Next week is Caterpillar Week Two in Exploring Nature With Children.
Here are some links to help you along:
Happy exploring!
There is a particular sort of child that I fear we may be in danger of forgetting how to raise. Not a child who can complete a nature worksheet, or who can recite three facts about bees. Not even a child with a beautiful nature journal, though that may come in time. I refer to the child who can walk slowly.
The child who notices that the same tree is not really the same tree this week, who knows where the blackberries ripen first, where the robins argue, where the first daisies appear after winter, and which patch of grass stays damp longest after the rain.
The child who has learnt that the world is not merely background, is one of the most overlooked gifts of Charlotte Mason nature study, teaching a child how to belong. Our fast, modern life tends to make children into consumers of experience; we take them to places, provide activities, arrange outings, crafts, clubs, enrichment, and opportunities.
Nature study, however, asks for something much slower, quieter and, perhaps, more radical, It asks a child to return: to the same park, the same tree. the same stretch of pavement where the weeds push up between the cracks. And in returning, the child begins to understand that a place is not exhausted by one glance. Indeed there is always more to see, and that the world opens slowly to the attentive.
This is why nature study need not be complicated, and, in fact, it probably should not be. A weekly walk with a few careful observations, a short reading, a simple journal page. These things may appear insignificant at first glance, but they are doing deep work.
They are training attention, forming memory, teaching patience. They are giving the child the dignity of direct contact with the real world, not a screen version of a butterfly, or a laminated fact sheet about autumn. The glorious, wild, beautiful, messy, unique thing itself.
Fior us the parent, this is wonderfully freeing. We do not need to be an expert naturalist to begin, or perform outdoor lessons about a subject we may know little about, and we certainly do not need to turn every walk into a project. We just need a path., a gentle structure, and perhaps a little help knowing what to look for, what to read, what to record, and how to keep going when real family life is not particularly picturesque.
That is exactly what the Nature Study Starter Bundle is for.
It gathers together the three resources I would place in the hands of a family who wants to begin nature study in a way that is beautiful, practical, and genuinely sustainable:
Exploring Nature With Children — a complete year-long guide through the seasons.
The Guided Nature Journals — in both cursive and print style copywork editions.
A Nature Study Primer — 21 days to help you, the parent, build the habit gently and well.
Together, they give you the rhythm, the prompts, the readings, the journal pages, and the encouragement to stop overthinking nature study and to actually begin.
The Nature Study Starter Bundle is available today for $35, saving $11.
Please note: this is a PDF-only bundle. You will receive digital downloads, not a physical product.
For the family who wants less rush, more attention, and a truer relationship with the natural world, then this is a very good place to begin; a child slowly learning that the world is alive with things worth knowing.
Happy exploring!
It’s almost Caterpillars Week One in Exploring Nature With Children.
Here are some links to help you along:
Exploring Nature With Children is an open and go curriculum. To make it even easier, I have created a free calendar for you to download.
If you’re over on Instagram, do pop over and say hello! The Instagram page is very much about community; think of it as your virtual home school co op! Our community uses the #exploringnaturewithchildren hashtag, & also specific weekly hashtags to enable you to connect with other families working through the ENWC curriculum. This week’s hashtag will be: #enwccaterpillarsweek
Happy exploring!
May always feels quite like a month of fullness to me. The blossom is out, the hedgerows are thickening, our children are drawn out of doors for hours & hours on end, the evenings stay light for longer, and ordinary days begin to carry that particular May feeling of growth, abundance, and a somewhat cheerful untidiness!
For many of us, May can be both lovely and surprisingly full. There is more to notice, more to do, and often more coming and going as the season opens out. Home life can feel a little looser around the edges at this time of year. Meals are simpler, the door is opened and shut all day long, and the children seem to trail in grass, pockets full of finds, and requests for “just a little longer” out of doors.
So I’ve made a small gift for you: a simple one-page May Joy sheet. It’s not a plan, a challenge, or another thing for you to keep up with, just a little encouragement for these bright, blooming days. You needn’t use it perfectly, simply pin it to the fridge, tuck it into your diary, or read the blessing aloud while the kettle boils.
From my home to yours,
Download here: free- May Joy
From my home to yours,
One of the most common difficulties in home education is not knowing what to do next. We may believe in the value of nature study. We may love the idea of our children keeping nature journals. We may know that Charlotte Mason considered time out of doors, close observation, and a growing relationship with the natural world to be deeply important.
Yet, in the middle of ordinary family life, it can be hard to make it happen.
