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: #ENWCsenseswalkweek
There are some nature-study lessons that we plan, and others that present themselves quite wonderfully without any help from us at all!
On the 12th of August 2026, the Moon will pass between the Earth and the Sun, creating a solar eclipse. Here in the UK we will see a deep partial eclipse, while parts of North America and much of Europe will also see a partial eclipse. A total eclipse will be visible from Greenland, Iceland, parts of Spain and a small part of Portugal.
As the eclipse progresses, we may notice the daylight becoming dimmer, changes in the shadows, a drop in temperature, and perhaps even changes in the behaviour of birds and insects, which feels like a wonderful opportunity for a little nature study!
I have created a free Solar Eclipse Nature Study Resource to help your family to notice what is happening around them. There are simple pages for sketching the projected Sun, observing changes in light and wildlife, recording questions, and looking for the tiny crescent-shaped images of the Sun that can appear beneath trees during a partial eclipse. There is also a simple colander projection activity, together with important guidance for observing the eclipse safely.
As always, my aim is not to turn a beautiful natural event into lots of work, but simply to help our children to look carefully, wonder, and remember.
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:#enwcnighttimeskyweek
The Raising Little Shoots Summer Sale has begun, with 20% off every resource until 16 August.
There are nature-study guides, journals, seasonal resources, homeschool-planning materials and devotionals for mothers included in the sale. Rather than presenting you with one enormous catalogue and leaving you to work out where to begin, I thought it might be more helpful to gather the resources according to what you need in this particular season.
This is not an encouragement to buy what you don’t need, but an opportunity to choose the few resources that may genuinely serve your family, and perhaps nourish yourself, in the months ahead.
“I need help beginning nature study”
Perhaps you have always wanted nature study to become a part of your own family culture, but instead it has remained one more lovely intention.
You may not feel knowledgeable enough, perhaps you have struggled to establish a regular rhythm, or found that the beautiful plans you made were simply too complicated to sustain within real family life.
These resources are designed to help you to begin right where you are, without the need to become an expert first.
Rather than asking you to transform your entire homeschool overnight, it helps you to establish the habit gradually, one small step at a time, and is particularly suited to families who love the idea of nature study but need a little structure and encouragement to actually make it happen.
Exploring Nature with Children
Exploring Nature with Children Now in it’s 16th year, ENWC is a classic within the home educating community, providing a complete year of nature study, following the changing seasons through weekly themes.
Each week includes a nature walk idea, a book suggestion, a poem, a piece of art, a discussion prompt and further activities. You may use everything provided or simply choose the elements that suit your family.
ENWC is written to be used year upon year for layered learning.
It may be used alongside the curriculum, helping children to pause, observe and form a personal relationship with the natural world around them.
Together, these resources provide the encouragement, framework and place for recording that many families need when beginning nature study. Available individually, or as an extra value Bundle.
“I want a richer year of nature study”
Perhaps nature study is already part of your family life, but you would like to deepen it, noticing seasonal changes more carefully, helping your child to make connections across the year or create a more meaningful record of the places you return to again and again.
Exploring Nature with Children
Exploring Nature with Children can provide the central rhythm for your year, with each weekly theme offering an invitation to look more closely, and the opportunity to go as deeply as you wish.
Exploring Nature Around the Year: 365 Days of Nature Journaling is a unique, easy to use curriculum, that provides a nature journaling prompt for every day of the year, with major and minor nature study themes woven throughout. No planning is required, it’s already done for you.
Learn how to keep a nature journal, and get to know nature’s rhythms in just a few minutes each day, noticing the wider patterns unfolding month by month, it is ideal for those who wish to move beyond isolated nature-study lessons and begin recognising the natural year as one continuous story.
The Phenology Wheel Guide
A phenology wheel is a circular record of seasonal change.
Children might record the first snowdrop, the return of the swallows, the ripening of blackberries or the gradual turning of the leaves. Over time, the wheel becomes a visual story of the year in your own particular place.
