Exploring Nature With Children: A Guided Journal
Exploring Nature With Children is a complete, year-long curriculum designed to guide you, step by step, through an entire calendar year of nature study. Completely self-contained, this book has all the information you need to make nature study happen regularly for your family.
Exploring Nature With Children contains:
- An entire chapter devoted to getting you up and running with nature study.
- Forty-eight weeks of themed and guided nature study; four weeks for each month of the year, organised by season. Exploring Nature With Children can be used as a whole year’s study, or dipped in and out of as you please.
Each week’s guided study contains the following:
- A themed nature walk.
Exploring Nature With Children will take you step by step through a themed, Charlotte Mason-style, nature walk. There is no need to hunt through various books and websites; all the information you need is there, leaving you free to enjoy being out in nature with your child.
- References to the Handbook Of Nature Study.
Exploring Nature With Children is completely self-contained, but includes references to related pages in the Handbook Of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, should you wish to delve a little deeper.
- A themed book list.
With books for children of all ages, you will find a comprehensive list of living books related to the week’s nature study theme. Exploring Nature With Children is a self-contained course, so the book list is an extra tool, not a necessity.
You will also receive the booklist compiled separately, should you wish to use it as an additional planning tool.
- A poem
Related to the nature theme of the week; a classic piece of poetry that can be used for copywork, dictation, or simply to just read aloud and enjoy.
- A piece of art
The name and details of a piece of art that relates to the nature theme of the week has been included. This can easily be looked up online, or in art books available from your local library.
- Extension activities for your child
Here you will find a list of activities, written directly to your child, that will extend their nature study throughout the whole of the week. You will find ideas for crafts, writing, science, maths, and more, with absolutely no busy work.
I am a 2nd grade public school teacher and would love to use something like this to create a more place-based curriculum. Can this be used in any environment/area? I live in Alaska.
Thank you!!
Dear Carrie,
Thank you for writing, and for considering my work for your students.
Exploring Nature With Children is written to be as accessible as possible, however, it has a definite northern hemisphere, four season slant. Readers in other parts of the world will need to adapt the book slightly to fit with either their climate or location. There are thousands of readers who happily use ENWC around the world, but they do have to adjust to suit what is happening in the natural world around them. The best thing to do is to download the sample:
https://raisinglittleshoots.com/buy-exploring-nature-with-children/
Here you can see a complete week’s lessons and the table of contents, which shows the theme for each week. This should help you decide if ENWC will be suitable for your own students. If you have any questions, do let me know!
Warmly,
Lynn