Once again I’m joining Aurie, Lisa, Amy, and Connie to share ideas for fun, family activities for the summer. We hope you’ll stop by every Wednesday to share in our theme or link up your own posts about great summertime fun for the whole family!

Last week we talked about Food Fun and this week we’re talking about Summer Learning Fun–which is what our whole summer has been about. Learning and Fun. Together.

Back at the beginning of the summer I made the kiddos each a nature journal (a plain old $0.25 composition book covered in pretty paper and mod-podge) to record all their summer learning. We haven’t been completely diligent with it,but they do have about 1/3 of it full. And it’s not completely a “nature” notebooks, but more of just an adventure journal or summer scrapbook. A place to put pictures of our little field trips, make notes about fun things they did with the babysitter (like the snake incident!) and even some nature journal notes about bird, butterflies, and other neat stuff we’ve found.

The Ladybug writing her observations in her journal.

For example, with our little family excursions, I title the pages with location, date, and sometimes the time of day. I include a list of anyone that was with us. Then I let them narrate answers to questions like “What did you see? What did you hear? What did you like best?” and write it down for them. Then I leave room for each of them to draw a picture, and room for me to print some pictures from our adventure and they can glue them in.

By keeping our eyes open, we’ve found all kinds of deceased bugs to bring home and learn about and draw.

For the boys, I do most of the writing. For the Ladybug, I do about half of it. I don’t want them to lose interest because it’s “too much work.” I really want it to be fun. And I’m trying to use it to hone their observation and analysis, not their reading and writing. Those are great secondary aspects, but just secondary.

We’ve enjoyed observing butterflies, moths, grasshoppers, june bugs and other beetles, dragonflies, flowers, leaves, and rocks.

We’ve also done some simple investigation. We used our field guides to identify the specimen. Measured size;  observed shape, color, and patterns; and talked about what they eat to figure out why they might have been in our yard.

This would be a Luna Moth, minus part of it’s tail.

I also discovered that magnifying glasses can be very inexpensive and they LOVE them. It’s their favorite part! Ladybug’s are nicer glass ones (still only $10–we used our Swagbucks and got them for free.) but the boys are $3 plastic ones from the grocery store.

A few other simple tools we keep around for our nature investigations are tweezers, colored pencils, a ruler, and empty peanut butter and nutella jars for collecting.

The Ladybug really gets into scientific investigation. She asked for her magnifying glass a few months ago when we put the new desk in her room because she was “doing observations” on leaves and seeds.

I’ve also made simple paper pockets in their notebooks for them to save ephemera like museum brochures and maps, tickets, and entrance bracelets. Just cut a piece of paper the size of your pocket, and use double-sided tape on 3 sides to stick it to the page. We’ve glued dinosaur and leaf crayon tracings right to the page as well.

Speedracer is less interested than the other two, so I make sure he has a parallel activity if he gets bored.

And put the word out to friends, family, and co-workers. You never know what cool stuff they might come across. I’ve got work-friends leaving dead insect specimens on my desk all the time now because they know we’ll enjoy them.

Dead grasshoppers on your desk–doesn’t that sound like it would brighten your Monday morning?! {grin}

What summer fun have you been up to lately? Link up a new or old post about your great summer family activities. Please keep it family friendly and link to you post, not your homepage.

And be sure to come back next week and join us. We’ll be wraping up Family Connections {Summer 2012} and I’ll be asking you what great ideas you might have for the Fall!