The Phenology Wheel Guide will help you to create and use one without turning the practice into something overly complicated.
“I am preparing for our autumn homeschool”
At this point in the summertime, our thoughts often begin to turn towards autumn.
There may be books to gather, rhythms to reconsider and plans beginning to form, but you do not need to organise every detail of the coming term, you may simply need a gentle framework, a few beautiful anchors and room for real family life.
The Charlotte Mason Homeschool Planner
The Charlotte Mason Homeschool Planner has been created to support thoughtful planning without demanding that every hour of family life be accounted for.
It offers space for the practical details of lessons and schedules, whilst keeping sight of the wider atmosphere, habits and family culture that we hope to nurture.
The Sanctuary of Childhood – Autumn
The Sanctuary of Childhood: Autumn is a seasonal companion for creating a childhood shaped by beauty, connection and meaningful family life.
This is not a workbook of tasks. It is not busy work, instead, it is a devotional companion for your child; simple, unhurried, and deeply rooted in God’s Word and the rhythms of the year.
Copywork Pages and Art Prints
The accompanying Copywork Pages and Art Prints offer simple, beautiful materials that provide an easy way to bring poetry, language and art into the atmosphere of the season.
The Harvest Festival
The Harvest Festivalhelps families to mark this rich turning point in the natural and Christian year.
Offering ideas for learning, reflection, food and celebration, helping you to create a meaningful observance without requiring weeks of preparation.
“I need a little nourishment for myself”
Many women arrive at Raising Little Shoots looking for something for their children.
They may be searching for a curriculum, a planner or a seasonal resource—and whilst here, realise that they indeed actually need something for themselves too. Us mothers are not merely the person delivering the education, organising the home and making the seasons beautiful for everyone else, our own inner life matters incredibly.
The Sanctuary of Home — Autumn
The Sanctuary of Home: Autumnis a seasonal guide for women who long to tend the soul of their homes with faith, beauty, and rhythm.
This Autumn Edition (September, October, November) is shaped around the theme of Gathering & Gratitude. It invites you to notice the shifting light, the ripening harvest, and the quiet turning of the year, and to root your days in peace and thanksgiving.
Whether you’re new to journaling or have kept diaries for years, Keeping a Seasonal Diary will help you to discover a slower, more mindful rhythm to daily life, blend faith, nature, and personal reflection, and create pages filled that nourish the soul and encourage gentle sacred noticing.
Over six days, you will learn a simple five-step pattern that you can carry with you anywhere:
Listen · Intend · Ground · Hallow · Thank & Trust
Preparing ahead for winter
For those who enjoy gathering resources before the busy season begins, The Year of Light and The Winter Light Bundle offer familiar devotional companionship throughout the winter months.
Choose what will truly serve you
A sale can sometimes create the feeling that we ought to gather everything whilst we have the chance. As mother whose now grown children never went to school, I am well aware of the lure of a curriculum sale! However, I would much rather you choose one resource that genuinely supports your family than purchase several that become another source of pressure.
Consider where you are now:
Are you trying to begin nature study?
Are you ready to deepen an existing practice?
Are you preparing gently for the autumn term?
Or are you longing for something that will nourish your own inner life?
Begin there.
The Raising Little Shoots Summer Sale runs until 16 August, with 20% off every product throughout the shop.
May you find something that helps you enter the coming season with a little more beauty, confidence and peace.
August has almost arrived, and here in Lancashire, we are experiencing humid, brooding days, & the feeling of summer at its fullest.
The hedgerows are beginning to offer blackberries, seedheads are growing heavy, apples are swelling on the bough, and the evenings are holding onto the light a little more softly.
When my children were little, they would wander in and out of doors, shoes are abandoned by the back step, damp towels appearing in unexpected places, and the house would bear all the lovely, untidy evidence of a family living deeply within this season.
August can feel wonderfully abundant, but there is often a quiet pressure beneath it too. We may begin to notice how quickly the summer is passing and feel that we ought to be doing more with it: making memories, taking trips, finishing plans, gathering every last drop of sunshine before the season changes. Sadly, even joy can become something else to manage.
