Printable nature observation journal

Drawing first is the instruction and it is the whole method. A child who writes "a bird" has stopped looking; a child who has to draw one has to decide how long its beak is against its head, whether its legs are behind it or under it, and how many colors are actually on it — and the sentence they write afterwards is a different sentence for having drawn. The box is unruled for that reason: rules in it would be a page asking for writing in the space reserved for looking.

The three small boxes across the top are the ones that turn a nice drawing into an observation. The same feeder at eight in the morning and at four in the afternoon is two different sets of birds, and a page with no time on it cannot say so; two weeks of these with the date and the weather filled in is a record somebody can look back through and notice something in, which is the point of keeping one at all.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.