 Hey everybody, welcome to Vladok Bay. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about our one thing for this upcoming home school year, which is nature study, what resources we're gonna use and how I plan to prioritize it. If you're new here and you are not sure what I mean when I say our one thing, it is something that we have done for the past five or six school years and we pick one specific thing, kind of like a habit or a fundamental thing that we really wanna work on in our home school and we do our best to prioritize that for that home school year. The glory of it is once you've done it for a home school year, typically it's become a habit and you can move on to something else, knowing that that is kind of like bread into your day. So in the past, we have done things like read aloud, game schooling, poetry, tea time, filled trips, art, logic, and this year we decided to focus on nature study. It felt like it would be the best of all of the things, it would be some art for Kevin, it would be some animals in nature for Emily, it would be some active for me, so it would give everybody something to look forward to and then of course time together. Now, I am going to share some of the resources that I either had or have accumulated to help set us up for success for nature study to be our one thing. I like to make sure I have things on hand to try to make it as easy as possible. The first thing is the pocket full of pine cones, which is a book that I'm actually going to read. It's nature study with the gentle art of learning, a story for mother culture. So hopefully it will help me get to better at and be more familiar with nature study. That is my goal for using this anyway. So I'm gonna read through this hopefully in the next couple of weeks before we start our homeschool year to kind of again set me up for success. In addition to that, again to like teach myself and Kevin before we start doing it with Emily, I have the Laws Guide to Drawing and Nature Journaling as well as the How to Teach Nature Journaling. And then we also got Keeping a Nature Journal, which I really liked this one because it had some pretty good tutorials. And then we have a few watercolor nature books. So this one is just watercolor in nature. So it's just, you know, step by step, like sketch it. Then it shows you a few of the colors and then a few more colors. This one is just a 15 minute watercolor masterpieces. So not all of them are specifically nature, but there are a lot that are. And then we have these watercolor with me. We have had these for a while. I really like these. This one is in the ocean and this one is forest. There's also a jungle one. We don't currently have that one. What I love about them is that the tutorial is very easy. And if you are looking to just watercolor and not also draw on this side of the page, they've already sketched it out and you would just watercolor it. So basically the sketches are already done. We've never done that because then that would mean that each of us would need one of these. So we just do the lesson in our own nature journal. And then kind of for activities, ideas and reference, I obviously have the nature anatomy set from Julia Rothman. So nature anatomy, the newest release wildlife anatomy, ocean anatomy, farm anatomy, and food anatomy. And then I have the nature connection, which is actually meant to be an outdoor workbook for kids, families, and classrooms. I don't know that we will actually do it in the book. We've had this for a while and we've never written in it so far. We just kind of do the different activities that are in here, but you could. But then again, if you were going to do that, then again, if you were going to have one for multiple people, you would each need one. So we might just use that for inspiration and ideas. And then for more inspiration and ideas, we have the fun with nature take-along guide. So this is actually like a treasury of the different individual books. So caterpillars, bugs, and butterflies is one book. Frogs, toads, and turtles is one book. Snakes, salamanders, and lizards is one. Rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks is one. Tracks, scats, and signs. And then trees, leafs, and bark. And so each of those books talks about those things. And then there's always like some sort of activity that you could do. And then this would be more fun with nature take-along guide. This is the second one. And so the books that it includes are berries, nuts, and seeds, birds, nest, and eggs, rocks, fossils, and arrowheads, seashells, crabs, and sea stars, and then wildflowers, blooms, and blossoms. And then the same thing at the end of each kind of like book section, there are some different activities. For our actual like nature journaling supplies, the things that we will be using the most commonly, I guess, I have these Florida pamphlets so that we don't have like these big books to look around because I figure if we're going for nature walk or nature journal, we just want something quick that nature walk to nature journal, we're gonna want something quick that we can just take with us and not have all of this stuff. And these are thin, they're laminated, so they're waterproof. There's quite a bit of different images with just a little bit of information underneath. I mean, obviously we could then search and look up more or come in and reference a book after the fact, but there are quite a few things here to get us started and these are lightweight. So I thought this would be the perfect addition to our nature journaling set. So we have the Florida Trees and Wildlife, Florida Seashores, Florida Reptiles and Amphibians, Florida Birds and Florida Wildlife. Now I will leave a link to all of this, but these are the Kavanaugh Pocket Naturalist Guides. So you can look up your state if you're not from Florida and see what they have for you. For our nature journals, we will be using these Arteza Landscape. They are eight by three, or eight by five, sorry. It's about 110 pound paper. It's watercolor and they're 76 pages. Since this is a set of three, we will each get one. And then we have these Windsor and Newton Pan travel watercolors. And to make life easier for traveling, we each have some aqua brushes. It's for assorted brushes, so a set for each of us. And then basically you just fill that reservoir with water so it would be ready to go. Micron pens for the tracing and outlining. We have some white gel pens for highlights. And then we have some Prismacolor pencils for, in case we don't want to watercolor, we could color with pencils. So that is the majority of the resources that I have kind of accumulated or acquired for our nature study one thing this year. In addition to this, we do actually have exploring nature with children at the curriculum that I may reference depending on what we're doing or what season it is. We also have a membership to notice what nature study. So if the weather is not cooperative or we don't want to go out, it's raining, it's hot, whatever, we can always do a lesson at the house or if there's something that goes along with or we'll extend what we did on our nature walk, that would be a great idea too. I don't really have a set plan as far as like we're gonna do this once a week or this is what we're gonna do every time we do it. But the plan is just to do more nature study in general. So hopefully that's gonna mean more nature walks, observing more nature, journaling in general, just being out in nature, spending time together as a family and then hopefully recording what we've seen. That is pretty much the goal. We're gonna make it as simple as possible. This kind of seems like a lot but it's just because I like to like I said, make sure we're set up for success and I feel like we are, we have enough for Kevin and I to learn to be able to teach her better and then we have all really good quality resources as far as materials and artwork goes so that we're not using subpar things as far as that goes because Emily's just, she's never done that. She doesn't know what anything except good quality materials are. And so that is pretty much it. We're just gonna kind of wing it. If you do a nature study in your home school though, I would love it if you would tell me more about it in the comments. What does it look like in your home school? What are some of your favorite resources? And just tell me all of your tips because I would love to hear them.