Growing your Naturalist through Detail Development

Teaching students to pay keen attention to detail is challenging.  Looking beneath the surface to capture that details often elicits, “This is so boring” response. When my sons pull that line on me, I say, “The word ‘Bore” means I’m either too lazy or not smart enough to make it interesting.” Great soccer players pay attention to detail –detail of movement. Great scientists recorded detail to make contrasts. Great historians went below the surface to record the detail of daily activity, struggles, politics, beliefs. Scientists, engineers, nurses, doctors, lab technicians are detail gatherers. Sadly, most college students start academic careers detail deficient and the pay for it with poor grades. This is a simple project that allows students of all ages to not only develop detail gathering skills, but to develop behavior patterns for strong concentration skills.

Part I.

• Science:
  • Record the phases of the moon.
  • Mount an outdoor thermometer to allow your students to record the daily temperature at your house
  • Record the time of day
• Writing: Send your adventurer out on a nature walk where they can sit down and write a 5 minute nature description using the 5 senses:
  • What they hear
  • What they see
  • What they feel (this is especially fun if it is really cold)
  • What they taste (maybe they’re crunching an apple, granola bar, or some yum gum
  • What they smell
• Art: This would make an ideal one day a week project.  On Friday, chose the favorite journal entry and develop an art project around it through one of the following methods:
  • Drawing
  • Collecting for Art Projects
  • Photography

 Part II

When they come in, charge up the computer, open a word file for their Nature Study Journal, along with www.dictionary.com (go to Thesaurus). Have them type of up their journal entry, refining their nature descriptions:

• Develop a topic statement for the description paragraph (what’s the point of the writing)
• Choose accurate synonymes (what color blue was the sky? What kind of cold was it?)
• Utilize similes using like or as.  Cold like what? Blue like what?
• Only use a coordinating conjunction every 3 sentences (,and, but, or, for, so, nor, yet)
• Add a concluding statement that reasserts the topic statement

This is an ideal year-wide project that provides holistic educational benefits in a hands-on, adventure opportunity rich assignment that will not only grow their detail, but grow their attention to the life around them.