Science lessons ramp up even more in middle school, and we’ll explain exactly what to teach and how lessons work at this stage as students deepen their knowledge of the universe and thus care more deeply about the world around them.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Winners in Life’s Race by Buckley (Yesterday’s Classics) (Living Book Press)

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Form 3-4 Science Curriculum

ADE Special Studies Rotation

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Special Studies book lists
(This is a treasure trove! Use the left hand side bar to navigate down)

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Living Science book lists

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s details on List Keeping

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Calendar of Firsts

Handbook of Nature Study by Comstock

Emily’s favorite Science Notebook: Stillman & Birn Epsilon softcover 8×10

Nicole’s favorite notebook for keeping Lists: Blueline business notebook

Nature Notebooks:

• Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover 8×10 (Emily’s favorite!)
• Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardcover 5.5×8.5 (Nicole’s favorite!)

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill…

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.

Emily
Because Charlotte Mason designed her curriculum to meet children where they are at and then pull them up little by little, the further we go into a subject, the more is required of each child.

So Form 3, or what we would say grades are year seven and eight, children between 12 and 14. That’s another step up from Form 2. So Nicole, will you share the details about Science education at this level? And I know it’s gonna be a lot more than the last time. 

Nicole
Yep. 

And so in Forms 3 and 4, which I’m gonna explain in just a minute, but the first thing I wanted to highlight is the sheer variety of Science that they do at this level.

Students take up all the major branches: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and the Earth Sciences, and within them they meet a wide range of topics. So often in high school, the subjects get narrowed down to just very specific things for the sake of a transcript for the most part. But at these form levels, kids are still getting very broad exposure to several scientific fields. And the breadth is just one of the big gifts at this stage, I think. 

So it’s worth pausing on what Forms 3 and 4 mean here and why we’re talking about them. Form 3 spans grades seven and eight, and Form 4 is grade nine, and that is how Charlotte Mason combined these things. She assigned the same work in Science, Natural History, to both of these forms for the most part. There’s a few little places where she branches off. 

Nowadays, most high schools start in ninth grade, and so typically we will separate Form 3 from high school. But I just thought it’s good for you to know that the caliber of work that they are doing at this point is appropriate in Form 3 is appropriate. It’s appropriate for that student who’s come up in the Charlotte Mason education, but it’s also…the Form 3 work is often appropriate towards high school credit. So just know that. 

So as for organizing all this, there’s more than one good way to do this. Charlotte Mason on her programmes, she had students studying several streams of Science at the same time, working on a different subject every day of the week, or in her case, most days of the week. Let me just clarify that. That is still one good option, and you’re welcome to follow it. 

The option I usually point families to though is to concentrate on a more term by term schedule like they did in Form 2, like how we explained there. So I keep Biology going all year, one day a week, and then give your attention to just one other Science topic for the other days of the week. 

Emily
I’m thinking if you don’t do this, if you did the one day per and you do four Sciences across the year, one week of like every three weeks is going to be experiments. And so if experiments cause fear and trepidation in your life or just…maybe that’s easier. Maybe you’re like, this is the week we do it and we get all of our supplies. Yeah. Wow. That would be a challenge. 

Nicole
It is. And you know, as my girls, they were my last two that I homeschooled, got towards the end of high school, I asked them, What do you think? What would you prefer to do? Would you like to do a different stream every day of the week or keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it? Which is Biology all year and then we change topics term by term. And they chose to do something different every day of the week. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
And we did run into that where we had three, four experiments in one week. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
But at that point, they’re more independent and they could take that on. I was more just getting them the experiment supplies. So my point really is that either way is fine. I think that if you’re new to this, it’s probably better to do the term by term approach because switching subjects

has value in it. It’s what Charlotte Mason had us do in many categories. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
But if you’re brand new to it, it can be a lot. So anyways, that’s what I suggest. 

Now there’s one place that I make a real change from what Miss Mason assigned. And that is that in Forms 3 and 4, she kept her students in a Nature Lore reader, again a Buckley book, this time Winners in Life’s Race. And this time we have the vertebrates. So in Form 2, she had the invertebrates, and Form 3 and 4 she had the vertebrates in that book. 

Now I love Buckley and I will just champion for her in the earlier forms all day long. But I think that at this stage the children need to really get started on a more formal Biology. We are very deliberate about our Nature Study. I feel like we’re just as deliberate as we could be, and a lot of what is covered in those books that Buckley was presenting to the kids, we’re covering that, but we need to get started on Biology. That is, I would say, the one topic where there is so much more quantity of information for our kids to learn. 

