Homeschool · Nature study
Classic nature books for children, from Clara Dillingham Pierson's talking farmyard animals and Thornton Burgess's bird and animal books to Fabre's insects and Anna Botsford Comstock's great handbook, free to read here or download, with a step-by-step teaching guide for the Handbook of Nature-Study.
Begin with the Handbook of Nature-Study. The teaching guide takes you through its lessons one at a time, so you know what to read ahead and what to look for when you go outside. The read-alouds above can go alongside, a chapter at a time.
Nature study happens outdoors. Read a short chapter together, then go and look for the real thing, in your own garden, a park or a hedge, in whatever season it is now. Spring is for nests and flowers, autumn for seeds and spiders. Give each child a nature notebook for drawing what they find, with the date and the place, and a few words about it. Over a year the notebook becomes their own field guide, and that one habit does most of the work.
Look, but do not take or taste. Never eat a wild plant, berry or mushroom, leave nests and eggs alone, watch stinging insects and wild animals from a distance, and wash hands after handling soil, ponds and leaf litter. These books were written a hundred years ago or more. Plant names have changed since, some animals are rarer or more common than they were, and the stories in the read-alouds make the animals talk, so talk together about what is story and what is fact.
In rough order of reading age. Ages are rough guides; a younger child can listen to most of these read aloud. The animals talk, but the habits they describe are drawn from real life.
Clara Dillingham Pierson's gentle stories of the animals in a farmyard, from the hens and the Big Gobbler to the Blind Horse and the Lame Duckling, told as if the animals could talk to each other.
Scanned from a Library of Congress copy.
Short stories of the animals and birds of the woods, such as the Ground Hog and the Crow, by the same author. A companion to Among the Farmyard People.
Scanned from a Library of Congress copy.
Peter Rabbit learns about the birds around him from Jenny Wren and his other feathered neighbours, a bird or two to a chapter, with colour pictures by the bird painter Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Good to read with a bird feeder in view.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
Peter Rabbit and his friends go to Old Mother Nature's school to learn about the mammals of North America, from mice and squirrels to bears and bison. Pictures by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The companion to the Bird Book.
Scanned from a New York Public Library copy.
True observations by the French naturalist J.-H. Fabre, who spent his life watching insects in his own garden and fields.
Chapters from Fabre's insect studies, chosen and retold for young people by Louise Seymour Hasbrouck from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos's translation. A good first meeting with Fabre.
Scanned from a Library of Congress copy.
Fabre's full chapters on the spiders he watched for years, how they hunt, spin and raise their young, in Teixeira de Mattos's translation, with a preface by Maurice Maeterlinck. For older readers after Insect Adventures.
Scanned from a Smithsonian Libraries copy.
For the parent to read ahead, and for older children to use on walks.
Anna Botsford Comstock's handbook for teachers and parents, based on the Cornell nature-study leaflets, with short lessons on birds, animals, insects, plants and trees, rocks, the weather and the sky. Each lesson says what to look for and gives questions to answer by watching.
Scanned from a Cornell University copy.
Mrs. William Starr Dana (Frances Theodora Parsons) helps you put a name to the common wild flowers of the eastern United States, with the flowers arranged by colour so you can look them up by what you see. Some of the plant names have changed since.
Scanned from a University of California Libraries copy.
For more science, see Science, which has Fabre's Story-Book of Science and Arabella Buckley's Fairy-Land of Science.
Every book here was published before 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States: free to read, print and share. The scans are kept by the Internet Archive, which shows them on this page and supplies the PDF downloads. The teaching guides are written for this site. Modern reprints are also sold, if you prefer a clean printed copy.