June has a particular feeling of almost-summer: tall grasses, the hedgerows heavy, full and green, evenings that seem to go on and on. The children are often half in the house, and half out of it, trailing in grass, muddy knees, sticky fingers, and pockets full of treasures.
June can also bring a sense of loosening: the school year year is not quite finished, summer has not quite begun, and everything can feel a little unraveled at the edges. Home life may become simpler and less polished; meals move towards bread, fruit, eggs, salad, and whatever can be eaten outside. There is beauty in it, but also tiredness, and he end of a long season often asks for our steadiness more than our sparkle.
So I’ve made a small gift for you: a simple one-page June Joy sheet. It’s not a plan, a challenge, or another thing for you to keep up with, just a little encouragement for these long, green days. You needn’t use it perfectly. Pin it to the fridge, tuck it into your diary, or read the blessing aloud while the kettle boils.
The hedgerows are thick with green, the bees are busy, the grasses are high, and suddenly summer feels properly here. For many home-educating families, it is also the point in the year when rhythms begin to loosen a little. Lessons may be winding down, the weather is calling everyone outside, and you may find yourself wanting a simple way to keep nature study going without adding more planning to your plate.
Exploring Nature With Children gives you a doable, year-round structure for nature study, with weekly themes that guide you through the seasons. It is not about producing perfect nature journals or turning every walk into a lesson, instead, it is about forming the habit of attention: helping children notice what is growing, changing, blooming, buzzing, nesting, ripening, and fading in the world around them.
June is a beautiful month to begin, return, or to simply forge ahead, noticing wildflowers, watching honeybees about their work, listening to the birds, comparing leaves, sketching, and following the signs of summer in your own small corner of the world.
Nature study does not need to be complicated. A short walk, one thing noticed, a quick sketch, a few words in a journal, these small acts, repeated over time, become rich habits for a lifetime.
Whether you are beginning nature study for the first time or returning to a favourite subject, ENWC is there to give you a simple, thoughtful structure for noticing the natural world around you, one week at a time.
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: #ENWCbutterfliesweek
When we pay attention, wisdom grows. Not when we rush, but when we pause long enough to notice the light that falls on the kitchen table, or the first green shoots in the hedge. Perhaps the way the evening settles around the home, and the small mercies that carried us through an ordinary Tuesday.
A seasonal diary is not simply a record of what happened, it is a new way of learning to see. It teaches us to notice the world as it really is: changing, patterned, generous, and full of invitations. The weather, the garden, the birds, the household rhythms, the meals we make, the prayers we return to, the small work of our hands, all of these become part of a living conversation between our inner life and the world that God has placed us in.
Keeping a seasonal diary is in many ways a practice of sacred noticing, helping us to resist the modern pressure to live constantly ahead of ourselves. Instead of always chasing the next thing, we begin to ask: What is here? What is growing? What is fading? What am I being shown in this current season? Ordinary diary keeping becomes something deeper, a few lines about the weather may become a record of faithfulness. A note about blossom, laundry, tiredness, or soup on the stove may reveal more than we expected, and over time, these pages become a testimony: not of a perfect life, but of a life attended to.
Across 42 pages, you will be guided to observe your days with fresh eyes, to write with tender detail, weaving gratitude and prayer into your reflections, and to connect your daily life with the natural rhythms of the year. You absolutely do not need to be a polished writer, nor do you need a beautiful notebook, just a willingness to begin noticing, and a longing to slow down, write more meaningfully, and find wonder in the ordinary. It is especially for those who sense that the seasons are not just passing scenery, but a quiet framework for prayer, reflection, memory, and growth.
The small, ordinary things matter, and sometimes, when we write them down, we begin to see that they were holy ground all 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: #ENWCblackgardenantsweek
The days are full and golden, the hedgerows thick with green and heady fragrance, and bees hum busily amongst the flowers. Evenings stretch on and on, and our children seem to sense that this is one of those turning points of the year, even if no one has quite explained it to them.
For families who want to live more closely with the seasons, then Midsummer offers us a beautiful opportunity to pause, notice, give thanks, and mark the passing of time in a meaningful way.
For Christian families, Midsummer is more than simply a celebration of the longest days. Traditionally, it is connected with St. John’s Tide, the feast of St. John the Baptist, celebrated on the 24th June.
Why celebrate Midsummer?
Charlotte Mason wrote of education as an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. Seasonal celebrations sit beautifully within this way of thinking. They are not about adding yet another elaborate activity to an already full week, instead, they are about forming an atmosphere within the home, one in which children learn to pay attention, to recognise beauty, to connect the natural world with the rhythm of the year, and to understand that time itself can be received as a precious gift.
Midsummer gives children something very concrete to observe:
The height of the sun. The fullness of the garden. The abundance of flowers. The warmth of the long evenings. The sense that the year has reached a very bright, and golden pause.
These are not abstract ideas. They are things children can see, touch, smell, and remember, which is very much in keeping with a Charlotte Mason approach to nature study. We do not begin by over-explaining, we begin by helping the child to notice.
Midsummer and St. John’s Tide
Traditionally, Midsummer is celebrated on the 24th June, the feast day of St. John the Baptist. At this point in the year, the sun is high in the sky and the days are long and luminous; a natural moment to think about light. In the Gospel of John, St. John the Baptist is described as a witness to the Light. Jesus Himself spoke of John as “a burning and shining lamp.” This makes St. John’s Tide a rich and meaningful celebration for Christian families: The outer world is full of light, warmth, flowers, and growth. The inner invitation is to prepare the way for Christ.
This is the heart of the season: to notice the light, to give thanks for it, and to make straight the way for Jesus in our hearts.
An open-and-go family guide
Celebrating The Seasons With Children: Midsummer and St. John’s Tide is a 37-page PDF handbook designed to help you create a simple, thoughtful, and authentic family celebration. It is part of the Celebrating The Seasons With Children series: a collection of handbooks written to guide families step by step in observing the natural rhythms of the year alongside the seasons and celebrations of the Church. The format is simple and open-and-go. You do not need to spend hours planning or gathering complicated supplies. The guide gives you the background, ideas, readings, and journal pages you need in one place, so you can shape a celebration that fits your own family’s needs, and is written for a wide range of ages, making it suitable for younger children, older children, and family learning together.
Inside the guide, you will find:
Midsummer and St. John’s Tide Journal Pages
Getting started: notes on using this guide
About Midsummer and St. John’s Tide
Joyfully Observing Midsummer and St. John’s Tide
Book List
A poem to enjoy as you celebrate
A piece of art to enjoy as you celebrate
A Charlotte Mason approach to seasonal celebrations
This is not a craft pack designed to keep children busy for an afternoon, it is a guide for creating a living family tradition. A Charlotte Mason education teaches children to form relationships: with books, with nature, with art, with poetry, with history, with Scripture, and with the world around them. Seasonal celebrations help to gather many of these relationships together.
At Midsummer, a child might observe the wildflowers in bloom, listen to a poem, look carefully at a painting, hear about St. John the Baptist, draw in a journal, and spend time outdoors noticing the long light of evening. None of these things need to be forced, they simply become a part of the atmosphere of home, and over time, these repeated seasonal observances become anchors in a child’s memory: they remember that the year has meaning, that faith is not shut away from the natural world. They remember the flowers, the light, the stories, the prayers, the books, the family table, and they remember that the created world speaks of the goodness of God.
Begin a simple Midsummer tradition
Midsummer does not need to be elaborate. Small things, repeated with love, become family culture.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