Liz
Today, you mean. 

Nicole
Today. Compared to– 

Emily
And things that they actually have a relationship with so they can take that on earlier like in high school instead of waiting until college.

Nicole
And living books to work with, because you know we see a lot of evidence of Charlotte Mason choosing books because they’re good living books even in her day that were like fifty years old. We see that it was important to her to have that good living book but we have some good living books we can work with. So I think that is very important.

Let’s see, there’s just more information. The Special Studies, like I said, they do a lot of filling that plant and animal side of Biology right alongside the reading. As in Form 2, a Science biography makes a wonderful free read during these years. And now that the students are taking up Biology and other branches, it’s a good time to let them see that every one of these fields was built by real people who were curious enough to just keep asking questions. It’s a really good thing. 

Nature Study also matures at this time. And now our students are looking at things that are more cross-species, pollination, a seed dispersal, things that are not just a single plant or a single species, but more like big picture. 

Emily
Processes and such. 

Nicole
Yeah, I mean this is really important. And it will lead really nicely to what comes next. And that’s what we’re seeing all the way through here is everything is developmentally building up to more. 

This is also where the Science Notebook begins. So before now, you mentioned in our last episode that in their narrations, they could keep a little notebook where just their Science narrations lived, but they didn’t really have to do that at that point. They could do written narrations just with all their other narrations. But now we want them to have a Science Notebook that all of the subjects live in. They can put experiments in there, diagrams that maybe are in the book that they’re reproducing over. So it really becomes a beautiful book. It’s not divided by sections or like divided by topics. You wouldn’t like divide up this is the Biology section, Chemistry…. Just if you’re doing all those subjects, you turn the page and add the next thing. 

Also the Nature Notebook increases here too because they start keeping more formal lists at this age. And this is truly a challenge. It’s exciting, but it’s not easy. But at this point, they’re keeping like flowers and bird lists, they’re identifying them, they are putting their scientific name and their basic classification and stuff like that. So see, really ramping up now. 

And one more addition to this level, beginning in Form 3 and continuing right through the upper forms, students start reading current events in Science. And so through the living books, they aren’t only learning facts, they’re really learning to think. And this subject is huge for this. And then when they’re reading the scientific thought that’s changed over the years and how those ideas have been proposed and tested and sometimes overturned, they gain perspective to look at today’s headlines with a more critical, thoughtful eye. And that’s exactly the scientific literacy that we’re aiming at, for the young person who can read a piece of Science news and ask sensible questions about it and just really be learning to think about things. 

Emily
Yeah, so it is a lot more, and the time is a lot more too. So for the lesson format, we have four lessons a week and they’re all 40 minutes. So we had a total of 70 minutes in Form 2. So now we have 160 minutes. 

Liz
More than double. 

Emily
More than double the amount of Science. And so, like you said, you do not recommend any more Nature Lore because they’re going to be starting actual Biology, but they’re getting Nature Lore as they read about their Special Studies, too. But that becomes more for leisure time. They have to pursue that outside of lessons. 

As Nicole was describing the streams of Science, the big idea, as she said, was to keep variety in each term and across the year. And to do that, while she mentioned talking about or keeping the focus on one Science topic, there is one of those four days that is one stream all the way through. So for example, one day of Biology all year long. The next year you might do a day of Botany all year long. And then at the same time they’re going to have one Term Science for the other three days. 

The format is still the same though. So while the content is ramping up, we’re not learning new procedures, right? They’re recalling the last lesson, they’re reading and narrating and then writing it in their Science notebook. Probably their narration is going in there and diagrams, as you said. And then keeping those lists. 

So our teacher prep at this age, again, Nicole’s guides make it just so easy. You’ve got it laid out every day of the week. And if you wanted to do one day per or one day for one and three days for the other, the way you have it laid out, it’s very easy to do that. So that means they’re gonna be reading more days and one day for experiments every third lesson. 

Nicole
Generally, yeah.

Emily
Generally, yes. So I think as far as teacher prep goes, having the supplies on hand is essential. I showed this for my Form 2 students, but I have these Science bins and I share them with my Natural History club. They also help share the expense of buying some of the Science materials. but I keep them in a Science bin and we just rotate around so we can share materials and the non-consumables, or maybe you might consume a little bit but you have enough for many many students to use. 

So I find that helpful to put pull those ahead of time either at the beginning of the term, or I try to prep those all in the summer so I have most of the things and then I set myself reminders in my phone of if those other random things that I might need to get that are fresh or going to expire or just don’t live in the bins. 

