1. When you begin a Nature Notebook the sky is the limit.
You can make your notebook as simple or as involved as you like. The main objective is to document what you see and what you experience. It's your nature notebook so there is no limit to your creativity.
2. You record what you see and over time discover how things evolve around you.
Label your sightings, date them and record what you observe. That way you can go back and review them. You may after some time begin to see for example how your state, city, neighborhood, yard, or "one small square" can change each season. By frequenting the same places you will become aware of the changes the natural world also experiences.3. Your Nature Notebooks gets better with age.
Over time your notebook becomes a familiar friend and a project to be proud of. You will begin to develop your own style. You may only have a chance to do nature study once a week. But over a year or two you will have accumulated a wonderful collection of entries. Here is a page from my daughters notebook from several years ago. She was 13 at the time.
4. You will learn about the wildlife in your location.
We move almost yearly, so It has been my great pleasure and privilege to get to know my new locations by studying the natural world around me. It gives me a sense of my place on planet earth when I understand the natural world that I am a part of. Here is an entry from my son's notebook when we lived in Germany.
5. You get to choose from a variety of materials.
Here is a sample from one of my pencil entries.
6. You get to see things as they are up close.
Close observation is one of the best reasons to nature notebook. Because we can get close to the animals or plants themselves we can see details that we would not otherwise get to see. No picture can really give us that hands on experience.7. It's a great way to develop skills both in observation and documentation.
While we all can't be natural born artists, we can develop skills. Any artist must develop skill. And that takes practice. Nature Notebooking gives us the chance to record what we see with some level of skill and helps us along the road to improvement. It provides an outlet for practice in a fun and likable way with meaning.8. It is a way to make your voice heard.
Just look at the entry below from my son's middle school journal. Just the kind of expression we want our kids to find.
9. However you decide to nature notebook, there is no right or wrong.
Learning to do a nature notebook or nature journal is a process. You discover the best way to have a nature notebook by just getting out in nature, observing it and then recording what you see. But you can also select an animal, do research, and then see if you can find it. If you know the wildlife in your area and the conditions in which they live, you would be surprised how common they really are to find. So you decide how you go about the process and do what works for you.
10. It brings us closer to the Creator.
Whatever your beliefs may be, nature certainly reminds us who we are. This I think is the most important reason to keep a nature notebook. It puts us back into our rightful place in life. It teaches us about our limitations, our needs, and all the fundamental realities of life which we sometimes tend to forget in our busy and technology driven lives. I hope that your nature notebook will bring you as much joy as mine has brought to me.
