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Outdoor Hour Challenge #3 – time to draw

So we have been on several walks lately – including this one with my nieces and teenage sister to the pond near our house.  We netted 5 wonderful minnows which are thriving in my aquarium, and we go here regularly and net duckweed to feed to our goldfish and koi.  They love the stuff.  I hadn’t found a thing that could produce any enthusiasm for drawing in the nature journal, until we came upon a dead bird – a white throated sparrow that had flown into a window.  In combination with the the Outdoor Hour’s creation of a Flickr group for nature journal drawings, this produced an excellent drawing session.  She responds to any opportunity to show her work to others.

She also experimented with using some watercolor crayons to draw the picture, then use a wet brush to blend the colors.  I am not enthralled with this booklike journal we are using.  I prefer our old method of using a three-ring binder, but she feels like it is a “real” journal, and that the things we put in it are important and permanent, unlike our everyday use of reams and reams !!! of paper.  She draws all day long – from her imagination – but is not as eager to draw from life.

She did a great job with this drawing.  I think the bird feet in particular are fantastic, and as she was drawing them she asked some questions about bird feet (”Mom, do all birds have four toes?”  Hmm, I’m not sure . . .)  but in any case the drawing definitely led to some thinking.

I think this captures the spindly-ness of the feet rather well.  You can see how she drew the picture first in pencil, then went back to highlight some color with the watercolor crayon.

The reading for this challenge included ‘The correlation of nature study with drawing’ – of course “They learned to draw because they liked to make pictures of the living objects which they had studied,” and ‘The correlation of nature study with language work.’

This is where Comstock used an analogy that crystallized a concept for me.

. . .the purpose of a language is, after all, merely to convey ideas . . . A conveyance  naturally should be fitted for the load it is to carry, and if the pupil acquires the load first he is very likely to construct a conveyance that will be adequate.  How often the conveyance is made perfect through much effort and polished through agony of spirit and the load entirely forgotten!

Charlotte Mason said something which I cannot find to quote – but it was that ideas should come first, and facts will follow.

We must lovingly and persistently pile on a load, so they are naturally able to build the conveyance that is needed.  They must need the conveyance.  A-ha!