And again still at this age you would prep an object lesson as a teacher. So you are helping your child look more deeply at something. And because we’re looking at processes, you might have to be a little more creative. But also you can, I’m taking your idea about your video object lessons. You could find a video online and do an object lesson from something that you can’t necessarily count on observing outside so that you’re prepared for when you do come across that or evidence of it. Migration. We can’t really do an object lesson on migration, but we could absolutely watch like the paths of birds or or what it looks like for them when they all are flying overhead or whatever. But we can’t do an object lesson out in our backyard on migration.

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
Necessarily. But then someday we might see a flock going over and we’re prepared for it. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
And then I also, because lessons at this age are independent for the most part and you write your guide to the student now, so they are responsible for reading through the lesson setup and all of that, I do pre-read the books that they’re going to be reading so that I can have an understanding sympathy as Charlotte Mason would call it. So I consider that part of my teacher prep as well. 

So resources to mention. Again, Nicole’s guides go with a living book. So it takes a living Science book and then adds experiments to it. You also bring things up to date that might need it if the book is a little older as a lot of living books are and all of that is in here but as I said is the Form 3-4 guides are now written to the student.

So there’s Chemistry, Astronomy, that’s with another book. Oh, and on your website you have lists of lots of books on the topics for the Special Studies levels and all that. And we will link to those in the show notes. 

Science notebooks. I got one that is the same size as our nature notebook for my son. The paper is a little thicker, which allows him to do, I don’t know, just some more drawing diagrams and things. So it’s the same size. And it’s again Stillman and Birn, so the paper is high quality. The bindings are sewn so they’re gonna lay flat. And this is a soft cover book, but it’s in the Epsilon series if you’re interested in just what I did, but that’s not a prerequisite. You can get whatever you think, but something that works well for writing and for drawing.

The Book of Lists. This is a notebook that we will throw a link to in the show notes, but it is full of graph paper. And so these are your…here’s your bird list. You have one for birds in California and California flowers, and then you have Tennessee flowers and Tennessee birds. And so you’re going to write the name and the Latin name and the family they belong to, where you saw them, and then at the end, that’s why the grids are so handy, is you’re supposed to include what date you first saw it and then check off subsequent months that you saw the bird so you really can track…or flowers, when they’re blooming, where you saw them, so you get used to knowing more about their habits.

Nature notebooks again. Stillman and Birn is what Nicole and I both use. I use the soft cover 8×10 alpha series for all of my kiddos. Nicole prefers the Epsilon series hardcover, about 5×8 inches, and they are just wonderful and will last a lifetime.

The Handbook of Nature Study can still help you at this level for object lessons and for your own nature knowledge and things that your children might need to know. 

The Calendar of Firsts. This can be an ongoing project, but the lists really start to take the place of the Calendar of Firsts at this level. 

Nicole
I agree. That might be a good family thing. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
And then you know, maybe there’s younger students that are keeping that up, but yeah.

Emily
And they just might like to if you’ve been doing this for a lot of years they might want to keep adding to it, but I think it’s a good adjunct to the lists or it helps set up their keeping the lists and should excite their interest in doing that project as well. 

Nicole
Yes. 

Emily
Well what challenges or common questions do you hear at this level? 

Liz
I think at this level the biggest problem most parents face is it just seems like too much work. Doing more than one stream at a time, they feel like their kids will be confused or they won’t be able to keep up, and the difficulty of getting around to all those experiments. 

And I would say, you know, preparation ahead of time is key with the experiments. In your breaks in the summer or between terms, that’s the time to get everything pulled together. And you can at this age have your students, this could be an assignment, you know, you need to collect all these things and make lists of things we need to purchase. 

I would say that in our world Science is necessary, it is super important, it is part of our daily way of life. And it’s a big part of the feast, which reflects that Charlotte Mason had that same value of the subjects. The students are independent at this stage. They can read. Nicole’s guides are written to the student. And like I said, they can organize the materials. And they’ll get much more out of their Science the more they own it. And I would just say to the parent, don’t feel burdened about this. Your child needs to be carrying more of the weight at this point. They are beginning to learn how to collect and report data and do serious experimentation and follow directions, read and narrate more in depth. 

And it is important I think to do the multiple streams because atoms, you know, they’re part of Biology and Physics and Chemistry. You know that these Sciences are not distinct subjects. They overlap. 

Emily
That’s why we have Biochemistry or Chemical Engineering. 

