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“Everything was ready. The shelves were lined with shining jars of jam, the cupboards were full, and the scent of rose petals drifted through the kitchen.”
Jill Barklem, Brambly Hedge

Are you familiar with the Brambly Hedge stories? These gorgeously illustrated tales follow a community of country mice & their comings and goings. When my own children were little, we read the books season by season. They pair beautifully with nature walks, tea time, or a quiet morning with your nature journal.

In the warm days of early summer, the roses begin to open: soft, fragrant, generous, and full of secret life. Some grow carefully in gardens, trained along arches and walls; others scramble wild through hedgerows, offering pale petals to bees and later, bright hips to birds.

Invitation

This week, choose one rose to visit often. It may be a garden rose, a dog rose in the hedge, or a climbing rose tumbling over a fence. Watch it as though you are a tiny creature living nearby. What would it offer you? Shade? Scent? Food? Shelter? A place to hide?

What to Observe

Look closely at your rose and notice:

The flowers
How many petals does it have? Are they tightly folded or wide open? What colour are they at the centre, the edges, and as they fade?

The scent
Smell the rose gently. Is it sweet, fruity, spicy, green, honey-like, or hardly scented at all?

The leaves
Notice the shape of the leaves. Are they glossy or dull? Smooth or toothed? How are they arranged on the stem?

The thorns
Are they large, small, curved, sharp, reddish, green, or brown? What purpose might they serve?

The visitors
Watch for bees, hoverflies, beetles, ants, spiders, or birds. Who comes to the rose, and what do they seem to be doing?

The changes
Visit the rose again later in the week. Which flowers have opened? Which have dropped their petals? Can you see the beginnings of rosehips?

Nature Journal Prompt

Draw your rose or press a fallen petal into your nature journal.
Write a few words or sentences about it:

This rose reminds me of…
Its scent reminded me of…
The creatures I noticed were…
If I were a mouse in Brambly Hedge, I would use these petals to…

Simple Rose Activities

Make one of these:

Rose Petal Pressing
Collect a few fallen petals and press them between paper inside a heavy book.

Rose Scent Words
Create a list of words to describe the scent of your rose. Try to find at least five.

Rose Colour Study
Use coloured pencils or watercolour to mix the exact shade of your rose. Look carefully: is it truly pink, or peach, cream, yellow, blush, crimson, or white with green shadows?

Petal Counting
Count the petals of a wild rose and a garden rose. Compare them. Which one is simpler? Which one is fuller?

A lovely recipe for Rose Petal Jelly

Things to Learn

Roses belong to the same plant family as apples, blackberries, raspberries, hawthorn, and strawberries: the Rosaceae family.

Wild roses usually have five petals, while many garden roses have been bred to have many more.

After pollination, many roses form rosehips, which are fruit. These are important food for birds and wildlife later in the year.

Thorns help protect the rose from being eaten, and climbing or scrambling roses can use them to help hold themselves among other plants.

Poetry & Literature Basket

You might enjoy reading:

“The Rose” by Christina Rossetti
“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Reflection for Parents:

A rose teaches us to look slowly. It is not only a pretty flower, but a whole small world: petals, perfume, thorns, leaves, visiting creatures, fading blossoms and future hips. Sit beside one for a little while, and let it show you just how much life can be held in a single stem.

From my home to yours,

P.S. A little planning note for the year ahead…

The 2026–2027 Charlotte Mason Homeschool Planner is now available!

This year’s planner includes a lovely selection of 106 printable planning pages, allowing you to custom build a planner that truly serves your own family. It is designed to help you shape your homeschool year with clarity, steadiness, and purpose — from big-picture aims to weekly and daily lesson planning.

Written for the Charlotte Mason inspired home educator, the planner helps you create your own personal road map for the year ahead, and gently supports you in carrying out those plans on a daily basis, with minimal additional planning time throughout the year.

This year’s planner also includes the new 14-page Bonus Planning Section, featuring guided pages to help you reflect on your term and preserve the family culture and traditions you are building along the way.

Please use the code PLAN20 for 20% off the planner.

The 2026–2027 free annual Exploring Nature With Children calendar is now available, which you are very welcome to download and use alongside your curriculum this year. Included are all the dates and themes in one handy place, and the occasional week that needs to be changed, (such as Harvest Moon Week) is already switched around & planned for you.

