Sometimes while searching for books for one post I come across a title that doesn't really fit but is too wonderful not to highlight. I've decided to call these "Just Because Books" because Just Because gifts are always extra special due to the way they occur in your life unexpectedly and brighten your day. As a whole-book educator, nothing makes my day more than a book that I just can't wait to share. As I discover these books, I have decided to give them a brief post all their own, a "Just Because Book" post. Yesterday, while researching for my post on Roald Amundsen, I came across one such lovely book.
Explorers' Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure
by Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert
Pages: 320
Publisher: Chronicle Books (2017)
Recommended for: Rhetoric students/adults (but so visually rich, I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't enjoy paging through it)
Homeschooling and nature journaling have always been a natural pairing. When your child's education doesn't have to remain within the confines of a brick-and-mortar school building, outside becomes one of their preferred classrooms, whether it's to do math, vocabulary, literature, or yes, science. Even homeschoolers who don't like to draw have a sketchbook and a set of good colored pencils to record things that strike their fancy or sketch something they find particularly appealing.
From the time my kiddos were very little, simple line drawings and basic colored sketches played a role in their studies. All of our early readers were written for Amish and Mennonite school children and were rich in quietly elegant art instead of the photos so prevalent in most modern readers. These books were supplemented by Christian Liberty Nature Readers, a set of five leveled readers that are rich in fantastic colored pencil and watercolor drawings and bursting with scientifically accurate yet accessible prose abundant in all the information young minds crave about nature from the smallest bug to life on a grander scale. My kids, now in their teens and twenties, still remember the moral stories and nature facts that they learned from these special books. I believe that the reason those lessons have clung is because of the countless hours that we all spent snuggled up together letting the gentle artwork and simple goodness of the words wash over us.
The art in a book is important. Think about how many picture books young ones flip past at the library until they find The One. What makes them pick that one book out from all the others? It certainly isn't the words they can't read. It's the artwork. Every child is different and they choose differently every time they go to a bookshelf, depending upon whatever is running through their busy minds in that moment. There is a direct parallel between this behavior of the very young and what finds its way onto the pages of a nature sketchbook of that child when they are older. Each time a person goes out into the world they are visually drawn to different things.
The opportunity to look through a sketchbook is like the opportunity to look into the mind and soul of its producer right in that moment of creation. Are the lines and colors hazy and inexact, perhaps indicative of a lazy, quiet amble in the woods? Or is every detail precise, as if trying to capture exactly something new and pivotal? Maybe the lines are terse and jagged, indicating frustration or aggression. The captions and short bursts of prose in these sketchbooks are also an indicator of a moment in time because what is written is done so in the moment, unedited, recording fresh first impressions.
Just as personal sketchbooks and journals are time capsules of our own lives or those of our students, so too are those of others. Journals and sketchbooks have traveled with scientists and explorers to the tops of the world's highest peaks, across oceans, and into every corner of every continent. These records produce an immediacy that is devoid of any attempt at editing to whitewash the reality of the moment in which they are created. This is why journals and sketchbooks rank among the best primary sources when studying an event from the past and are so frequently reproduced in later recountings of the event..They are that one person's truth, recorded in the heat of the moment.
That is what makes this book so special. Explorers' Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure allows you intimate glances into expeditions the likes of which most of us will never experience. As you page through this book, you can slip inside seventy different great minds and encounter exactly what the artists and writers saw and felt. Even the sense of worn pages and hodgepodge add-ins has been preserved.
The book is marketed as a coffee table book, but its homeschool applications are endless. Obvious uses would be to have students look up the relevant historical or scientific topics being featured so that they can learn more. Profiles of the explorers and brief sketches of their expeditions are given, providing a nice jumping off point for students to choose those individuals about whom they might like to read a full biography or a memoir about the expedition featured. Individual pages could also be used during atlas and geography study, guiding students to find locales and learn more about their peoples and geographic features. Art applications could include identifying media that are used and having students try their hand at copying the artwork in their own sketchbooks.
Whether you are looking for a conversation starter on your coffee table or inspiration for your students, I absolutely love this unique, well-produced book and think you will, too.