YMB #71 Nature Study Hacking: A Conversation with Joy Cherrick

Pam: This is Your Morning Basket where we help you bring truth, goodness and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone and welcome to episode 71 of the Your Morning Basket podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host and I am so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, on today’s episode of the podcast, we are joined by Joy Cherrick. Joy is a homeschooling mom of six kids who has a passion for nature study and on today’s podcast we’re going to talk about using some very simple nature study techniques to build a habit of nature journaling in your Morning Time. I think it’s a fascinating conversation that you’ll enjoy and we’ll get on with it right after this word from our sponsor. This episode of the, Your Morning Basket podcast is brought to you by Your Morning Basket Plus. Get the tools you need to put the joy back into your homeschool. If you have been wanting to do Morning Time in your homeschool, but you’re a little overwhelmed at the idea of which resources to use or which books should you choose, we have done all the hard work for you. Your Morning Basket Plus is how you can get more out of your Morning Time with less work for mom.

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Joy Cherrick is a homeschooling mother of six following the Charlotte Mason philosophy. She has a passion for introducing children and adults to the beauty of nature, and shares her simplified nature study plans on her website, naturestudyhacking.com. Joy also authors a monthly eNewsletter, Naturalist Monthly, where she shares nature journal prompts, nature lore and other ideas for parents and children to learn side by side about the world they live in. Joy, welcome to the podcast.

Joy:
Thanks for having me Pam.

Pam:
Well, I am just so excited to have you here. Start off by telling us a little bit about your family and your homeschool.

Joy:
Sure. My oldest is 10 and is in fourth grade and I have six kids. So then I’ve got a third grader, a first grader, kindergartner, and a four year old and a 20 month old. And I have three girls and three boys. We’re very even except the birth order. I’ve got the girl and the three boys and then two girls at the end.

Pam:
Okay. And so you do use Charlotte Mason, that’s the method or philosophy that you follow, correct?

Joy:
Yes, and I use Ambleside Online as our, I call it our spine, the backbone of our homeschool book selections. And then from there we pick and choose. We have a really thriving Charlotte Mason community here where I live. And so I collaborate with some of my other girlfriends. We’re always exchanging books and book list recommendations and all of that. So I have really enjoyed just diving into Charlotte Mason’s work and just trying to apply it in our homeschool.

Pam:
Oh, I love that. It’s always great to have a community that you can tap into and really enjoy working together on your homeschooling.

Joy:
It feels like, what did we call ourselves? It was coworkers. We’ll do peer reviews every now and then, that’s what we call it, where we’ll share our lesson plans with one another and it has really been that iron sharpens iron. So it’s just been really fun in this season to have that support even though I’m obviously by myself at home with my children doing the actual school part. But knowing I have that support behind me has really been great.

Pam:
Oh, that’s awesome. Well let’s talk a little bit about Nature Study Hacking because you introduced me to this idea the very first time I met you. We were having dinner at an event and you came up and you said, “I have these things that I want to show you.” And you gave me these little bound notebooks with your nature lesson plans in them. And I brought them home and I thought they were cool because it really was an easy way. It just seems so doable, an easy way to do nature study. So tell me a little bit about Nature Study Hacking and where that came from.

Joy:
Sure. Well I developed them for my family, but also I was collaborating for the next school year with one of my friends. We were going to do a couple of different subjects together but separately. Like at her house, at my house. So I really wanted to have some lesson plans for the next year because I was pregnant with our sixth child and I really wanted to make sure that my students were getting into their nature journals more regularly. Because up to that point I had really been good about studying nature and reading about it and exploring. But then the nature journals weren’t getting done regularly. And then I listened to, so Cindy Rollins has talked a lot about how she would have her students draw while she was reading and they would have all these nature books scattered around the table. And I thought, ‘Oh, you mean we don’t have to be just out amongst the wild?” because I just could never get field journals done. I always have a toddler or a baby in tow. I can’t instruct my older students in that way. So I really thought, “Okay, let me just pull it back and create some plans for the next year.” And what you saw was what I had actually done that school year. And it was so helpful to just pick it up and go, “Oh, well today this is what we’re doing and we’re journaling in this way or we’re getting a poem about this topic or we’re doing an object lesson, let’s study these things.” And they were so simplified, and I had done so much research ahead of time. I was like, “Man, I really want others to be able to have the benefit of using these.”

So that was where the idea came from. It was just necessity. But then I was able to refine them more just because I have the technical background to be able to do that. So it was just really a fun way to share that skill, I guess, the graphic design and all that with the homeschool community.