The 2026–2027 Charlotte Mason Homeschool Planner is also now available. It includes a lovely selection of 106 printable planning pages, allowing you to custom build a planner that truly serves your own family. It is designed to help you shape your homeschool year with clarity, steadiness, and purpose, from big-picture aims to weekly and daily lesson planning.

Written for the Charlotte Mason inspired home educator, the planner helps you create your own personal road map for the year ahead, and gently supports you in carrying out those plans on a daily basis, with minimal additional planning time throughout the year.

This year’s planner also includes the new 14-page Bonus Planning Section, featuring guided pages to help you reflect on each term, and preserve the family culture and traditions you are building along the way.

You can use the code PLAN20 for 20% off the planner.

Happy planning, and happy exploring!

It’s almost Honeybee Week in Exploring Nature With Children!

Here are some links to help you with your studies this week:

• How do I tell the difference between a wasp and a bee?
• Bee ID
• Bees Can Dance! And other Things You Didn’t Know
• Honeybee Anatomy
• How Bees Make Honey Mini Book

A little planning note for the year ahead…

The 2026–2027 Charlotte Mason Homeschool Planner is now available!

This year’s planner includes a lovely selection of 106 printable planning pages, allowing you to custom build a planner that truly serves your own family. It is designed to help you shape your homeschool year with clarity, steadiness, and purpose, from big-picture aims to weekly, and daily lesson planning.

Written for the Charlotte Mason inspired home educator, the planner helps you create your own personal road map for the year ahead, and supports you in carrying out those plans on a daily basis, with minimal additional planning time throughout the year.

This year’s planner also includes the new 14-page Bonus Planning Section, featuring guided pages to help you to reflect upon each term and preserve the family culture and traditions that you are building along the way.

Please use the code PLAN20 for 20% off the planner.

I’ve also created the 2026-2027 free annual Exploring Nature With Children calendar, which you are very welcome to download and use alongside your curriculum this year.

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:#ENWChoneybeeweek

Happy planning, and happy exploring!

One of the challenges of home education is not simply what to teach, but how to hold the whole year in your hands without becoming completely overwhelmed by it.

There are books to read, habits to cultivate, lessons to prepare, nature walks to take, children to encourage, interruptions to absorb, and ordinary family life is happening all around it. A good homeschool planner should not add pressure to that work. It should bring a steady rhythm.

The 2026–2027 Charlotte Mason Home Education Planner from has been created to help you plan your year with clarity, and confidence. Written especially for the Charlotte Mason inspired home educator who wants more than a checklist, this planner helps you think about the larger vision for your home education, shape a realistic rhythm for your family, and then faithfully carry that vision into your daily lessons.

Charlotte Mason wrote:

“Our aim in education is to give a full life.”

And this is the very heart behind this planner, a full life: rich in books, nature, faith, atmosphere, habits, beauty, family culture, and steady daily attention.

This year’s planner contains 106 printable planning pages for you to choose from, so that you can build the planner that truly serves your own home and children. And, if you follow Exploring Nature With Children, the full year of ENWC has already been plugged into the calendar for you, so you do not need to plan out those weekly nature study themes yourself.

BONUS: This year’s planner also includes 14 additional guided planning pages, including the new:

Mother’s Term Compass Pages
A place to begin each term with calm and realism: considering what your home education needs to feel like, what your children most need, and what you yourself need in order to carry the term well.

Family Culture & Traditions Pages
An invitation to notice and preserve the things that make your family life meaningful: the books you return to, seasonal traditions, faith rhythms, nature places, meals, songs, poems, prayers, and small comforts that your children will one day remember.

Planning home education is not only about lessons, it’s is about building a family culture.

The 2026–2027 Charlotte Mason Home Education Planner  is designed to hold your hand from big-picture vision to daily lesson planning, helping you create a personal road map for the year ahead while keeping the process simple, practical, and beautiful.

The planner runs from August 2026 to August 2027, and is available now.

Take a look at the sample pages, choose the pages that will serve your family best, and begin shaping a homeschool year that feels calm, faithful, purposeful, and full of life.

Use code PLAN20 for a limited, 20% summer discount.