Liz
And I’ve read many recent scientific books that are bemoaning the fact that our specialization has limited our knowledge, that we would actually be able to give more application if we understood more about the other fields. But, you know, none of us can be master of any one area. The amount of information that’s out available in the world right now is…did they say it is doubling every 24 hours? 

Emily
Something like that. 

Liz
Yeah. 

Emily
But so the key takeaway is now is not the time for specialization. Right? That would be grad school, probably. 

Nicole
Yeah. But I’m also thinking in response to that question, that this is why we’re always harping on the schedule. Because yes, it does ramp up. And if we have early on established the habits of following a schedule— 

Liz
…and paying attention for the whole lesson.

Nicole
Right, we’re going to be prepared to handle this kind of information. And you know, our students are going to be and we’re going to be.

Emily
And students are not confused by doing multiple streams. 

Liz
No, in fact if anything like she said, it builds interest. A change is as good as a break.

Emily
Thank you for joining us today. Next time we’ll look at the highest level of lessons for students in Forms 5-6. We’ll see you next time.

Charlotte Mason believes strongly in hands-on experimental science, but she reserved these types of lessons for upper elementary students beginning in year four. In today’s podcast, we’ll talk about why this is important and still good advice for today’s students.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Life & Her Children by Buckley

Madame How & Lady Why by Kingsley

Story Book of Science by Fabre (Living Book Press) (Yesterday’s Classics)

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Form 2 Science Curriculum

The Sciences by Holden

ADE Special Studies Rotation

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Calendar of Firsts

Handbook of Nature Study by Comstock

Nature Notebooks:

• Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover 8×10
• Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardcover 5.5×8.5

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill…

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.

Emily
So by Form 2, your student should be well acquainted with the natural world. If you have been following Charlotte Mason’s progression of Science and Nature Study lessons, their interest has been kindled. They have made friends with all sorts of things that they have observed around them. 

So now it is time to awaken their interest to other natural phenomena that they’ve encountered, but they likely don’t know why things are the way they are. Like why steam rises, why it’s there in the first place, properties about sound or simple machines and things like that. In other words, they begin learning formal Science. 

So, Nicole, can you tell us what is covered at this age, the scope of their education? 

Nicole
Yes. 

The first lesson of the week continues to be Nature Lore, which we started in Form 1. This keeps that thread from Form 1 going and it leans towards something like a Biology, which it will later become. 

For this spot Charlotte Mason alternated between Life and Her Children by Arabella Buckley and also the Madame How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley. And in Life and Her Children, it’s the invertebrates that are covered in that book. So it’s starting with amoeba and then it’s going to the six-legged insects. It’s kind of working through that category of animals. And then Madame How and Lady Why is more of a Geology – volcanoes, things like that. 

It’s important to note that no child ever would have been in this form long enough to read both of these books. She alternated through, but no student would have gotten both of them. And I think it also is kind of worth noting that people love or hate these books. It kind of goes both ways. 

Today I really prefer to use The Story Book of Science by Fabre. 

Emily
We’ve got a copy of that right here.

Nicole
One of the things I like about it, well, beyond the fact that it’s Fabre and he writes so beautifully, is that he does bring both of those things into there. There are stories about animals, but there’s also a lot of Geology in there and you know, volcanoes and other natural phenomena, thunder, lightning, things that are really in the wheelhouse of kids at this age group. 

So the other type of book that was used was more for those formal Sciences. They’re finally going to get to do this now. And as you said, they are topics that are appropriate for this age. They represent what Charlotte Mason called the Philosophy of Common Things. Things like you said, sound, basic weather, magnets, simple machines, things that are going to be very observable by them. These are not abstract topics. They are things they’re going to already be questioning, or if we’re even just bringing them up a little bit, they quickly grasp right onto those. 

So Charlotte Mason used a book called The Sciences for this by Holden, and she talks about Holden in several of her books. I mean he’s–

Emily
“Grudgingly one of the good things to come out of America.” 

Nicole
Yes, that’s what she said. She did say that. 

So it was a single book, but it covered all these different topics, and she roughly assigned a topic of weather, say or Astronomy, Chemistry, for a single term. So she just assigned part of the book for that.

I don’t use Holden today, not because even though it is over a hundred years old, it’s out of date. You know, really a lot of the information, I’ve really studied it and it’s not bad. It’s just that the experiments are hard for us to reproduce. Yeah. And that was important to Charlotte Mason. We’ll talk about that more in minute. 

But instead I use several smaller, more up-to-date books that cover the same disciplines, and I still rotate them one discipline per term. 

Emily
Like one topic like Chemistry or Weather… 

Liz
And is this because you can’t go to the local drugstore, pharmacy, or as they would say over there, chemist, and get these items anymore that are recommended for his experiments? 