Pam:
Right. And you really did. I have a few of these myself and we’ve used them in our Morning Time. Everything is right there for you. It truly is an open and go thing. And one of the things I love about it is you don’t need a lot of stuff other than, we have our nature notebooks and our colored pencils and then our little, just the guidebook there in front of me and it gets done. So that’s one of the wonderful things about it.

Joy:
Well that was one of the other things. Sarah Mackenzie years ago wrote this post about spiral notebooks. I know she still talks about this. And I decided for a full year I would just dutifully handwrite my kids’ spiral notebooks each night. That was that year that I was pregnant. And through that, I was starting to write out their nature journal entries for that week. And it was really helpful because Sarah talks about, as you’re hand writing these things out, you realize you really need to keep it short because this is starting to get long.

Joy:
So it was through that discipline that I started to figure out, “Oh, okay, well it really needs to be short. We need to just be concise with what we’re going to do.” And then that was where I really wanted to know, “Okay, well what are the different types of nature journal entries that we could do?” Because I have been to several Charlotte Mason conferences and usually, I think every one I’ve gone to, there are a table where everyone shares their nature journals. And I started to notice that there was a huge variety of the types of nature journal entries that these different Charlotte Mason families were doing. Some of them were just full of writing. Some of them would have some writing and then they would maybe have a little picture on the side. Some of them would talk about the weather or it was a narration from just sitting outside and observing. And one of them drew a map. It blew my mind about all the different varieties because what I was seeing on the internet was everybody’s doing watercolor and this is the only way you can do nature journaling.

And I’m a researcher, I love to understand things all the way around. So I checked out dozens of books on nature journaling and started to research, “Oh, how does this naturalist do it? Oh, this one…” Like Teddy Roosevelt, he would keep these science notebooks where he would keep measurements and just these small details about the specimens that he would collect. And then others would observe caterpillars and butterflies. And I was like, “Oh, this is just not a discipline that we do in our modern culture as a ‘everybody’s doing it.'” Not everybody keeps journals in this ways.

Pam:
No.

Joy:
So I just really loved learning about all those different ways. So what I did, I’ve got on my website some free lesson plans on flowers, but this is in there, the nature journal prompts. And that is the outline that I use as far as the various types of ideas.

So there’s copy work, you can copy something from your field guide, you can copy that information into your book when you are learning something or you can draw a specimen that you find or you can just tell back what you saw when you were outside. You can do a phenology wheel, those wheels that track different cycles. So the moon is a popular one. You’ll just track the phases of the moon.

I just loved all this variety. So my thought was, “Man, wouldn’t it be fun to pepper in some of these different types of nature journal entries throughout the course of the time that we’re studying this particular topic?” And we’ve just had so much fun having that variety, but then also exposing ourselves to these different ways to use our journals. And really the big deal was, “Now my kids are picking up their journals regularly on their own because it’s about cultivating that habit.” You’re just wanting to lead them to it in the first place, right? Especially if you’ve not done it before. I’m a public school educated mother, so I did not have that background. So I’m learning with them.

Pam:
Yeah, I love this because you’re so very right. I think nature journals can be really intimidating, not only for kids, but for moms too. We’re scrolling through Instagram, we’re seeing these pictures and they’re always beautiful watercolor pictures and things of that nature. And there are so many different entries we can put in our nature journal and it gives us so many different ways to explore different skills of our own to hone. We can work on our narration skills, we can work on our observation skills. There are so many different skills we can work on other than just painting or drawing. And also, we meet kids where they are. You may have kids who just feel like, “Well, I don’t want a watercolor. I don’t want to add a lot of color to my nature journal. I would rather write about what I see.” And it gives them an opportunity to nature journal in a way that appeals to them the most without feeling the pressure

Joy:
Yeah. And exposing them to those different options. Now, it is good to say, “Okay, well here’s a way that we’re going to do it.” Like, “Today we are going to draw this particular specimen.” And I do lay out specific nature journal entries for, “Okay, now draw this or do that” just because it really cuts down on the fighting and the argument about what are we going to draw. It’s laid out so there’s not that decision fatigue as well.

Pam:
Yeah. And I think it’s always good to ask your kid, “Today we’re going to try this kind of entry.”

Joy:
Right.

Pam:
Because sometimes they may really like something and never know it because they’re resistant to it for whatever reason. And one of the things I love, and we’re jumping ahead right now, but one of the things I love about your Nature Study Hacking books, is you provide simple line drawings that the kids can either draw in their nature journal or if they’re really young you can make a copy of it and they can color it as well.