What shall we look for today?
What should the children draw?
How do we keep going when the weather changes, or enthusiasm dips, or we have missed several weeks?
That is exactly where Exploring Nature Around The Year: 365 Days of Nature Journaling is so helpful.
A unique, easy-to-use nature study curriculum that provides a comprehensive nature journaling prompt for every day of the year. It is simple, structured, and already planned for you, while still leaving plenty of room for your own family’s observations, interests, and local landscape.
Charlotte Mason nature study is not about rushing through facts or producing perfect notebook pages. It is about forming the habit of attention. A child learns to look closely, to notice what is changing and comparing one day with another. They recognise the signs of the seasons, becoming familiar with birds, trees, flowers, weather, insects, fungi, seeds, skies, and small ordinary wonders.
Exploring Nature Around The Year supports this habit gently and steadily, each day offering a thorough nature journaling prompt. Some days may invite a drawing, others a written observation, a comparison, a search for something particular, or a closer look at what is happening outdoors. Over time, these small entries become something far greater than isolated notebook pages, becoming a record of the year in nature where you live.
One of the great strengths of this resource is that the planning has already been done. You do not need to decide on a theme, search for ideas, create a list of seasonal topics, or wonder whether your nature study is “enough”. The prompts are already arranged around the year, with major and minor nature study themes woven throughout.
You simply open the curriculum, find the day, and begin, which makes it especially helpful for busy home educating mothers who want to offer rich and meaningful nature study, but do not have the time or energy to prepare something new every week. A true pick-up-and-go resource.
A nature journal is not merely a pretty sketchbook. In the Charlotte Mason tradition, it is a serious and living record of a child’s developing knowledge of the natural world. As your child follows the daily prompts, they begin to build a dynamic scientific log of what they are learning. Which teaches children to see the natural world as something ordered, changing, alive, and worthy of careful attention. They also help them understand nature through direct experience, rather than only through books or screens. These resources have their place of course, but there is nothing quite like the knowledge that comes from personal connection.
Although Exploring Nature Around The Year provides a prompt for every day, it is not intended to become another burden. Use it daily, or dip in and out as needed. You can return to it after a missed week. You can use it during term time, holidays, quiet afternoons, or alongside your existing nature study rhythm. Nature study should become part of family life, not another thing to feel guilty about. The daily structure is there to help you to begin, to remove decision fatigue, and to keep nature study moving through the year. An invitation.
Many families are familiar with Exploring Nature With Children which is a complete 48-week nature study curriculum. It includes weekly themes, a guided nature walk, poetry and art selections, themed booklists, references to The Handbook of Nature Study, and extension activities.
Exploring Nature Around The Year is different.
Rather than offering a weekly curriculum structure, it gives you an authentic nature journaling prompt for each day of the year. Its focus is specifically on helping children keep a nature journal and grow in the practice of close, regular observation.
In simple terms:
Exploring Nature With Children gives you a full weekly nature study curriculum.
Exploring Nature Around The Year gives you a daily nature journaling rhythm.
Choose one or the other
This resource is best suited to children who are old enough to keep a nature journal, whether through drawing, writing, labelling, or a combination of these, however, younger children can certainly take part orally. A parent may read the prompt aloud, talk through the observation with the child, and write down the child’s words. In this way, even a young child can begin to develop the habit of noticing and narrating what they see. It is also a lovely resource for the parent. Many mothers find that nature journaling helps them slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the changing year alongside their children.
You can begin at any point in the year.
The resource includes a beginning prompt on 1st September to help set up the journal. After that, you simply continue with the actual date.
For example, if you begin on 3rd May, you would use the 1st September prompt first to set up your journal, and then continue with the 4th May prompt the next day. N need to wait for a new school year, a new term, or a perfect starting point., begin now.
Exploring Nature Around The Year is written for a northern hemisphere, four-season climate.
The December prompts include themes of Advent and Christmastide, and some poetry selections may contain religious themes. However, the resource is used by secular families and by families from different faith backgrounds.
As always, parents are free to adapt the material to suit their own home and convictions.
Please use code: ENAY20 for a 20% discount on your purchase – it’s valid for the next week.
Happy exploring!
It’s almost Grasses Week in Exploring Nature With Children!
Here are some links to help with your studies:
Exploring Nature With Children is an open and go curriculum. To make it even easier, I have created a free calendar for you to download.
