Never be within doors when you can rightly be without ~ Charlotte Mason
Author: raisinglittleshoots
A Charlotte Mason inspired home educator, person of faith, knitter, lover of the outdoors. Author of Exploring Nature With Children: A complete, year-long curriculum
As the days shorten and the festive season approaches, it’s so easy to feel that we ought to be doing more: more activities, crafts, traditions, and more memory-making. As a mum with adult children, perhaps I can hopefully reassure you that the most meaningful seasonal traditions are usually also the simplest.
Take the same familiar walk each week and notice what has changed, bring a little greenery indoors and add some pretty ribbons. Light a candle at dusk and read together. Keep a short daily record of the things that you’ve noticed.
Children very much remember the atmosphere of a season, not just the activities that we managed to squeeze into it.
I’ve gathered together my resources for the coming weeks and months, each created to help you to celebrate the season with intention, wonder, and without any unnecessary fuss.
A Nature Advent Calendar — Scripture, nature study, simple activities and journaling for the whole family.
November has arrived, bringing branches losing their leaves, misty mornings, and those lovely afternoons when the lamps are lit a little earlier.
There is something I find quite comforting about this quieter time of year, as the natural world is settling into winter, perhaps we can allow our family days to become a little more home-focused too.
For home-educating families, November offers a lovely opportunity to enjoy familiar rhythms: good books, games to teach maths & language arts, simple handwork, and of course time spent noticing the changing world out of doors and the beautiful little details that are so easily overlooked.
It is also a month for remembering, for finishing things rather than beginning more, and for appreciating what we already have.
With this in mind, I have made another free November Joy page for you.
Just one page, with a few gentle encouragements, cosy pleasures, nature-noticing ideas, three little journal questions, and a blessing for the month ahead; there’s nothing to complete, nothing to keep up with, hopefully just a little encouragement to find joy in your ordinary November days.
May the month ahead bring you warm lamplight, good books, muddy walks, and the pleasure of noticing small and beautiful things.
The birds visiting the garden, the changing leaves on a familiar tree, the moon rising above the rooftops.
One of the loveliest things about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy is her emphasis on cultivating the habit of attention. There’s no need to turn every discovery into a lesson, or every beautiful thing into an activity. Instead, we can simply make room for our children to look, to wonder, to ask questions, and to become familiar with the world around them.
Poetry has a wonderful part to play in this, too. A few carefully chosen lines can awaken our children’s imaginations, draw their attention to something they might otherwise have overlooked, and help them see the familiar world with fresh eyes; and perhaps, in slowing down enough to notice these things alongside our children, we begin to recover a little of that wonder ourselves.
We don’t always need to give our children more things to do. Sometimes, we simply need to help them notice what’s already there.
If you’d love to make poetry a more regular part of your home education, I’ve recently published my new A Nature Poet’s Companion, created to help you to share the beauty and richness of poetry with your children.
A gentle, Charlotte Mason-inspired journey through a full year of nature poetry, created especially for home-educating families.
Across 12 weeks and four seasons, the child will:
meet beautiful living poems practise copywork and build a treasury of words spend time observing the natural world learn, step by step, how to form those observations into poetry of their own finish each week with Poetry Teatime, illumination & presentation
Each lesson includes guidance for both The Budding Poet (approx. 6–8) and The Blossoming Poet (approx. 9–12+), so the same resource can be used with your whole family.
This curriculum is absolutely not about dissecting poetry or filling in worksheets; it is about reading beautiful words, paying close attention to the living world, and helping the child to discover that they, too, have something worth saying.
The PDF is 257 pages & costs $19, but is currently at the introductory price of $15
I do love making plans for Advent! The candles, the greenery, the beautiful traditions, the stories, the baking, the little things we hope our children will remember long after they’ve grown.
But I also know how easily all those lovely ideas can become quite overwhelming, particularly when we’re already juggling the ordinary demands of home and family life, and sometimes, in our enthusiasm to make the season special, we can find ourselves so busy doing Advent that we miss the joy of simply being in it.
Advent isn’t another thing we need to accomplish. It’s a season to enter into, with our children.
A little Scripture, prayer, time outdoors, simple family traditions, and plenty of opportunities to wonder, there is so much beauty in the ordinary rhythms of this season: watching the winter birds, gathering greenery, lighting a candle as the afternoon grows dark, reading together, and quietly preparing our hearts for the coming of Christ; We don’t need to manufacture wonder for our children. We simply need to make room for it.
Celebrating Advent with Children
That’s very much the heart and soul behind my Nature Advent Calendar, a 90-page guide to celebrating this beautiful season with your children. Bringing together the rhythms of the natural year and the Christian year, it offers daily Scripture readings, prayers, indoor and outdoor activities, and opportunities for Advent journalling.
My hope is that it will help you to create meaningful family traditions without adding unnecessary busyness to your days, and it can be returned to year upon year, as a faithful companion for the Advent season.
I’ve recently finished knitting another pair of socks, and it got me thinking about Mother Culture, handcrafts, and the importance of mothers having interests of their own.
Charlotte Mason famously described education as an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. We spend a great deal of time considering what this means for our children, but I think it’s worth remembering that education is a life for us mothers, too!
The early Charlotte Mason movement recognised the importance of Mother Culture, encouraging mothers to continue reading, learning, thinking, and developing their own interests amidst the demands of family life, and what a wonderfully encouraging idea that is!
We are so careful to provide our children with a generous education, rich in good books, beautiful things, interesting ideas, and worthwhile occupations, yet how easily we neglect to offer ourselves the same opportunities.
The Value of Handcrafts
Charlotte Mason valued handicrafts not simply as a way of keeping children’s hands occupied, but as a means of developing attention, patience, skill, and good workmanship. Children were encouraged to make things that were genuinely useful and beautiful, rather than producing work merely for the sake of being busy. Surely there is something here for us mothers, too?
Whether we’re knitting socks, sewing a dress, tending a garden, or learning to embroider, we’re exercising many of those same habits. We’re practising careful attention, developing our skills, overcoming difficulties, and finding satisfaction in work well done.
Handcrafts remind us that we can continue to be learners, that our interests are worth cultivating, and that not every moment of our day needs to be devoted to meeting someone else’s needs, and there is another lovely benefit; when our children see us reading, making, learning, and pursuing interests simply because we love them, they begin to understand that education isn’t something we finish when we grow up. A living education really is a lifelong adventure.
A Little Encouragement
If your own interests have rather disappeared beneath the demands of motherhood, may I encourage you to reclaim a little space for them? You really don’t need an elaborate Mother Culture routine, expensive supplies, or hours of uninterrupted time. Just pick up the book, thread the needle, plant the seeds, knit a few rows. It all adds up. Knitting was invaluable for me when my children were small, as I could pick up my work for just a few moments at a time. I could carry it around in my handbag to meet ups, church, bus journeys etc. And it didn’t require lots of materials or space.
Begin something simply because it interests you, and allow yourself the pleasure of growing in knowledge and skill. We wouldn’t dream of offering our children an education consisting entirely of duties, chores, and responsibilities; we want them to encounter beauty, discover their interests, develop their abilities, and delight in learning.
Mothers deserve a place at that generous feast, too. Education is a life, and ours is still unfolding.