Joy:
Yeah, that was a huge, again, just game changer. And that came from my, that was not an original idea of mine. A friend of mine actually recommended I do that with my student who was about six years old at the time, a first grader. And I was like, “I can’t get him to do anything.” And she’s like, “Oh, well just get a coloring page and let them color that and then you guys can cut it out and paste it into your journal.” And I was like, “Oh.” And then another student was just really struggling with drawing from the specimen. Particularly it was a daffodil, and daffodils have all these ridges and stuff, so it looks like, “Oh, you could just draw this.” But the part where the crown is, I don’t know, it was too much going on, and we’re like, “Oh, it’s just a blob of yellow.”

But when you put a line drawing or a coloring page in front of the student, then they’re able to see how you can actually make the shape more accurately. So then instead of it being, it really turns into sometimes like, “Oh, this is a drawing lesson. This isn’t nature study.” So this takes out, takes away that, “Oh, this is a drawing lesson and you can just copy.” Sometimes my students, my six year old, my first grader in particular, will just trace something and that really makes him feel like, “Okay, I’ve actually accomplished something today. I’m not getting frustrated because I can’t make the page look like that thing I’m trying to draw right now.”

Pam:
Yeah, that’s a really great point because sometimes I even get discouraged by what’s going in my nature journal because it doesn’t look the same as what I’m seeing in front of me. And so I really would like the simplicity of just being able to trace it and then label it and just make it easy on myself, give myself a little bit of grace in that area.

Joy:
Yeah, so the Peterson Field Guide, coloring books are phenomenal for this type of study. Especially for a new, just someone who’s new at doing nature study or even for me, the mom. I love to look up in our Peterson Field Guide books, the picture of something that I’ve seen out in nature. And then I’ll just hold it up and then that’ll help me at least get the gist of how to draw. I saw a woodpecker the other day and I really wanted to draw it more accurately, and you can’t, with birds in particular.

Pam:
They’re not sitting still.

Joy:
They’re not going to sit still for you. You have to use some type of picture and something with a good line drawing or something that someone has drawn or watercolor or whatever. That is a lot easier to imitate.

Pam:
Yeah. I used to think it was cheating. I really did. I thought it was cheating if I saw a woodpecker or a little wren or something in the backyard, I thought I was supposed to be able to draw it from… And it’s like, “You can’t do that. It’s not-“

Joy:
Right. That’s a really good point, Pam. I think we feel that’s not okay in our modern day or whatever, but for one, our nature journals aren’t going to be sold and there’s not a copyright. But the other thing is that that is how creative people create, is they take in great, excellent information and then narrate. That’s how we learn. We imitate.

Pam:
Yeah. And so many artists have done that. They’ve drawn from books. They have not drawn from real life necessarily. So yeah, I think we need to give ourselves a little [grace], we need to realize that. And they’ve done it over and over and over again, too. They don’t draw just one woodpecker, they draw 50 woodpeckers, and then they’re good at drawing woodpeckers and it comes easy to them.

Joy:
Right. And then it does help us learn how to make those shapes and then we can get our own voice or our own style after imitating. But we have to have something to draw from. We can’t pull it from inside ourselves, it’s not in there. We got to get out from outside.

Pam:
Yeah. And I love that idea of drawing lessons can be drawing lessons but nature study needs to be nature study. Two separate things that are going on here. And so let’s do what we need to do in order to make nature study about nature study and less about doing a drawing lesson.

Joy:
Yeah. And removing those barriers from the student so that they can get in touch with nature study and also be led to their nature journal in a way that it is a place that is restful for them and is a joy and a delight and they can use that is their own. We have to teach them how to use it, is why I made these books essentially.

Pam:
Okay. All right. So I want to break down what I’ve heard you say so far. So, so far Nature Study Hacking came out of your own need for writing down lesson plans. And as you were doing that you realized that these lessons needed to be really short snippets, very small things to do each day. And that’s one of the wonderful things, I think is they really build on each other.

And the books themselves are restful because you open it up and only the top half of a page is taken up with what the lesson is for each day. And then you’ve got all this room down below to write any notes or add anything that you want to, but just looking at it is not overwhelming for the mother as somebody who’s used this.

And then it’s about doing different kinds of nature journal entries. So it’s definitely a nature journal centric program. You don’t necessarily have to go outside. Though I know you encourage moms to get out for nature walks, you don’t necessarily have to. This can be done around your Morning Time table. And then it’s all about removing the barriers that people might be feeling towards doing nature study. These barriers like, we have to have beautiful watercolor paintings or our drawings, perfect drawings or things like that. So how else is Nature Study Hacking different than other kinds of nature study?