If you’re over on Instagram, do pop over and say hello! The Instagram page is very much about community; think of it as your virtual home school co op! Our community uses the #exploringnaturewithchildren hashtag, & also specific weekly hashtags to enable you to connect with other families working through the ENWC curriculum. This week’s hashtag will be:#ENWCgrassesweek
Happy exploring!
Many of us feel the need to slow down a little. Not necessarily to do less, because for most of us, that is not particularly realistic, but to live our days more attentively. To stop rushing from one thing to the next without really taking in what is in front of us. To notice where God is meeting us in ordinary life. To pay better attention to the season, to our homes, to the natural world, and to the shape of our days.
I think this is part of why so many women are drawn to things such as diary-keeping, seasonal rhythms, and simple forms of prayer. Not because we are trying to construct some ideal life, but because we hope to live our real life with a little more care and awareness.
It is very easy to live superficially now. Modern life trains us to skim. We move quickly, consume quickly, and often overlook the small things that make up the substance of a life. Yet much faithfulness is built in exactly those small things: the work done at home, the way we speak to others and to ourselves, the way we pause, the things that we notice, the prayers that we offer in passing, and the habits we return to quietly over time.
That is the thinking behind two of my resources: Keeping a Seasonal Diary: A Practice of Sacred Noticing and LIGHT: A Simple Pattern for Everyday Prayer.
They are different resources, but they sit quite naturally alongside one another. One helps you to pay attention to the shape of your days and write them down. The other helps you pray simply and naturally within those same days.
To notice properly is a discipline. It sounds gentle, and it is, but it is not vague. It asks something of us. It asks us to stop living entirely on the surface. It asks us to pay attention to what is here and now, rather than always straining after what is next.
This matters spiritually because so much of life with God is lived in ordinary time. Not only in church services, retreats, or especially meaningful moments, but in kitchens, gardens, errands, conversations, tired evenings, and the repeated work of keeping a home and caring for others.
Learning to notice teaches us to recognise the value of ordinary days. It helps us see patterns, mercies, answered prayers, small growth, and the natural rhythms that carry us through the year. It helps us to become more rooted, and less scattered. Less likely to treat our own lives as a blur.
There is something steadying about keeping a diary, not in a performative sense, and not because every entry needs to be profound, but because the simple act of writing things down helps us to see them more clearly. It helps us to gather the day a little, creating a record not just of what happened, but of what mattered.
A seasonal diary can be especially helpful because it encourages us to notice both the inner and outer season we are living through. What is changing in the garden or hedgerow, what the weather is doing. What feels difficult, and what has been good. What God seems to be teaching us, and what has quietly sustained us.
That is the habit that Keeping a Seasonal Diary: A Practice of Sacred Noticing is written to help you to form in your own life.
It is a practical 7-day guide to keeping a diary in a way that is rooted in faith, attention, and the natural rhythm of the year.
Over seven days, it will help you learn how to:
This resource is for people who are new to journaling, but also for those who have kept notebooks before and want a more thoughtful, and perhaps more anchored approach.
It is not about writing beautifully for the sake of it. It is about learning to look more carefully at your own life.
Keeping a Seasonal Diary: A Practice of Sacred Noticing is $9 – you can purchase & download the sample HERE
In my own experience, many women feel quietly defeated by prayer. Not because they do not want to pray, far from it, but because they imagine prayer belongs to a set of conditions that very rarely exist: a quiet house, a clear head, a settled heart, a long stretch of uninterrupted time.
For most of us, life does not often look like that. We have children to teach, meals to make, messages to answer, jobs to get on with, tiredness, interruptions, noise, and the general muddle of everyday life. So prayer gets pushed to the edges, or postponed for later, or turned into something we feel guilty about not doing properly.
I believe that what many of us need is not another prayer journal or complex weekly system, but a simple pattern. Something we can remember, that fits into our ordinary life as it is actually lived.
Which is exactly the reasoning behind LIGHT: A Simple Pattern for Everyday Prayer. A short, practical 6-day resource built around a five-step prayer pattern:
Listen · Intend · Ground · Hallow · Thank & Trust
Written to help you to pray in the middle of daily life: at the sink, on a walk, while home educating, between tasks, or on the days when you are exhausted and have very little to say. Rather than waiting for the perfect quiet time, LIGHT helps you to return to God in the moment you actually find yourself in.
The six days cover the whole pattern:
Day 1 – Listen: learning to pause and become aware of God’s presence
Day 2 – Intend: offering the task in front of you to God
Day 3 – Ground: praying with your body and remembering that you are held
Day 4 – Hallow: blessing ordinary work, meals, lessons, and conversations
Day 5 – Thank & Trust: practising gratitude and release
Day 6 – Living LIGHT: drawing the whole pattern together into daily use
This is a small resource, but it is meant to be genuinely useful. Not another thing to admire and then leave on the shelf, but a pattern you can carry into the day and use straight away.
