Nature Study with Struik Nature… And Mushrooms…

I know I have blogged about this many times, nature study forms a large part of our schooling, specifically nature notebooks. and most often we use Struik Nature books as our guides. If you sign up to the Struik Nature Club they have loads of online talks and online book launches that you can join, and a quick search for them on YouTube has loads of talks and reviews too.

Last year was not the best year for getting out and about to study Nature Study as we normally do, and yet it turns out… in nooks and corners of our home and neighbourhood walks we were able to find loads of great nature to study. Just lately our nature study has been spilling over into art projects and I am all for it.

First Field Guides

First Field Guides are lovely little handbooks that you can pop into your back pack and carry along on a hike. My kids love them and I often find these little books lingering in outdoor hideouts and forgotten in backpacks weeks after an adventure we have been on. As it heads into autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the perfect time to do a quick study of mushrooms.

These books are great, the first few pages describe the basics, what to expect when you are out looking for mushrooms and then what to look out for when you are identifying mushrooms in the great outdoors.

Recently, when lockdown was fairly tight, we took some clay from our art supplies and decided to create our own mushrooms.

Everybody picked a mushroom, looked them up in the field guide, and found a couple of facts to share about their particular mushroom. The first, and most important fact of all, was if their mushroom was poisonous or edible… and from there on out… even though it looks like just a little information on each page… the pages are packed with valuable information… in small readable bites.

This is a great little series of books and there are so many topics to choose from, something for every curious explorer those who like to explore from their armchairs and those who like to get away into the great outdoors.

We went on a wonderful mushroom walk last, last winter…

And reviewed the Full Mushroom Guide, which is fantastic for details, but if you are popping out for an afternoon amble… then this little handbook is perfect.

If you would like to learn more about mushrooms, then Firefly Nature School has a lovely study on dissecting mushrooms. We really enjoyed it, it became part of a larger microscope project we were doing. Head over to Firefly Nature School… for lots and lots of nature study projects for nature loving families.

Amazon Affiliate Links for the Books in this Post

All these books were given to us for review purposes by Penguin Random House South Africa and Struik Nature. This is not a sponsored post and opinions expressed are entirely our own.