Today is the autumnal equinox: one of those turning points in the year when it is worth pausing long enough to notice that the season has changed; the light is different, the evenings are drawing in, and the laves are beginning to turn. Later this week the glorious Harvest Moon will rise.
For those of us who practise nature study with our children, these changes are our curriculum.
Charlotte Mason understood that a child’s knowledge of the natural world is not built primarily through facts to memorise, but through a growing relationship with the real things themselves, such as a particular tree known through all four seasons, the changing position of the moon, and the first frost noticed because a child has been watching out for it.
This kind of knowledge grows slowly, and that is one of the loveliest things about nature study: you do not need to keep up. If your nature notebooks have been neglected, just pick up and begin again. If you haven’t managed a nature walk for weeks, go outside today. If your child doesn’t know the names of local trees, choose one, and look it up, and observe how it changes (or not!) over the coming weeks.
Look closely, wonder about something, find out a little more when you return home. That’s it!
This Week in Exploring Nature With Children
This week in Exploring Nature With Children, we are studying the Harvest Moon, and it is a wonderfully simple study because everyone can take part; step outside together and look up.
Notice where the moon rises, watch how it changes over several evenings. Talk about why this full moon became associated with harvest time. Younger children may simply draw what they see; older children might want to learn more about the moon’s orbit, phases, or the traditions that have grown around the Harvest Moon, and allow the study to grow according to your child’s interest rather than feeling that every possible avenue must be explored.
That is very much the spirit of ENWC.
The curriculum provides a gentle framework for a whole year of nature study, and is written to be used year upon year for layered learning, helping families to notice what is happening in the natural world week by week, without turning those encounters into another heavy school subject. And because nature study begins with observation, you need very little to start:
A little time to spend out of doors, the willingness to pay attention.
Free Harvest Moon Journal Pages
To accompany this week’s study, I also have free Harvest Moon journal pages available for you to download. You might like to use them after an evening moon watch, add them to your nature notebooks, or simply leave them on the table with pencils and watercolours and see what your child chooses to record.
There is no need to produce a perfect page, and the purpose of the notebook page is not the page itself. it is the looking and the noticing that comes first.
Begin With This Season
The equinox is a lovely marker in the year, but nature study does not require a perfect September beginning, or indeed a perfect anything! We begin with the season that we are in.Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children: the habit of looking closely at the world around them, and the sense that the natural world is something that they belong to, delight in, care for, and continue discovering throughout their lives.
Exploring Nature With Children is there to help you to begin, and to help you to keep on returning.
Happy exploring!