So I have made a small, free August Joy resource for you.
It is just one page: a gentle encouragement for the ripe, & golden days of August. There are a few permissions, (not that you need permission from me, but it might help to ease the mother-guilt!) some cosy joys to choose from, small nature-noticing ideas, three straightforward journal prompts, and a short August blessing. It is not a plan, a challenge, or another thing to complete, just an invitation from one mother to another to loosen your grip on how summer was supposed to look, & to welcome the life that is actually here, allowing the ordinary moments of pleasure to interrupt your busy day.
You might pin it to the fridge, tuck it into your planner, keep it beside your morning basket, or read the blessing aloud while the kettle boils.
May this month bring open windows, blackberry-stained fingers, clean sheets stirred by the evening air, and the grace to enjoy what is here without trying to hold onto it too tightly.
This weeks all about choosing a new place to go for your nature walk; either an entirely new place to you and your child, or somewhere you very rarely visit.
How to make a paper bag book This would be lovely to make as a special journal to document your field trip this week.
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: #ENWCfieldtripweek
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: #ENWCmothweek
There is a way of living with children that genuinely feels unhurried, rooted, and whole. Not perfect, certainly not endlessly peaceful, untouched by washing piles, tiredness, difficult days, or interrupted plans. But beneath the ordinary busyness of family life, there can be a deeper rhythm: days shaped by faith, woven with time in nature, and grounded in the simple beauty of home. A rhythm that gathers the ordinary and blesses it.
When we begin to see our days in this way, home becomes much more than the place where we eat, sleep, learn, and complete our tasks, it becomes a sanctuary: a place where our children feel secure, where faith is quietly practised, where beauty is noticed, and where the changing seasons help to give shape and meaning to family life.
The Sanctuary of Home is a gentle seasonal guide for women who long to tend the soul of their homes with faith, beauty, and rhythm.
It is absolutely not about creating a spotless house or manufacturing picture-perfect family moments. Our home becomes a sanctuary not because everything is beautiful, but because love, attention, prayer, and care are practised there.
The guide offers simple ways to welcome the season, tend to your own spiritual life, and create meaningful family rhythms. These small practices are important because they help us to become present; gently reminding us that our ordinary work, cooking, comforting, tidying, teaching, listening, can become part of a faithful life.
A Sanctuary for Childhood
The Sanctuary of Childhood is a Christian devotional for children, rooted in Scripture and the beauty of nature study.
Children do not need every hour filled with activities in order to experience a rich and meaningful childhood, instead they need time to wonder, to observe, to ask questions, to listen to stories, and to develop a living relationship with God and His creation. Through Scripture, art, prayer, and seasonal nature study, the devotional gently encourages children to notice the sacredness of the world around them. Nature study is not about collecting facts; although knowledge grows naturally through careful observation, It also teaches patience, attentiveness, gratitude, and reverence. It teaches children that the world is worth looking at closely.
Rhythm Without Rush
Each guide offers simple practices to help you mark the seasons and tend to your family’s faith without unnecessary busyness. There are no complicated checklists, and there’s no pressure to complete everything. No need to race through the material or feel that you have fallen behind, these resources are intended to serve your family, not become another burden, because the last thing that we need as mothers is another list of things to accomplish! We all benefit from a way to live slowly enough to notice the holiness that is already beautifully threaded through our imperfect days.
The complete collection offers a shared seasonal rhythm for both mother and child, while each resource may also be purchased individually.
You do not need to create an elaborate life in order to give your children a beautiful childhood, just begin with what is already in your hands: your home, your faith, the season outside of your window, and the precious people entrusted to your care.
Nature study is not merely the naming of birds, flowers, trees, and insects. Those names matter, of course. Learning to recognise a greenfinch or identify the tree at the end of the lane gives a child something precious: familiarity with the living world around them.
But nature study is also about relationship; the slow forming of an acquaintance with creation, the sort of acquaintance that grows through repeated meetings, careful attention, curiosity, affection, and delight.