Nicole
Yeah some of the times that is the case, or sometimes it’s just because of the way the experiment is described, it’s hard for a parent to follow and know what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s also the thing that I have a hard time with is that it’s a conversational book and I’m always kind of put off by those somehow.

So at this level students also begin experiments. That’s kind of what we’re talking about here, that Charlotte Mason said that they must be done. And we talked about in a previous episode that the student shouldn’t be doing experiments that are random. They’re not just picked up here and there. And we have a quote that Emily found for me that really explains this. It says, 

One thing is to be borne in mind: nothing should be done without its due experiment. (1.271)

Emily
And she says that right after she’s done a whole long quoting of the Holden book, and then another person that she thought went along with that. And so the way his book is laid out is you would read about a topic and then you would do an experiment to prove what you were reading or to observe what you had just read for yourself. 

Liz
And that’s what she liked about it.

Nicole
Right. 

And so we really take from that something that we really feel strongly about, that that experiment has to be related to what they have been learning about, what they’re reading about. It’s causing them to wonder and question. And now that experiment is going to develop those ideas for the students. 

Emily
And they get that firsthand knowledge. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
And I think also it’s not that we do experiments for experiment’s sake, right? It’s connected to the idea, which is just what we mean when we talk about the uniqueness of a Charlotte Mason curriculum or her principles, they are few and simple to understand. 

Nicole
And that’s not to say that a student can’t do any other experimenting ever, but for our lessons this is what we’re doing. We really are laying this out. 

And I just wanted to note that they’re simple and it’s the child’s first practice at following the procedures carefully, which is going to be very important and really watching that scientific principle come to life. And for many kids this is like one of their favorite things in the week. So even though there’s a whole aspect for moms but just…

Emily
Well I was just reflecting on, you know, for Form 2, they have a lot more responsibility. They’re reading more of their books, they’re having to do written narrations, which is not generally something the kids love. Some do, but most have a hard time with that. They start doing more Grammar and Dictation and all these language art skills that are so demanding on their level, but then they get Science experiments. And for my kids, it’s been just a sweet, like this is their favorite thing. 

Nicole
Yes. 

So also let’s talk about Nature Study. Special Studies continue right alongside all of this and they really deepen in Form 2. Now this child is studying more of individual species. So while those younger kids were just like all the birds, now we want them to really follow a robin that comes early in the spring and makes a nest, and the babies are born and keep tracking that, or keep tracking a plant like Queen Anne’s lace that grows up and opens and then it closes back again and it opens again because then the seeds are going to be dispersed. 

So there’s these transitions that are happening and we’re wanting them to look at that. And that’s just developmentally the next stage for these kids. It’s an important part. 

And then just finally I would mention that another thing we see on the programs is that students are starting to read biographies and a Science biography is an excellent addition to their free reading. 

This type of book doesn’t take the place of this Science spine is what I call it. Charlotte Mason didn’t call it that, but the book that we’re using for their formal Science is truly teaching them about a Science concept. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
It is not the same as a biography, but a biography does have its place. It has an important value. 

Liz
Are you saying they would do that in their leisure time? 

Nicole
Yeah. During their free reading time.

Emily
Did Charlotte Mason assign Science biographies in her programs? 

Nicole
Yeah. Yeah. Not a lot. But occasionally– 

Emily
I’d just like to gauge how many of those you might want to do in a year. 

Nicole
I think that one a year is good all the way through school. I think they’re reading biographies about other topics, history and such, but just getting one Science biography in a year would be great. 

Emily
It’s very inspirational. 

So as far as our lesson format goes, they have still three lessons a week, but two of them are about 20 minutes and one is longer – 30 minutes. And so the way you have scheduled this out, Nicole, is Nature Lore is one of those 20 minute lessons, and reading from their term topic Science book is the other 20 minutes. And then they have that 30 minute lesson, which about every other week, or about half the term’s lessons, is going to be experiments that tie into the book, and then the other half you would read for their Special Studies. And then of course they’re continuing their afternoon Nature Study, so they’re outdoors every day, hopefully at some point making a note or something brief in their nature notebook and then maybe one longer lesson a week for a nature walk, which could be the object lesson, maybe do that a different day or whatever. But that’s the whole scope of their Nature Study and Science at this level. 

So for these lessons, we’re still following the same basic format. We recall the previous lesson, we incite some interest, arouse some interest in what is going to be done that lesson, they read, often to themselves or aloud to you, and then they narrate. And then you might even have a very brief, you could even call it an object lesson if it came out of the text, that’s even a short experiment just to demonstrate some principle that they read about. And then obviously a couple days later they will have their longer experiment. 

