and the google version but a) we didn't have those and b) the process of keying by hand and book makes you really look closely at what's in your lens.

We had a field bag with binoculars, hand lenses for each person, colored pencils, notebooks, a few books - usually a bird, tree, and forb key - snacks, water, wool socks for the inevitable cold feet, a first aid kit, bags to collect things into.  We also had these and a little watercolor set https://www.amazon.com/Coloring-Watercolor-Painting-Powdered-Attractive/dp/B0C2KFZC8B/ref=asc_df_B0C2KFZC8B/?

Seasonality is really important to understanding nature so we went to the same places in different seasons to compare and draw. 

 

 

 

 

 

High school me would have LOVED this! 

[Pintosrock]

I haven't done this, but I would certainly look into Citizen Science. Our local nature center & park system is looking for volunteers to monitor area ponds/lakes. Something like that would be fun!

[cintinative]

I taught a junior high level class but you could certainly make it high school level. When I was in high school I took a course called Field Biology and Ecology.  In my high school course we covered:

tree identification using leaves

tree identification using dichotomous keys

Tree identification from buds/branches in winter

wild edibles

wildlife of ponds--fish, frogs, etc.

amphibians of our area

reptiles of our area

macroinvertebrates

bird silhouettes

bird songs

dyeing using wild materials (we used pokeberries)

animal tracks and scat

prairie life

Insects--identification and an insect collection

Presentation about something related to the natural world

-----

I added for my class:

vernal pools and nighttime salamander migration

raptors/birds of prey

bird eggs and birds nests

bird feathers

owl pellet dissection

Dissect a hornet's nest (this was too cool--call your local exterminators and see if they can get you one)

 

 

Some suggestions: 

Find a fish and wildlife book as a spine

I found the Handbook of Nature Study helpful for developing questions for observations like when I assigned them to observe birds or squirrels

See if your local Department of Natural Resources has state specific wildlife booklets. Ohio has some very nice field guides specific to our state.  

Ask about programs at the nearest nature center. The nature center at our state park did a program for us on wild edibles and the importance of prairies.

 

Edited April 11 by cintinative

[cintinative]

@Slache PM-ing you my google drive link. Syllabus from the co-op class is attached.

Nature Study Syllabus rev 040815.docx

Edited April 11 by cintinative

[cintinative]

One more recommendation, if your local state park has a BioBlitz, those are great. Definitely make an effort to be there. They haven't had one here in years but when they did, there was programming all weekend and free camping.

One cool thing they did was shock the fish in the lake so they could do a census of species. It was definitely not something we could have done ourselves.

 

Edited April 11 by cintinative

[pmeilaen]

We will try Outdoor School: Tree, Wildflower, and Mushroom Spotting and Outdoor School: Animal Watching in addition to monthly nature studies (home ecology) in our state park.