This wonderful photograph, Dispute by Polish photographer Jacek Stankiewicz, captures two birds apparently embroiled in what could be viewed as a very animated disagreement. One leans forward as though making a particularly forceful point; the other flings out a wing in protest, and a third bird watches quietly from behind the tree, perhaps wisely choosing not to become involved! A photograph full of life, expression, and story.
Begin with what the child notices
When we share an image such as this with a child, it can be tempting to begin teaching immediately.
What species are the birds? What do they eat? Where do they live? What colour are their feathers?
These are all worthwhile questions, but they need not be the beginning of the conversation.
First, allow your child simply to look. What catches their attention? What seems to be happening? Which small details do they notice before you do?
A child might observe the open beak, the outstretched wing, the position of the birds’ feet, or the expression of the quiet onlooker. Another may immediately invent an entire quarrel involving a stolen seed or an unsuitable nesting place. This is not a distraction from nature study, it’s an exercise in attention, as before a child can study the natural world, they must learn to truly see it.
Observation comes before explanation
Charlotte Mason encouraged us to place children in direct contact with worthy ideas and real things, rather than always standing between the child and the subject, and this means that we do not need to explain everything before the child has had a chance to encounter it.
We may simply say:
“Look carefully at this photograph. Tell me what you notice.”
Then we wait.
That waiting may feel difficult; we may worry that the child has not noticed the “right” thing, or that our nature-study lesson is not sufficiently educational, but a child’s relationship with nature is not built through a stream of adult facts. Instead it develops as the child looks, wonders, remembers, compares, and begins to ask questions of their own. Information is far more likely to take root when it answers a question that has already awakened in the child’s mind.
Let them narrate the scene
A photograph such as Dispute is also a lovely invitation to oral narration.
You might ask:
“What do you think has just happened?”
“Who began the argument?”
“What might each bird be saying?”
“What do you think will happen next?”
There is no worksheet to complete and no single correct answer; the child is being asked to attend closely, gather their thoughts, and express what they have seen in their own words.
A younger child may offer a single sentence, whereas an older child might describe the scene in detail, write a short dialogue, or turn it into a poem. The important thing is not the length or cleverness of the response, it is the movement from looking to thinking, and then from thinking to telling.
Imagination does not oppose knowledge
Sometimes we become nervous about allowing imagination into nature study. We want children to understand birds as birds, rather than turning every creature into a storybook character, but careful imagination and accurate observation need not be enemies, and in fact, imagination often causes a child to look more closely.
If the child believes the birds are arguing, they may begin to notice the posture of the bodies, the angle of the heads, the open beak, and the spread of the wing. Afterwards, you might wonder together whether birds really do dispute over food, territory, mates, or nesting places, the imagined story becoming a doorway into genuine natural history. We are not asking children to replace truth with fantasy, instead, we are allowing delight and curiosity to lead them towards truth.
A simple nature-study lesson from one photograph
You could use this image for a gentle lesson with almost no preparation.
Begin by giving the child a quiet minute to look. Next, ask them to tell you everything they notice. Invite them to narrate what they think is happening. Then choose one question that has arisen and look for the answer together.
You might finish by asking the child to sketch the position of the birds, write a short conversation between them, or watch the birds in your own garden to see whether they display similar behaviour.
A rich education does not always require a complicated plan. Sometimes it begins with one beautiful photograph, one attentive child, and one adult willing to pause long enough for wonder to appear. Nature study is certainly not a race to collect facts. It is the patient cultivation of attention, and attention is one of the greatest gifts we can give a child.
As Charlotte Mason reminded us, education is an atmosphere. And sometimes that atmosphere may be decidedly argumentative!
Next week in Exploring Nature With Children is ‘Weather Week’, with Saint Swinthin’s Day falling on the 15th of July. According to traditional folklore, whatever the weather is like on St Swithin’s Day – whether rain or sunshine – it will continue for the next 40 days and 40 nights!