At this point they can do some written narrations too, so maybe they’re writing their narration on their book but they’re also kind of starting what will become a lab book but it’s still just their narration time. Even after they do an experiment they’re going to narrate what they did, what they discovered…they might draw a diagram something that’s kind of like a seed Science notebook which is going to really pick up in the next form.

So first of all, I have to brag about Nicole. She has taken all of the guesswork out of this. So here’s, for example, one term Science book. You might read The First Book of Sound and learn all about sound waves. And so, what Nicole has done is she has made Science study guides. So it will tell you what to read for your Nature Lore, what to read for your term Science book, pick a Special Study, she’s brought all those things together. 

And then she will have the experiments in here as well. And what’s so nice is she gives you a list at the very beginning that is all of the experiment materials that you’re going to need so you can actually gather those and have those on hand. And then you just follow along and she tells you exactly what you need to do each week. 

So that makes it really easy to prepare. You just have to, even each week…so there’s the whole book, the term’s worth of materials, but then she breaks that down: Here’s what you need just this week. And so you could gather those and know right where they are. Make sure you have cabbage or whatever it is on hand that you need. And so then you would just need to prepare by making sure you have those experiments or supplies on hand. 

What I have done, and actually share these with my Nature Club, Natural History club, I have put together Science boxes. And so this is something my kids know. I put a little list in the lid of what’s inside. I don’t cross off the things that are household supplies that we might need to gather. And I just know I need to gather all that. So I can look at that at the beginning of the week. My kids also know where to find everything. And that just makes it really easy for us to succeed in doing the experiments, which I know is a struggle for a lot of families. 

Nicole
It really ruins it if you don’t have the stuff because it’s just over. You can’t do it.

Emily
Yep. 

And then of course, you’re gonna continue to prepare an object lesson at most once a week for something in their Special Studies or Nature Study topics. 

So the resources I have to recommend, of course, would be the Sabbath Mood Homeschool Living Science Guides. What is so beautiful about these is she takes an actual living book that, some of them do really explain different experiments and you do refer to those too, but you also make it so much easier because you list out what we need and the procedure and you remind us to have our child recap the previous lesson and what they need to do as a written narration. So that would be the first thing.

Also at this stage, and really you can start this earlier, I just forgot to show it. A Calendar of Firsts that you can keep as a family and just a place to note those things that you see the first of each season. And so you know next year when you come along, you can oh, this is when the robins were nesting last year. Maybe they’ll be building a nest now, and we can go out and look for those. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
The Handbook of Nature Study is still a very excellent preparation for object lessons for you. Do not be intimidated by the size of this volume, read the first 20 pages and then just look up whatever your Special Study is on. I just saw plantain as I was flipping through. So we have that growing all over our yard. I could do a little reading on that, prepare a couple object lessons, and we could do that if our Special Study was wildflowers.

Emily
And then of course, nature notebooks. And I showed these on our last episode, but if you’re just tuning in because you have a Form 2 student only, we prefer the Stilman and Birn because they are sewn bindings. They lay flat. The paper is a nice quality. Mine is a soft cover Alpha series that’s like an 8×10 inch. Nicole’s is like five by eight-ish, and it’s the Epsilon series and it’s hardcover, but still lays flat. So those are the resources that you would want to have on hand to do all of these lessons. 

What challenges were commonly– 

Liz
Well, you guys have covered a couple of things, you know, that I have thought of or heard quite often. One of them though is what if my fourth or fifth grader is still a really weak reader and is not independent? 

Emily
Sure. 

Liz
And I will just say there’s not a huge quantity of reading here. They’re reading a very short amount. And this is just the form where you begin guiding your children to follow directions, so you’re gonna have to help them learn to follow the step-by-step, and this is where they’re forming their independence. It’s where it’s developing. So you may have to work with some weaker readers more at the beginning but most kids by wouldn’t you say by sixth grade are handling that guide and the books just fine.

Nicole
It’s really a good transition time where it is. During that first part of Form 2, you’re having to do more with them, but by the end, they’re gonna be more independent at it, presumably. 

Emily
Yeah. I was just gonna tell about something from the end of this year. I have two students, one in Form 2 and one in Form 3, that are doing experiments, and we do those as our last lesson on Fridays, just because then if it goes long or cleanup or whatever, it just makes it easy. 

Liz
Uh-huh. 

