Charlotte Mason teaches that a child should tell what he has learned after reading a book. This narration is meant to be done in his own words, rather than in the Classical style’s question and answer format. We use both methods in our homeschool.

Sometimes it is hard to get my little boys to narrate to me. The idea is that they would tell about the things that they felt were interesting or important, but sometimes they get self-conscious and don’t know where to start or what they should say.

 Enter the Hands-On Narration Activity.

If I ask my boys to “set up a scene” depicting what they learned, they are overjoyed and race off to comply. When they tell me about their scenes, I find out quickly how very well they have been listening. No detail is too minute to share, as they have been careful to incorporate everything they remember into their scene.

They love these opportunities, and I love seeing their creativity and hearing them tell me in detail about what they have learned.

I’m so thrilled to be hosting the latest edition of the Charlotte Mason blog carnival! We are beginning our 10th year of homeschooling this fall. The very first book I ever read about homeschooling was The Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola. I was captivated by Miss Mason’s ideas and knew that I wanted to bless my children with that kind of education.

Inspiration for a New Year

Barb at Harmony Art Mom explains how families can still use Charlotte Mason principles during High School in her post High School Planning: Reminders from Charlotte Mason.
She shares some quotes from CM Volume 6, which are “a breath of fresh air”. Charlotte wrote, “If we can only allow ourselves to believe it, we really don’t have to manipulate children to learn their lessons. Nature has already taken care of that. If the lessons are the right kind, children will enjoy learning them.” Barb’s encouraging post about atmosphere and establishing habits put me in the mood to get back to school!

I needed those reminders! As I wrote in my post New Year, New Books, I sometimes find it hard to leave summer behind and begin a new school year. My recipe for end-of-summer-blues calls for setting up our new school year bookshelf. An hour or two spent looking at all the great books waiting for us quickly turns my heart toward the joys that lay in store for us. In this post on Countercultural School, I share my audio podcast series The Homeschooler’s Library, which is full of practical ideas and inspiration for choosing living books.

I am looking forward to making audio books a daily part of our curriculum this year. We are currently enjoying the living history books Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall and The Story of the Middle Ages by Samuel B. Harding, which can both be streamed at my new blog My Audio School.

Charlotte Mason’s volume 6 was a popular read this summer! Keri from Sunny Scholars also read it, and she distills Charlotte’s philosophy clearly and succinctly in her post Charlotte Mason in a Box? Using ideas from C.M. Volume 6, Keri shares insight into choosing a course of study the Charlotte Mason way.

Nature Study

I wondered if Heather of Maple Hill Academy might be suffering from end-of-summer-blues, too, when I first read her post about nature study, Winter Fun. As she notes, it may seem odd to mention this topic in the summer, but I found many of her thoughts to be applicable here in Georgia, where the heat threatens to keep us indoors all summer. You’ll want to check out her post for ideas of how to do nature study–both indoors and out–even when the weather is not ideal.

Tammy from Adventures on Beck’s Bounty lets us take a peek at what they’ve been finding on summer nature walks. Take a look at her posts, Nature Walk Discoveries and More Nature Walk Photos. The photos in Tammy’s posts are worth a thousand words. They inspired me to take my own children outside to observe and photograph the flowers and wildlife in our yard.

Jimmie has been using photo-sensitive paper for nature studies. Her fun post Nature Print Paper can be found on her blog Jimmie’s Collage. I know we have some of this paper in our school closet, but we haven’t used it for a couple years. Thanks for the reminder, Jimmie!

Using Living Books for Science and Math

Jimmie also provides some reviews from the wonderful new website The Curriculum Choice. Who would have thought one could study chemistry with living books? Jimmie shares about her wonderful find in the post The Mystery of the Periodic Table. In her Living Math Curriculum Review, Jimmie shares about a math supplement which is “a historical tour through time, looking at the mathematical developments of each period.”

Poetry and Memorization

Jeanne at A Peaceful Day shares about her new experiment with poetry memorization the Charlotte Mason way in her post Memorization and the Man. The quote she shares is well worth reading, and Jeanne is finding Charlotte’s method is working wonderfully in their homeschool. A lovely video clip, along with the text of their chosen poem, The Man from Snowy River, can be found in her post.

