My Side of the Mountain Literature Unit and Nature Study
Hand a child My Side of the Mountain and watch what happens. They close the last page wanting to walk into the woods with a penknife and a ball of cord, and the only real question left for the rest of us is what to do with that spark before it cools. (My son actually asked if we could go live in a tree for a year when we read it. After figuring out that Dad couldn’t take that much time off of work, he tried to talk me into a month.)
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My Side of the Mountain is one of the best living books for nature study because the author was a working naturalist who wrote and illustrated it from her own life. Sam Gribley does not survive by luck. He survives by paying attention, and the book trains your child to do the same.
This is Engage-phase work, the season when learning stops being something you assign and becomes something your kids chase on their own.
My Side of the Mountain Trilogy (My Side of the Mountain / On the Far Side of the Mountain / Frightful’s Mountain)
My Side of the Mountain (Puffin Modern Classics)On the Far Side of the MountainFrightful’s Mountain
Why is My Side of the Mountain so good for nature study?
Jean Craighead George wrote and illustrated the book from a real naturalist’s life, so its survival skills, animal behavior, and plant lore are accurate enough to teach from.
She grew up in a family of naturalists, and she and her brothers were taught falconry as children. Her small pen-and-ink drawings in the margins work like a field guide, showing how to build a deadfall or shape a fishhook. The method underneath the whole story is simple and worth naming for your kids: observe, understand, then act. Sam learns which plants are safe by watching what the animals eat. He finds water by reading the land. He predicts the weather by watching the birds. That is genuine nature study wearing the clothes of an adventure novel, which is exactly why it holds a reluctant reader who would never sit still for a science text.
What grade level is a My Side of the Mountain unit study for?
A My Side of the Mountain unit study fits best in grades 4–7, and it reads aloud beautifully for younger siblings listening in.
The reading level lands in the upper-elementary to middle-school range, and the themes carry more weight than the survival plot first suggests. Younger students can follow the adventure and try the hands-on skills. Older students can wrestle with the harder question the book keeps circling: a boy who sets out to live alone slowly discovers he does not want to. That range is part of why the book works so well for multi-age homeschools, where everyone reads the same story and each child works at their own depth.
Pocket Guide to the Outdoors: Based on My Side of the Mountain
How do you turn the book into a nature study?
Read a few chapters, then take the skill outside. Almost every chapter hands Sam a problem he solves by observation, and your own yard can hold most of them.
Here are nature study ideas pulled straight from the book. Pick the ones that fit your space and your season.
Keep a field notebook the way the author did
This is the single best activity the book offers, and it costs nothing. Give your child a small notebook and three jobs: observe a plant, observe an animal or its tracks, and observe a sign of the weather or the changing season. Each entry gets a labeled sketch and a few sentences of careful description, written in the present tense as Sam would. Accuracy matters more than artistry. The point is to notice the details most people walk right past, which is the whole skill George is teaching.
Learn what is safe by watching, not tasting
A quick safety word first: never eat any wild plant, nut, mushroom, or berry unless an expert has identified it as safe. Many harmless-looking plants have poisonous look-alikes. The lesson here is observation, not foraging. Use a regional field guide to identify five common plants in your area, then study one edible plant beside its dangerous look-alike. Talk about how Sam watched the animals to judge what was safe, and why that was smart but still risky.
Read the weather like a mountain boy
Sam reads coming storms in the behavior of birds and animals long before the sky changes. Start a two-week weather log. Each morning, your child records the clouds, the wind, the temperature, and anything the local birds and squirrels are doing, then writes a prediction for the next day. After two weeks, look back and see how often the animals were right.
Map where your own survival comes from
Here is a connection that lands hard with kids. Sam runs away from New York City to the Catskill mountains, and the Catskill and Delaware watersheds supply roughly 90% of New York City’s drinking water. The city he fled drinks from the mountains where he hid. Have your child trace where their own four needs come from: heat, water, food, and clothing. Where does the water enter your house? Where was dinner grown? It turns geography into something personal.
Study a bird of prey
Frightful, Sam’s trained falcon, opens a whole topic. Research how falconry began and why it was once called the sport of kings. Learn the difference between a falcon, a hawk, and an owl. If there is a raptor center or nature preserve near you, a visit to see a live bird of prey is worth a hundred worksheets.
Try one survival skill, with an adult
Pick one of Sam’s skills and actually attempt it: building a small shelter from branches, twisting cordage from plant fibers, or making a fire with flint and steel or a magnifying glass. Anything with fire or a blade needs an adult, a safe outdoor space, and water on hand. Afterward, ask the question that teaches the most: what did Sam make sound easy that turned out to be hard?
What other subjects does a My Side of the Mountain unit study cover?
Beyond science, the book opens geography, U.S. history, art, and writing, which is why it works as a full unit study rather than a single subject.
A few of the threads worth following:
- Geography: the Catskills as a dissected plateau, the watershed that feeds a distant city, and how population clusters while open land sits empty.
- History: Sam’s land is an abandoned farm, a real story of nineteenth-century hill farms going back to forest. The book also touches falconry’s long history and nicknames Sam “Thoreau.”
- Art: the author’s own naturalist illustrations open the door to nature journaling and scientific drawing.
- Writing: Sam’s first-person voice and the book’s “In Which I…” chapter titles give your child a clear model to imitate in an essay or a new chapter of their own.
You can chase any one of these as far as your child’s curiosity runs. The My Side of the Mountain literature guide maps all of them out with ready prompts and projects if you want the planning already done.
Where does faith fit in a book with no Bible in it?
The faith connection is not bolted on. It grows from what the story already does: creation worth knowing, provision Sam cannot manufacture, and the slow discovery that he was not made to be alone.
These are real threads, not a stretch. Sam survives by paying close, humble attention to the created world, which pairs naturally with passages like Job 12 and Psalm 104, where creation itself teaches. Much of what keeps him alive arrives as gift rather than achievement, which opens Matthew 6 and the birds that are fed without storing up barns. And the book that begins as an argument for solitude ends as an argument for company, an old idea first spoken in Genesis 2:18: it is not good for the man to be alone. Read the book honestly and those conversations open on their own. The guide includes a three-part Bible study built on exactly these threads.
How do you actually run a My Side of the Mountain unit study?
Use a simple weekly rhythm, then repeat it for four to eight weeks depending on your pace.
- Read the week’s chapters together.
- Take one skill or observation outside.
- Record it in the field notebook.
- Talk over one big question from the reading.
That is the whole engine. The reason most book-based units stall is not the reading. It is the blank page that comes after, when you have to invent the questions, the projects, and the answer key on a Tuesday morning. The literature guide hands you eight chapter-by-chapter units, discussion questions with answer keys, essay tracks for three writing levels, hands-on projects, and a parent guide plus a separate student workbook so everyone has their own pages.
Start your unit study this week
My Side of the Mountain earns its place on the homeschool shelf because it does something rare: it sends children outside to look more closely at the world, then gives them the language to describe what they saw. You can build the unit yourself with the ideas above, or you can start tomorrow with a guide already written for grades 4–7.
If you want the done-for-you version, take a look at the My Side of the Mountain literature guide. It belongs to the Middle School Survival and Frontier Fiction collection, alongside The Sign of the Beaver, so you can keep the momentum going with the next book when this one ends.
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