Emily
I was trying to help the older one get a bunch of complicated stuff together. And my younger student was like, Well, it’s my time for my experiment. And he just pulled out the book and he started gathering all the things and following the steps. He’s at the end of fifth grade.

Nicole
That’s great. 

Liz
Well and I do have a lot of moms, you know, that will let their children read the book that goes with the guide, but they just skip all the experiments. And that is just a huge disservice because that is where they’re learning, they get to actually get their own hands involved. And they’re not complicated experiments and activities at all. 

Emily
It really makes it tangible.

Liz
It does. 

Nicole
I’m thinking of Charlotte Mason’s books and things. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
This is one of the things. 

Emily
Yes. Yeah. 

Nicole
That’s important for your education. 

Emily
Right. 

Liz
And you don’t want your children to always be just reading and not getting involved.

And related to that is just moms wanting to just get a book of experiments, because they feel like they’re learning directions and how to handle equipment and measure things. 

Emily
Or they just like it. 

Liz
Yeah, or it’s appealing. And I would say those books may have their place as an activity for your children to do at other times. But like Emily said, you know, the experiment needs to enhance or develop the ideas that they got from the book.

Emily
Yeah. 

Liz
And so random experiments are not what it’s all about. It’s not just doing experiments, it’s about doing experiments about machines or electricity. Whatever idea they had just read about. 

Emily
We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in our Science series, but there’s still more to come. Next time we’re gonna look at the next stage, Form 3, or what we call middle school here in the United States.

What do Science lessons look like once formal schooling begins? Join us on the podcast in today’s episode as we explore the next step in our children’s education and how Science and Nature Study play an integral role for lower elementary students in years one through three.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Eyes & No Eyes series by Buckley
(Yesterday’s Classics) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
Individual books in the series from each publisher on Amazon:

• Wild Life in Woods & Fields (Yesterday’s Classics) (Living Book Press)
• By Pond & River (YC)
• Plant Life in Field & Garden (YC) (LBP)
• Birds of the Air (YC) (LBP)
• Trees & Shrubs (YC) (LBP)
• Insect Life (LBP)

Nature Lore by Dallas Lore Sharpe:

• Fall of the Year (Yesterday’s Classics) (Amazon)
• Winter (Yesterday’s Classics) (Amazon)
• Spring of the Year (Yesterday’s Classics) (Amazon)

ADE Special Studies Rotation

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Nature Explorers:

• Rotation A
• Rotation B

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Calendar of Firsts

Nature Notebooks:

• Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover 8×10 (Emily’s favorite!)
• Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardcover 5.5×8.5 (Nicole’s favorite!)

Last Child in the Woods by Louv

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill…

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.

Emily
We are in the middle of our series on Natural History, the word that Charlotte Mason most often used for Science and Nature Study. So we’re focusing in today on just Form 1, which is the first three years of formal education. So years or grades one, two, and three. Or children about six to nine years old.

So, Nicole, would you explain what the scope and sequence of lessons looks like for just these years? 

Nicole
Yes. 

So, Form 1, students begin with Nature Study and Nature Lore. So they’ve been doing Nature Study already, but Nature Lore is a new one here. And they are not introduced to the formal Science subjects, nor do they do lab experiments at this time. 

The two kinds of books, the Nature Lore books that were instrumental in these lessons, there are two of them. The primary one is Arabella Buckley’s books, and Arabella Buckley’s Eyes and No Eyes series in particular. 

Emily
Let me just hold those up right here. They’re in reprint by a couple different companies we recommend – Yesterday’s Classics and Living Book Press. 

Nicole
Yes. And Buckley’s books are special because she approaches plant and animal life with a genuine scientific eye. It is different from anything else out there really, and they are older, but again, it’s the common information that is the stuff the kids need to know. 

Some people have a little bit of trouble because she will start with a hook that is about maybe a bird that’s in England, but we have the same families of birds, just figure out what’s local to you. 

But immediately after that, she goes into more of the scientific information about the plant or animal or whatever she’s discussing. And and again, we just don’t see that in anything else. So really these are the Science books for kids this age, so it’s very important. 

Emily
Because it’s giving them those bigger ideas that they might not even be asking themselves when they see something outside. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
And at the end of each chapter, pretty much exclusively or across the board, she has a little prompt of what they should go out and try and find. 

Nicole
Yes. 

Emily
And my kids will often bring those up or – I have my last child doing this stage this year, it’s sad! But they’re always like we should look for such and such or mom, I found this. And those really hook them. 

Nicole
Yes. And these are really preparing the child for the formal Science lessons that are to come. I know we’re talking about nature things, but we’re doing them in a scientific way that’s setting that groundwork. 

