Living Nature Books....The History of Insects

The History of Insects

I must first apologize for the lack of nature study entries I've had over the past month or so. The elections this year have been so incredibly important to me ~ they seem to have taken up so much of my time. I had forgotten what this log is really about~ and that is helping our children to discover the amazing gifts God has given us! His beautiful creation that is such a gift and not to be forgotten!

A dear friend sent me an email a christian woman had put out and in it, she discusses our roles in the current state of things. As Christians ~ the MOST important thing we can do is pray - pray- and pray some more. The Lord will place in command of this country who He sees fit for His will. Whether it be to "wake us up" to our sins or to lead us back into a God fearing country ~ it is HIS will. So ~ I need to let it be ~ of course not to say its not important to pray and pray about it and OF COURSE VOTE! this Tuesday ---but I want to get back to what the Lord calls me to do ---and that is educate my children and use my passion, interest, and abilities in nature study to help others with thier children's education as much as I humbly can :) :).

So --- ENOUGH of the election on THIS blog :) ;) ! And I apologize to those of you who have been such devout readers and whom I've neglected the past month or so by not sharing our studies! :)

The children and I have continued nature studies ~ though not as diligently as usual and I'm sorry for that but I have taken pictures and notes on all that we have done and my goals is to post it all for you this upcoming week.

We've planted our fall annuals ~ including pansies ~ which have their own lesson in The Handbook of Nature Study.

We've completed our "Weeds & Seeds" three part series with a fantastic study on Dandelions (blog post on this is almost complete - check back - this was a great one!) And also an ongoing seed study as we continue to harvest, dry, and package our seeds for next year. This has been such an exciting time as we harvest and talk about harvesting in the Bible and how we relate to the Biblical times. It went well with our Ancient Egypt studies from The Story of the World ~
see our Nile River projects also!

The kids have planted their spring bulbs after I received a blog post from Barb at Handbook of Nature Study about her gorgeous bulbs. We then divided our own perrenials and moved their bulbs or gave them away.

The grasshopper study was TONS of fun and suprising - even for mom :) - there was so much information in The Handbook of Nature Study and the children had a great time really looking at our grasshopper friends and releasing them. The blog from that study as well as a "lesson plan" that I wrote up to use with the HNS for this topic will be uploaded this week. You'll find the release of the grasshoppers was the best part of the study as we marvelled at the amazing distance they were able to travel in one jump!

I can't forget the other fall activities --- the corn maze, pumpkin carving, gathering fallen leaves and pinecones, and making a fall wreath out of our gathered materials... the blogs should be great this week as I document our adventures. ;)

Now --- The History of Insects -- this is a GREAT little living science book about insects for the early elementary grades. It can be found for free at Project Gutenberg.
The files here are in html, however, it wasn't in a pdf format or word doc format so it was quite difficult to isolate just a page to print or particular insect. If you are like me, you don't always print entire books at once. Paper and ink have become expensive so I print weeks or subjects worth of the online books as they are needed. To do this, I copied the online book into a word document. It is available here for you. I hope this helps. We will be using the introduction, History of Insects, as well as the Honey Bee section this week to try to wrap up our insect studies during the (probably) last mild weather week we'll have here in Virginia. :)

Another great living science book on Insects is The Insect Folke by Margaret Warner Morley. You can find this literature online free also at Project Gutenberg. Here is a link for this book.