From my home to yours,

The turning points of the year offers children so much more than a pleasant seasonal activity. They offer a way of understanding time, creation, history, and faith. Midsummer is one of those beautiful, full and rich moments.

The days are long and golden, the hedgerows are thick with green, flowers are abundant, bees move busily among the blooms, and the evening light lingers long after dinner. Children often notice these changes instinctively: the brightness at bedtime, the warmth in the garden, along with the sense that the year has reached a rich and shining fullness.

A Charlotte Mason education gives children the habit of attention. It teaches them to form relationships with the world around them: with nature, poetry, art, Scripture, history, and the changing seasons. Seasonal celebrations bring these living relationships together in a way that is deeply memorable.

Midsummer invites our children to observe:

the height of the sun,
the fullness of the garden,
the abundance of flowers,
the work of bees and insects,
the long evening light,
the turning of the year.

These are not abstract lessons. They are living ideas, rooted in the child’s very own experience of the world.

For Christian families, Midsummer is also traditionally connected with St. John’s Tide, celebrated on the 24th June, the feast day of St. John the Baptist.

At the height of the sun’s light, the Church remembers John: the one who prepared the way for Christ, and whom Jesus described as a “burning and shining lamp.” This gives the season a beautiful spiritual depth. As the outer world is full of light, warmth, flowers, and growth, we are invited inwardly to prepare the way for Christ, the true Light.

Celebrating The Seasons With Children: Midsummer and St. John’s Tide is a 37-page PDF guide created to help families observe this rich seasonal moment with beauty, meaning, and ease.

It is not a busywork craft pack or a collection of disconnected activities. It is a guide to creating a living family tradition: one that helps children connect the natural year with the Christian year, and gently weaves together nature study, Scripture, poetry, art, observation, and reflection.

Within this 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

This guide gives you everything you need to mark the day thoughtfully, without hours of preparation.

You might take an evening walk, gather flowers, notice the bees, read a poem aloud, look closely at a painting, talk about St. John the Baptist, light a candle at the family table, or invite your children to record what they observe in their journals. Simple things, offered with intention, become part of the atmosphere of home.

Over time, these seasonal observances become anchors in a child’s memory. They remember the flowers, the long light, the stories, the prayers, the books, the family table. They learn that the year has rhythm and meaning, that creation is worth noticing, that faith is not separate from the natural world, but can be lived and remembered within it.

Celebrating The Seasons With Children: Midsummer and St. John’s Tide is available now as a PDF download.

37 pages | $9

A beautiful way to help your children notice the light, give thanks for the season, and prepare the way for Christ.

From my home to yours.

Next week in Exploring Nature With Children is ‘Museum Week’.

Here are some helpful links for your studies this week:

• How to raise a museum loving kid
• 10 tips from actual teens on how to survive (and enjoy) a trip to the museum.

Here are selection of museums that offer virtual tours:

• The Natural History Museum : : London
• The Smithsonian : : Washington US
• The American Museum of Natural History : : New York US
• National Museums Liverpool : : Liverpool UK
• Eton College Natural History Museum : : Windsor UK

• London Zoo
• Cincinnati Zoo
• San Diego Zoo

• Yellowstone Park
• Stonehenge
• Chichén Itzá Mexico

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:#ENWCmuseumvisitweek

Happy exploring!

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.

From my home to yours,

Download here: free- June Joy

From my home to yours,

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.

To help you prepare for your summer nature study, I’m offering 10% off Exploring Nature With Children throughout June.

Use code: JUNE10

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.

Happy exploring!

It’s Butterfly Week in Exploring Nature With Children!

Here are some links to help you with your studies this week:

• Butterfly life-cycle printable
• How to draw butterflies with John Muir Laws (Video)
• A hatching butterfly (video)
• Butterfly ID: 5 Common Butterflies -UK
• Butterflies of North America
• Lifecycle of a Butterfly writing activity

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

Happy exploring!

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.

Keeping a Seasonal Diary: A Practice of Sacred Noticing is a gentle and practical seven-day guide to help you to begin this habit.

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.

Keeping a Seasonal Diary: A Practice of Sacred Noticing  is available now as a 42-page PDF. Click here to find out more and download the sample.

From my home to yours,