LIGHT: A Simple Pattern for Everyday Prayer is also $9 & you can purchase & download the sample HERE
Although they can each be used on their own, they work particularly well together.
LIGHT helps you to pray within the day as it unfolds.
Keeping a Seasonal Diary: helps you reflect upon the day, and write something of it down.
One helps to form the habit of turning to God in ordinary moments, the other helps to form the habit of recognising those moments afterwards.
Together, they create a simple rhythm:
pause,
pray,
notice,
write,
remember.
There is nothing complicated about this, and that is rather the point.
Written for ordinary women managing full days, who want a steadier and more faithful way to inhabit them.
If you have been feeling the need to slow down, pay proper attention, and to meet God more faithfully in the life you already have, these may serve you well; our ordinary days are not empty days, quite often, they are the place where the deepest work is quietly being done.
From my home to yours,
And here is my present to you: a 21% discount code to use against any of the products in the Raising Little Shoots online shop:
BIRTHDAY21
(Oh to be 21 again!)
This is a limited time code only – valid from today, Friday the 18th of April until Wednesday morning the 22nd of April BST
You can visit the RLS shop:
Happy exploring!
Next week in Exploring Nature With Children is ‘Wildflower Week’.
Here are some helpful links to support your nature studies:
Exploring Nature With Children is an open and go curriculum. To make it even easier, I have created a free calendar for you to download.
If you’re over on Instagram, do pop over and say hello! The Instagram page is very much about community; think of it as your virtual home school co op! Our community uses the #exploringnaturewithchildren hashtag, & also specific weekly hashtags to enable you to connect with other families working through the ENWC curriculum. This week’s hashtag will be: #ENWCwildflowerweek
Happy exploring!
One of the gifts of a Charlotte Mason education is that it teaches us not merely to look, but to truly see.
When a child spends time out of doors, returning week by week to the local park, hedgerows, garden paths, or the small corners of their neighbourhood, they begin to form a relationship with the world around them. They notice what is changing, what is returning, and what is particular to this month, in this place. The first bluebell. The last blackberry. The curl of a fern. The colour of the sky before rain.
This is part of the deep value of nature study. It is not only about gathering information, but about cultivating attention. A child learns to observe carefully, to remember, and to delight in beauty. One of the loveliest ways to support this habit is through keeping some kind of record of their studies.
A nature journal need not be elaborate. In fact, it is often better when it is kept simple. A sketch, a date, a few notes about the weather. Perhaps a copied poem or a brief written observation these small things. Faithfully kept, these records become part of the fabric of a child’s education. Over time, they form a testimony to days spent noticing.
For many families, however, the difficulty is not in seeing the value of such a record, but in finding a way to form the habit of keeping it regularly. Our days are often busy and full. It can be helpful, then, to have something that gathers the different threads of nature study into one place.
Exploring Nature With Children: A Guided Journal was created with this in mind, as a companion for your child to use alongside the Exploring Nature With Children curriculum.
The journal follows the rhythm of the curriculum through the seasons and months, offering 48 weeks of guided journaling. Each week includes a themed prompt, space for sketching, a place to record the date and time, and a weather box, as well as poetry copywork, an art study page, and pages for written or sketched responses to the extension activities. At the back, there is also a Calendar of Firsts, where a child can note the first signs of the season that they observe, and pages to record the nature books read throughout the year.
What I especially love about this resource is that it gives shape to our lessons without becoming a burden. It offers a framework, but still leaves room for the child’s own encounter with what they have seen and known. It helps to make the habit of keeping a record more natural, and perhaps more sustainable, over the course of the year. And of course, when such journals are kept over time, they become more than just a part of lessons, they become a treasure: a record of seasons gone by, poems learned, art works studied, and the slow growth of a child’s powers of observation.
In a world that often urges haste in education, nature study invites us to go more slowly: to pay attention, to get to know a place well, let learning take root through direct acquaintance and quiet reflection. The Guided Journal can be a very simple help in that work.
For those who are using Exploring Nature With Children, I am currently running a special offer on the companion guided journal for children. If you have been wanting a gentle way to help your child keep a more regular record of their nature study, this may be a lovely time to add it to your plans.
Use code: GJ20 for a 20% discount on your Guided Journal purchase.
Happy exploring!