Incorporating Notebooking and Lapbooking

Katie from Katie’s Homeschool Cottage shares how her family struggled to implement lapbooking, but eventually found success Combining Notebooking and Lapbooking. You’ll find great tips, lots of photos and tons of great notebooking and lapbooking links in Katie’s helpful post.

Applying Charlotte Mason’s ideas beyond the classroom

Anna from French Kids Don’t Get Fat shares How to Use Masterly Inactivity to Win Your Child to Healthy Eating for Life. I had never imagined applying Charlotte Mason’s ideas at the dinner table before, but Anna gave me lots of “food for thought”!

Click here to view past editions of the Charlotte Mason blog carnival. If you are using Charlotte Mason’s methods in your homeschool, we’d love to read about it in the next blog carnival! Click here to submit a post.

I found out about Charlotte Mason when I was just beginning my homeschool journey, and her philosophies continue to shape much of what we are doing now, almost 10 years later. She was an advocate of using Living Books to teach subjects like history, literature and science, and her views have forever changed how I choose our reading material.

If you are looking for lots of fresh insight and encouragement, check out this latest edition of the Charlotte Mason blog carnival, hosted this week by Harmony Art Mom. While you’re there, I encourage you to browse Barb’s site, as she has a whole host of information about including the fine arts in your homeschool. Harmony Art Mom is one of my favorite sites to browse!

To find out more about contributing a post to this twice-monthly carnival, click here.

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8

If you’ve been following this series, you know that Whatever is Lovely has turned out to be a very broad category! I’m glad to finish it up with this post on Nature Study. After this post, I’ll be moving on to the next part of the Home Library Builders series, Whatever is Admirable: The Classics.

Every home library should have a significant section devoted to nature study. Time spent outdoors, admiring and observing God’s creation, will shape a child’s soul. We read in Romans 1: 20 “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

As our children are learning about the God of Creation through the Bible, let them also learn about God’s creation–and thereby more about the nature of the Creator Himself–through time spent outdoors.

The Nature Study library should have books and field guides to help us identify and learn more about what we find outdoors. It should also have Living Books which inspire the imagination and increase love for God and His world. Also, good biographies about famous naturalists belong on our shelves, as they help us gain insight into how man can be faithful in his dominion over the earth.

A Word of Caution

One must be cautious in purchasing books for a Nature Study library. Many science books are overtly or subtly evolutionary in nature. As a Christian creationist, I don’t believe that evolutionary books have a place on my shelves. I prefer to save the teaching of evolution for my older children, when it can be compared side by side alongside creation, in order to teach them what we believe and why, as well as how to defend their beliefs in our secular society. I don’t want to always have to pause as I am reading to my younger children to refute claims about evolution. For this reason, I am careful when purchasing books to choose titles that have no bias whatsoever, or books which have been written from a Christian creationist worldview.

I am also cautious about the tone of my books. Many modern-day children’s books have such a strong conservation message that they seem to place the creation above man. I am teaching my children to protect the environment, as this is our responsibility in exercising dominion over the earth. But many nature books go much further than this, causing feelings of guilt and fear that seem to me to have a political agenda more than anything. Typically the older classics don’t have this tone, but many secular science books written for children in the last ten years do.

A “Must Have” for Every Library

One book that belongs on any nature-lover’s shelf is Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study.
We have had this book for many years, and it has served us faithfully on many occasions. When we caught a praying mantis, this book told us what to feed it. When we see an insect we don’t recognize, there are copious drawings to help us make an identification.

Nature Study Outdoors

A kind reader commented that she likes my digressions. Please allow me a rabbit trail…A simple way to do Nature Study is to take a leisurely walk outside in the yard or at the park. Let the children find whatever draws their interest: insects, pine cones, flowers, interesting leaves, a bird perched in a tree, or anything in nature that captivates their attention. Spend some time observing what you find. Use a field guide or the internet to learn a bit about what you’ve found. Take a few minutes and let the children draw what they see, to the best of their ability. They can write or dictate a few notes about what they learned, or copy an appropriate poem, hymn, or Scripture verse alongside their drawing.

