Green Hour Challenge!

I have been talking about starting Nature Study for almost a year now.... Talking but not doing. To be honest, growing up, I prefered to stay inside the house, in the lovely air condition. While I love sunrises and sunsets and "glimpses of heaven" (that is what I call it when you see sunrays peaking between the clouds), I have not had much of an interest in being in the outdoors.

That is just one more thing that is changing now that we are homeschooling! I love Charlotte Mason's ideas, in particular the value placed on nature study, picture study and music/composer study. I believe that by instilling a love and appreciation for these things, and seeing the beauty that is truly all around us, that it will bring a whole other dimension to their Christian walk.

That is all well and good, but the reason I have yet to do anything about these lovely ideas is because I had NO CLUE where to start! How does one who prefers to be inside and doesn't exactly have a love affair with nature yet herself, get her children excited about it? What do we do? Where do we go? Do I have to go to the woods or a nature preserve?? And, what exactly is a nature preserve????

I am so excited I found The Heart of Harmony!! Her blog is amazing and full of so much inspiration, but the thing that has me the most excited is her new Green Hour Challenge! Each week we will have a new challenge that will help inspire a love of nature and give us some ideas on ways to explore the lovely outdoors. This is the direction I was looking for!

So, here was this week's Challenge: Spend 10-15 minutes outdoors with your children, and take a walk around your yard or down the street and just enjoy being outdoors. Then, come back inside and talk about what they found the most interesting while they were outside. Spend the rest of the week exploring the one or two things that they show an interest in.

Today we spent a little over FIVE HOURS outside! Remember, I am the girl who prefers to be inside, or so I thought. I have been enjoying sitting outside with them more and more, and today we had a wonderful time. We just stayed in our backyard but we had a picnic lunch, looked for bugs, collected flowers, pine cones, pine needles and tree bark (um, can you tell our neighbors all have pine trees?)

They had a blast . . . we had a blast . . . closing our eyes and listening to the birds, hearing the airplanes over head, feeling the wind blow, looking at the clouds and watching the bugs. YEP, the bugs. Jordan thinks they are
BEAUTIFUL!! I find them creepy, crawly and scary..... I have this phobia that they all have huge fangs and will bite and hurt really bad, but I am doing an excellent job of not sharing or expressing my fears and agreeing in their beauty. And you know what? I am finding them to be pretty cool..... just at a safe distance!

Besides the bugs, which I DID NOT bring back inside (!), the picture above shows their favorite finds. We talked about the pine needles they found, how one was green and one was brown. We talked about the different stages of the flower they brought me, which I told them was a dandelion (luckily, I looked it up when I got back in and found out I was right!) We talked about the shape of pine cones and where they come from. It was fun!

We will focus the rest of the week on dandelions... and.... (gulp).... bugs. I guess I have to embrace their passion and delight, right? I will start with one bug and take it from there... are there any non-scary, non-yucky bugs? Please leave me a comment if you can think of one!