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 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.
It’s almost here! Next week is quite an exciting week: Harvest Moon Week in Exploring Nature With Children! with the Harvest Moon falling on the 26th of September.
Here are some useful links to help with your studies:
September rewards those who pay attention. The hedgerows are changing almost by the day; blackberries darken, rosehips redden, spiders stretch their webs between stems that only a few weeks ago were thick with summer growth. The mornings feel different, sunlight slanting at a slightly different angle, and somewhere overhead, birds are beginning long journeys.
And very often, it is a child who notices first.
“There’s a feather here.”
“That leaf has gone red.”
“Listen, what bird is that?”
We can be tempted to think of these moments as little interruptions to the real business of education, but Charlotte Mason might encourage us to see them quite differently, because one of the most valuable things we can give a child is not information, it is attention.
The ability to look carefully, to listen, and notice. To remain with something long enough for it to make an impression, and perhaps, ultimately, to recognise that the world is worthy of their attention.
Attention is more than concentration
When we speak about attention in education, we often mean the ability to sit still and complete a task. A child who finishes a worksheet without wandering away is described as attentive. However, the Charlotte Mason’s understanding of attention is much richer than simple compliance; attention is the habit of bringing the mind fully to something. Perhaps a story, a painting, a mathematical idea. Maybe a bird at the feeder, a piece of music on the radio, another human being. So rather than continually skimming across the surface of things, the child gradually learns to stop and to truly encounter them, and this is one of the reasons that a Charlotte Mason-inspired education can look deceptively simple from the outside.
A child listens to a chapter of a living book, and they narrate what they remember.
They study a painting.
They take a walk.
They observe a plant.
They listen to a piece of music.
None of these things necessarily looks spectacular, but indeed, something very important is happening beneath the surface: The child is learning to attend.
Narration teaches a child to listen with the whole mind
Narration is one of the clearest examples. When we constantly interrupt a reading with questions, explanations and prompts, a child quickly learns that somebody else will decide what matters, but narration asks something completely different. The child listens because the responsibility for knowing has gently been placed into their own hands, and afterwards, they tell what they know.
Not what the workbook writer thought important, or the answer hidden at the bottom of the page, they tell us what they noticed. What remained present for them, what connected, and this changes the way a child listens. They begin to meet the author directly, and over time, attention becomes less something imposed from outside and more of a habit that grows within them.
Nature study teaches us that looking is not the same as seeing
Nature study may be one of the loveliest schools of attention that we can offer! A child can walk past the same tree every day without ever truly knowing it, but given the time, gradually they recognise the shape of its leaves, the texture of its bark, the way its buds appear at the end of wintertime, and which particular birds favour its branches. They come to know the month when its leaves begin to turn, and the places beneath it where fungi appear after rain. No longer merely a tree, it has become something known.
In a world filled with information, our children have the ability to identify hundreds of things with a quick search, but knowledge is not always the same as relationship, and nature study teaches children to look before searching, to wonder before naming and to become familiar with the living world immediately around them.
Short lessons respect the limits of attention
Charlotte Mason’s use of short lessons can sometimes be misunderstood as simply a way of making school easier for young children, but something much more thoughtful is happening. Attention is a habit, and habits are strengthened through wise practice. We do not strengthen attention by repeatedly pushing a child beyond the point at which their mind has wandered, instead, we ask for genuine attention for a manageable period and then move on. Ten truly attentive minutes may accomplish far more than forty minutes spent staring unhappily at a page, and as children grow, their capacity grows too. This may be particularly important in a culture that constantly competes for our attention, and protecting a child’s attention has become even more important than it was in Charlotte Mason’s day.
Masterly inactivity gives children space to notice for themselves
There is another part of this which can be surprisingly difficult for adults, in that we must resist explaining everything. We are enthusiastic, we know things, and we love our children! And so when a child notices something, we immediately want to tell them all about it: That flower is called… that bird does… did you know… and so on, and sometimes our explanation arrives too quickly, with the child’s small moment of wonder becoming an adult’s lesson.
Masterly inactivity asks us to practise restraint, and to be present without always inserting ourselves. Perhaps a child finds a snail; we can simply crouch beside them, looking at the shell and watching it move, wondering where it is going. And then carry on with our own walk. Not every beautiful encounter needs to become “productive”, sometimes learning happens because we allowed something to remain interesting.
Attention grows through relationship
One of the great beauties of a Charlotte Mason education, is in my opinion, that the child is gradually forming relationships. With books, ideas, people, places, the natural world, history, art, music, with all of these things! And relationship requires attention as we cannot truly know something while continually glancing away, and this is why a generous education is not simply about covering enough material. The question is not only:
How much did we get through?
It is also:
What did my child meet?
What caught their imagination?
What did they notice?
What idea followed them away from the lesson?
What bird do they now recognise from its call?
What character from a story has become almost a companion?
What painting can they close their eyes and remember?
These are small signs that knowledge is becoming alive.
We need not demand constant attention
There is an important gentleness here too, as children are human beings who become tired, and daydream, and have difficult days. The habit of attention is not built through constant correction or anxiety, and childhood must never become an endless project in self-improvement. Instead, we simply create conditions in which attention can grow, by choosing worthy books, keeping lessons appropriately short, and removing unnecessary distractions where we can. We give children plenty of time outdoors, we allow quiet, we ask them to narrate, we place beautiful things before them, and then we trust that, over years, these ordinary practices are shaping a person.
Perhaps attention is a form of love
There is a reason that this matters so deeply to me, as a child who has learned to attend may one day become an adult who notices.
They notice when someone at the table has gone quiet, when the first primrose opening beside the path, when an animal is frightened. They notice beauty, injustice, loneliness, goodness. Their attention says: You are worth my noticing. Perhaps that is why attention feels like something far greater than an academic skill, as it is a way of meeting the world, and, in its quietest form, is a kind of love.
A small practice for September
This month, we might resist the urge to add another curriculum, printable or project, instead, perhaps we can simply practise noticing.
On your next walk, ask nothing at first, and see what your children find.
At the end of a reading, allow a moment of quiet before narration begins.
Put a beautiful painting somewhere it can be seen often.
Watch the same tree through the coming weeks.
Leave room for questions that you do not immediately answer.
Notice what your child notices.
And perhaps we might practise the habit alongside them.
Charlotte Mason’s philosophy does not only educate children, but again and again, it invites us to become more attentive ourselves. To look more closely, and listen more carefully. To hurry past fewer things. The world is full of things worthy of our attention, and one of the greatest gifts that we can give to our children is to help them discover that for themselves.