This kind of nature study can be done in as little as an hour a week, but the memories–and the nature notebook–will be treasured for years to come. For some inspiration about how an hour spent observing nature can yield rich conversation, humorous memories and an opportunity to disciple your children, read this post, written last year after our evening spent watching a lunar eclipse.

Many times these opportunities are seized, spur of the moment, when the children find something while playing in the yard. If you plan a few outings to observe nature with your children, you may find that they begin to spontaneously find things to observe as they begin to notice the world around them more and more.

Nature Journals

Back to books! It is always fun to browse what others have done in their nature notebooks. I was blessed to find a copy of Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
at a London thrift store (for a quarter)! It never ceases to amaze me the treasures that unknowing people throw away. If you’ve read the Charlotte Mason Companion, you know what a find this was.

Ms. Holden kept her journal month-by-month, with watercolor drawings of the birds, flowers and plants she saw on her nature walks. There are also poems and related folklore for each month. This is the type of nature journaling that appeals to me, where drawings and related text are combined. When we kept nature journals I liked to have the children copy poems, hymns or pertinent Scripture verses alongside their drawings. I found a few copies of Holden’s book available online, used, for $6 here, and many public libraries also keep this classic on the shelves.

You can also find good ideas for nature journaling, and ideas for teaching children how to journal, in the book Keeping a Nature Journal by Leslie and Roth.

One resource that is helpful in teaching simple drawing techniques is Mona Brookes’ Drawing With Children. A couple of hours spent with this book will pay off with much more realistic nature drawings.

We have kept nature journals in the past, but this year my middle boys are keeping a notebook of their favorite birds. We have been using the North American Birds Notebooking Pages in the boys’ birding journals. We like the pages with a small thumbnail drawing of the bird, a blank range map, and a few lines for jotting down notes. The boys consult a field guide to color in the bird correctly, and they color the range map to reflect where the bird spends its summer and winter. Then they dictate information, such as when they first spotted that bird in the wild or an interesting fact they have learned about the bird. We keep these pages in page protectors in a 3-ring binder, with a free-hand drawing of the same bird on the facing page. They are also working on getting digital photos of birds that come to our feeder, with the goal of adding some photos to their notebook.

Field Guides

My boys have loved this project and they take great pride in their notebook. It is helpful to have some good field guides on hand when doing nature study. We absolutely love Kenn Kaufman’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I would love to get Kaufman’s Butterfly guide titled Butterflies of North America, as well. It’s on my Nature study wish list! The First Field Guide series put out by National Audubon society is a good one for kids.

We also love using Living Books for nature study. A Living Book is one that is written by a single author (not a textbook) in a captivating, conversational style. The book draws you in through its story and helps you to remember what you’ve learned.

Here are some of my favorite Living Books for Nature study:

We love the art book Linnea in Monet’s Garden, so I was thrilled to find Linnea’s Almanac and Linnea’s Windowsill Garden, both by Cristina Bjork.

Citizen Bird by Mabel Osgood Wright, which is out of print but available for free download by the Gutenberg Project.

Minn of the Mississippi and all the other Holling C. Holling books are wonderful. Each book has detailed drawings alongside an excellent story, weaving history, science and geography seamlessly together.

I do Naturalist studies with my children, similar to our Artist studies and Composer studies. I like picture books that introduce children to conservationists and naturalists, such as Audubon: Painter of Birds in the Wild Frontier and John Muir: America’s First Environmentalist.

Nature Study for Emerging Readers

Nature study books are perfect for emerging readers. These are books that my children can read aloud to me, or silently to themselves to improve reading skills. I use easy readers such as John Muir: Rookie Biography for emerging readers,
Christian Liberty Press Nature Readers (graded readers, progressing from level to level) and books from the Childhood of Famous Americans (titles on Muir and Audubon) for 3rd and 4th grade level readers.

I have not personally read The Boy Who Drew Birds or Into the Woods: John James Audubon Lives His Dream, but I’m planning to get them through Inter Library Loan. Others that I haven’t read, but which look interesting to me, include Gregor Mendel: The Friar who Grew Peas, John Muir: My Life With Nature, The Flower Hunter and Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists (which includes a chapter about Anna Botsford Comstock).