Joy:
So there are four elements of nature study. There is reading great literature about what you want to study. There is nature walks, you are going out and getting into nature. We have object lessons, which is where you take an object such as, today we did Holly tree and then the Holly berries. And then we drew the Holly and wrote that down. And we were looking at that closely and asking a lot of questions about it so that we can learn about that object through asking lots of questions. And then there is the nature journals. So those four. So reading, nature walks, object lessons and nature journal entries.

So I really have sought to incorporate all four of those into my books and I’m always trying to lead you, it’s really a guide, it’s leading you to reading great literature. I’m not saying that I know everything about trees or the stars and sky, I’m saying here is an expert that we need to be reading to get that knowledge from a living book firsthand. And then it’s sharing how to do an object lesson, what questions to ask, but again, simplifying it so that you can do it within a 20 minute time period. None of my lessons take longer than 20 minutes.

And then of course leading you to the nature journal and saying, “Okay, well now is the time to go outside, in my trees study I say like, “Go outside and look at your tree and spend five minutes looking at it closely.” So that has been really fun to see how they, it’s just simple and then it can just introduce you to God’s creation.

Pam:
I think one of the things I like so much is that nature study just seems like a big overwhelming deal. Even if you say, “Okay, well we’re going to study birds now.” Once again, big overwhelming deal. It’s a big rabbit hole that you can go down into and get lost in. And breaking it down and giving it some structure I think makes it so much easier for moms to do.

And I had never considered that there were four parts to nature study, so I’m learning something new today. Well, let’s talk about Anna Comstock because I love to talk about her book in some of my talks because I tell moms, I say, ‘You have this book, right? You’re probably using it as a doorstop somewhere in your house.” Because it’s this big huge book, and for me, I purchased it and was immediately overwhelmed by this book. So tell me a little bit about the book. I will tell you, and I’m just going to throw this out there for moms who are listening, I think every teacher, whether you intend to do nature study or not, should definitely read the introduction to this book. I think it is one of the most fabulous bits of information on teaching that I have ever read. And I am not a huge nature study person but I use it to inspire my teaching and I’ve talked about it before. Tell me a little bit about how you use this book and how it influenced you.

Joy:
Well the introduction is beautiful. It’s funny, part of the introduction seems to maybe contradict some of the stuff that Charlotte Mason talks about because Charlotte Mason required her students to have a nature journal and Comstock says not to. So I just thought that was interesting.

But what’s fun is that she gives this vision for, why? Why this is important and also that it is so important for us to be leading our children into that truth, goodness and beauty with our own love and wonder and interest. Comstock in her introduction talks about nature study and its ability to bring us to understanding truth and loving truth and being able to perceive it.

So I’m going to read this quote by her that is found in the introduction. “Nature study cultivates in him a perception, any of regard for what is true and the power to express it. All things seem possible in nature. Yet this seeming is always guarded by the eager quest of what is true. Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. Nature study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are.” Isn’t that beautiful?

Pam:
Oh, wow! That’s cool. You think about, “Well, we’re going to do nature. There’s so many reasons to do nature study and you and I have talked about this before, but using it as a pathway to being able to discern truth was something that I had never really thought of.

Joy:
Well, and it’s one of the things that I really love about nature study is, because in our world we are so disconnected and in Anna Comstock’s world, they were at the beginning of feeling the effects of the industrial revolution. Of course she wrote Handbook of Nature Study at the beginning of the 1900s and all through the 1800s, the industrial revolution was sweeping and people were just leaving their farms and flooding into the cities for work.

So you had, Anna Comstock talks about being a child running through the pumpkin patch, and so you have this picture of her, I think she wrote it when she lived, I think she lived in New York. And it’s like, “Okay, well you’re at this university, you’re doing all this great work in a city and you’re talking about growing up, running through a pumpkin patch and a modern child today typically does not have that experience.

My family lives in a subdivision and that’s mostly where we’ve lived. We had an opportunity to live for six months on a little family farm and it really was a huge difference in how much more accessible nature was for that six months out on the farm. They were outside all day. They would come in at lunch, take a bath and go back outside and take a bath again at night. And that is just not how it is in a subdivision.

So what I love about Comstock’s book is that she is in a place where she understands the sense of urgency for children to learn. That for us as a people to be connected and learning about nature and saying, “You know what? We don’t have to use the stars to track where we’re going, to figure out direction anymore. We don’t have to read weather’s signs anymore. We have all this technology that’s coming up but we’re losing something when we’re not passing on. Just understanding the world around us, knowing the names of the plants that just are on our property that we live on. And were just talking about really small, small things that is really typical that we don’t know. We don’t know the name of everything that is on our property.

