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Tonight’s Homework – NATURE
It’s no secret – overall, children (and adults for that matter) are spending less time outdoors in natural environments. Having kids start a nature journal is an engaging and fun way to help them start noticing details, behaviors, and interactions of the living organisms with nonliving factors.
Students can use these pages alone, or combine them with the activities found in the Outdoor Explorer Science and Nature Series from Nitty Gritty Science Jr. to create a journal that will keep a record of the weather, lunar phases, and their observations of small and large changes going on all around them throughout the year.
How to Use the Outdoor Explorer Nature Journal
Set up:
Option 1: Choose pages from this download along with Outdoor Explorer activities, print and bind for each student.
Option 2: Choose a cover and back page for students to glue onto a notebook. Print in color, or have them color with markers or 
crayons.
- Print off an identification sheet to label their name/class and have students glue to inside cover of the notebook.
- If you would like students to keep track of their pages, print of Table of Contents and have students glue on the first few pages of their notebook.
- Field guides are also available to glue in the back of the notebook for students to use as a reference when out in the field. They include:
- Parts of a leaf/tree and leaf shapes
- Parts of a seed/flower/plant
- Plants to avoid
- Animal Tracks
- Rock Characteristics
Adding Pages:
- Each month students can add the Lunar Cycle, Weather Tracker and Constellation page to keep track of the monthly weather and
night sky. A page for daily weather reports is also included. - Observation pages for plants, birds, trees/shrubs, insects, mammals and rocks can be added when those topics are the focus of the time spent outside.
- Outdoor Explorer activities can be downloaded separately and added throughout the year. Activities include those that focus on specific seasons, as well as arthropods, steam activities and math-related science and nature activities.
Click image below to download the Outdoor Explorer Nature Journal to start giving your students the resources they need to learn about and fall in love with nature so they can appreciate the natural world around them like you do!
