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
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.
I genuinely think that one of the loveliest things we can give to our children is the habit of noticing; noticing the first snowdrops pushing through the cold earth, the different birds visiting the garden, the gradual changing of the seasons, or the extraordinary little world that exists beneath a fallen log.
These are such ordinary things, and yet they have the potential to enrich our children’s lives enormously.
I know that so many home-educating parents would love to include more nature study in their days; perhaps you’ve bought a beautiful nature journal, collected a few field guides, or made enthusiastic plans for regular nature walks, but somehow, amongst lessons, laundry, meals, and all the other demands of family life, nature study can become another good intention that never quite finds its place.
If that sounds familiar, may I encourage you? You don’t need to do more, you just need to begin, begin small, and repeat regularly.
The Gentle Work of Forming a Habit
Charlotte Mason placed enormous importance on the formation of good habits, recognising that so much of our daily life is shaped by the things we do almost without thinking, and I think this is particularly helpful when we consider nature study.
Rather than planning an elaborate nature walk once a month, what might happen if we simply made a habit of noticing the natural world every day? Of looking at the birds whilst washing the breakfast dishes, stopping to examine an unfamiliar flower on our afternoon walk, or taking a few moments to watch the clouds together?
Of course, there is a place for more purposeful nature study, but these little encounters are important too, as they help our children to become familiar with the world around them, and familiarity is the beginning of a relationship.
Charlotte Mason encouraged us to give our children opportunities to become personally acquainted with the natural world, rather than simply learning facts about it from books. After all, a child who has watched a robin gathering nesting material, or observed the same tree through all four seasons, has gained something that cannot quite be replicated on a worksheet.
And perhaps most importantly, we don’t need to be experts ourselves! We can learn alongside our children, allowing our own curiosity to be awakened in the process.
This is a resource especially for you, the parent, because I believe that when we develop our own understanding, confidence, and enthusiasm for nature study, it becomes so much easier to share those things naturally with our children, and over 21 days, I’ll gently guide you through the principles and practice of nature study, helping you to establish a rhythm that works for your own family.
Each day includes a carefully chosen quotation, a lesson for the parent, a particular focus, and a small, achievable goal. There are opportunities to reflect, to journal, to put ideas into practice, and to consider how nature study might become part of your family’s everyday life. The 90-page workbook is designed to be worked through a little at a time, there is no need to rush, and certainly no expectation of perfection! My hope is that by the end of these 21 days, nature study will feel less like something you ought to be doing, and more like something you genuinely look forward to.
Begin With What You Have
You don’t need to live in the countryside, own an impressive collection of field guides, or be able to identify every bird that visits your garden, just begin where you are, with what is around you, and over time, these seemingly insignificant moments begin to accumulate. Your children develop their powers of observation, their understanding of the natural world deepens, and the changing seasons become familiar friends, and you may find that something rather lovely happens to you, too. Nature study isn’t simply another subject to teach. It is a way of paying attention to the world in which we live.
If you’ve been wanting to begin, or perhaps to return to nature study after a rather long absence, I’d love to help you.
My A Nature Study Primer – 21 Days to the Habit of Nature Study is available as a 90-page PDF workbook, and please use the limited time code: PRIMER20 for a 20% discount on your purchase.
October has almost arrived, and with it comes a different kind of invitation.
September often asks us to begin again; whereas October, I think, asks us to deepen. The days are shortening properly now, and the light has turned softer and lower, leaves are gathering in the lanes, hedgerows are thinning, and fungi appear almost overnight! There is a sense of the year drawing inward.
For home-educating families, October can easily become a month of trying to keep September’s momentum going. We may feel that we ought to have found our rhythm by now, ought to be more organised, ought to be getting through more books, more lessons, more plans. But perhaps October does not need more effort from us, perhaps instead it can be the month when we allow our days to become a little quieter, slower, and more particular.
This is a lovely time to follow fewer things more deeply. To read aloud in the lamplight. To watch one tree changing week by week. To cook something warm together. To notice the evidence of creatures in the garden or hedgerow. To let handwork, conversation, poetry, baking, nature study, and ordinary household life take their rightful place alongside books and lessons.
So I have made another little free October Joy page for you.
It is only one page, & deliberately so. There are a few gentle permissions for the month ahead, some cosy September pleasures, small nature-noticing ideas, three very short journal questions, and a September blessing. Nothing needs to be worked through in order, and there is absolutely nothing to keep up with. This is not a September reset, nor a challenge, a routine, or a list of things that we ought to be doing. It is simply a small reminder, from one busy mother to another, that beginning again does not have to mean beginning everything again.
You might pin the page beside your calendar, slip it into your planner or morning basket, or leave it somewhere you will happen upon it during a busy day.
May September bring you golden afternoon light, and the grace to find steadiness without asking more of yourself.
As the days grow gradually shorter and the year turns towards winter, our thoughts often wander towards Advent and Christmas preparations. It can be very easy, especially as mothers, to feel that we ought to make the season magical in a hundred different ways. But may I be the gentle voice reminding you that a more soulful Advent really is possible; one that is genuinely rich, beautiful and meaningful without becoming yet another list of things to keep up with.
Perhaps the first step is simply to decide what “enough” looks like for your family. Light a small candle. Read one verse of Scripture. Step outside together and notice the cold air, the bare branches, the winter sky. Make presence the plan. Children may forget many of the carefully organised activities, but they do remember the warmth of home, the reverent hush of candlelight, the rhythm of familiar traditions, and the feeling of being deeply loved.
If you would like a simple framework to help you hold that course, Celebrating the Seasons with Children: Nature Advent Calendar was written for exactly this kind of Advent. Each day offers a short Scripture reading, gentle indoor and outdoor invitations, and an easy journaling rhythm for you and your child. Nature study, faith, creativity and seasonal observation are woven together in a way that allows Advent to become something you actually live, rather than something to be ticked off the never ending to do list.
Keeping an Advent journal is an especially precious part of the curriculum. These simple records of what you noticed, read, made and experienced together become little time capsules of family life, and treasures to return to in years to come.
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.