And so what I’ve loved about nature study is you start to hone in and pay more attention. In Comstock’s book, she does a beautiful job laying out lessons for a classroom teacher to tangibly teach children about the world. And she uses these questions to draw out from the child the answers. And this is something where you can really start to learn about what education is. That act of drawing out education is not just something that we’re cramming in. We’re actually drawing something that God has already put in us.

So an example of this will be, I’m just going to use an example from my latest book. So in Nature Study Hacking, Insects, I have a lesson about the butterfly and it is based on Anna Comstock’s lesson about, I think I use the monarch butterfly lesson, but we’re using the Painted Lady because the Painted Lady is the most, it said the word was commerce, but the most sold butterfly in the world. I just thought that was interesting. And so there’s these questions that you ask when you’re observing a butterfly. “When the butterfly alights, how does it hold its wings? Is it more camouflaged when its wings are open or folded? Can you see its tongue? How long are the antenna? How many legs does the butterfly have? How is this different from other insects?”

So what you see is, you’re asking questions about the details of the butterfly in order to start to drill in and pay more attention to, “Oh, I didn’t even think about considering whether it was camouflaged or not.” And ,”Oh, I can see its tongue.” Or, “No, I can’t see its tongue.” And it’s so fun to start doing this with children because it really showcases God’s creation and also lets them get indirect contact. It’s not me being the teacher being up front, being the one with all the knowledge. They have the knowledge, they can just answer these questions and that question is put to them and then their mind starts working on it and they can do nothing but try to figure out the answer to that question.

Pam:
Yeah, and you’re teaching them to observe. You’re building those observation skills and you’re teaching them to look closely at something, which I think are skills that we’ve lost sometimes in this day and age.

Joy:
Oh, definitely. Well, especially with how distracted we are as a people, this helps us start to go, “Oh, there’s more things.” And those things are worthy of our time and attention.

Pam:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned that one of the four areas of nature study, one of the four practices is getting outside for nature walks or just getting outside for nature study. I don’t suppose you have to go anywhere because you also mentioned it’s great just to know the names of the things in your yard. So what ideas do you have for families who struggle with getting outside their house to do nature study?

Joy:
So let’s just go back to the four elements of nature study. We’ve got reading, you can read about the topic of choice. So that is what is so fun about, again, my books, but also just doing nature study is that you can start to develop a foundation of knowledge by just doing Morning Time and having the book about the specific topic and that will help shape your time outside.

So say you’re not able to get out because everyone’s sick or you have a new baby and the weather’s weird or… There’s so many different reasons that it’s difficult to take it outside. You can bring a specimen inside and have that be what you’re looking at and studying, which is that object lesson idea. Also you can do poetry, you can read poems. That always gets me in the mood when we’re studying a new topic, is to read some poems about that topic.

Right now we’re doing weather and that sweet poem, “Whether the weather be fine or whether the weather be not, whether the weather be cold or whether the weather be hot. Well, whether the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” Doesn’t that get you in the mood to start learning about the weather.

Pam:
Yeah, it does.

Joy:
So I love just incorporating those different good, true and beautiful things into our study, which really can just help spur you on. But also, again, it’s giving you a foundation. So we’ve got object lessons, we’ve got reading great books and we have our nature journal and none of those have to happen outside our home.

Pam:
Right. So it’s a good way to inspire some interest, to learn some things even if you can’t get outside. And I think that’s one of the things that makes Nature Study Hacking such a good resource for busy homeschool moms. Well, Joy where can people find you online?

Joy:
I am of course at naturestudyhacking.com and I post to a YouTube channel which is just my name, Joy Cherrick and also on Instagram @joycherrick.

Pam:
We’ll include links to all of those different sites in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Well Joy, thank you so much for joining me here today. It’s been awesome.

Joy:
Thanks for having me Pam.

Pam:
And there you have it. Now if you would like links to any of the books and resources that joy and I chatted about on today’s episode of the podcast, you can find them on the show notes for this episode. Those are at pambarnhill.com/ymb71. Also over on the show notes are our wonderful goodies and downloads that we have for this particular episode. You can download a full transcript as well as timestamps to be able to find your favorite parts again and again, so be sure and not to miss those.

Now, I will be back again in a couple of weeks with another episode of the Your Morning Basket podcast. The next one is all about what to do when your kids don’t like Morning Time. We’ll be tackling that tough issue with you. Until then, keep seeking truth, goodness and beauty in your homeschool day.