Final field report

Find a repeating pattern outdoors and predict what happens next, invent a two-step maths problem from something you measured, then write a formal letter to whoever studies this month next year.

The closing sheet of the month, and the only one that asks a child to write for somebody else.

First a pattern found outdoors — the stages of a plant, the direction of shadows, the route ants take. What is visible now, what will happen next, and then cause and effect: why does this repeat.

Then the reversal that makes this sheet different from the other three. Using something measured that day, invent a two-step maths problem, and solve it. Setting a question is a different skill from answering one; you have to know where the other person will trip.

The third task is a formal letter to the student who studies this month next year: what was discovered, and what started to look different once you were outside looking for it.

The sheet ends with the month’s reflection — the most surprising discovery, the hardest thing and whether it makes sense yet, and whether anything outdoors has started to look different.

A note on the last question

The answer to it is not a keepsake. In this house it was the input: what the child says she wants to know next is what the following month gets built out of.