So alongside Buckley, the second Nature Lore book is read every week. And here I like the Christian Liberty Nature Reader, which you have there. And book one is the one I like to use. And then Dallas Lore Sharpe’s seasonal books. So you’ve got Fall of the Year, Winter, Spring of the Year, and then there’s a summer one also. And these can be really valuable because it was important to Charlotte Mason that they study nature that is seasonal, that they’re looking at it from that perspective and getting to know the year. 

And then there is a third type of book that is more assigned related to their Special Study every year, but that’s going to change and Charlotte Mason would have used a flyer or pamphlet in this category but we have lots of books that we can just plug in. 

Emily
Just tell us a little bit about what a Special Study is for Form 1 students. 

Nicole
Yes. Special studies in Form 1 is going to be a deliberate study of something but it’s going to be broad. So we’re gonna look at wildflowers in general and and I in particular will look at you know maybe the Aster family of flowers but that’s still a hugely broad category of flowers. 

Emily
And at the same time, they’ll look at birds or trees or something like that. 

Nicole
So they’d have two or three of these topics every term, and they can either run one after another or they can run concurrently. And we would read a book about it, and we would do an object lesson about one of these things, and we’d go out and look for them and have a goal on our nature walk to find one, maybe enter something into our nature notebook about it. So there’s some things that go along with it, but it’s really a deliberate study of nature that they’re doing at this time rather than how we talked about in the Early Years, we see something interesting and let’s look at that. 

Emily
By the way.

Nicole
Very by the way, now we’re getting more deliberate about it, but in a broad way. 

So this pairing of the books that I mentioned really reflects the pairing that Charlotte Mason that we see in her own programs. It always gave Form 1 two streams of Nature Lore at once. Streams is a word we use. It’s not something Charlotte Mason used, but we’re gonna see that all the way through the Science subjects we do here. 

But the pattern that I see is that one was always more general, often about a region or a habitat. And then the other one was more about a specific group of plants or animals. You might have the hedgerow and birds, something like that. So you have this kind of pairing. The two do not need to relate to one another and they don’t need to coordinate with the term Special Studies. That’s the point of it. It’s more of a breadth, if I’m saying that word correctly. 

Emily
Yeah, to have a wide scope and really in Form 1, we’re trying to get them to intentionally look at everything they can come into contact with. 

Nicole
Yes, start really noticing, right? 

So nature walks, seasonal special studies, like we talked about, doing object lessons at this time. If a nature notebook hasn’t been started already, definitely starting that now. Making entries in there as often as possible. We’re really again, like you just said, trying to expose them to a lot of ideas, letting them make connections between a lot of things. And really, in some ways, this could be thought about as the experimental side of their Science, you know, when they’re out looking for things and paying attention to what they are noticing. 

Emily
Right, the Nature Study part.

Nicole
They’re learning really to observe something and ask questions, through the object lessons we’re teaching them to ask questions and then observe some more. And that is really what the scientific method is founded on. So this is really the beginning for them. 

Emily
Yeah. So the lesson format at this stage is three lessons a week, about 10 minutes. So they’re really short. And then of course afternoon Nature Study time. So the afternoon time, something every day. They’re spending hours outside every afternoon, and a part of that time is for Field Work, Charlotte Mason said. so we might do an object lesson. And then having a goal of about once a week to go on a longer nature walk out in nature maybe even beyond your backyard. 

So each of those three morning lessons though would be a different book. So you might do Dallas Lore Sharpe on one day and an Arabella Buckley book on another day and then something about your Special Studies on a third day. Or a Buckley book and The Christian Liberty Nature Reader on different days and then something on your Special Studies that third day. 

Charlotte Mason said that the real use of naturalist books at this stage is to give the child delightful glimpses into the world of wonders he lives in, to reveal the sort of things to be seen by curious eyes and to fill him with desire to make discoveries for himself. 

We in education circles, especially home education circles, we hear a lot about ordering our affections or teaching ourselves what we need to love. And I think of this as that’s what we’re doing with these books is we’re teaching our children what to look for and what to care about. 

Liz
Whetting the appetite.

Emily
Yeah. 

So then an individual lesson is like a typical book and narration lesson where you first want to recall what you had read about last time and say some tiny little thing that would just whet their appetite or arouse their interest in what you’re gonna be reading about that day, and then a short reading, which is less than half of the lesson time, maybe three or four minutes of that 10-minute lesson. So a very small amount of reading and then narration. 

And then those lessons, the object of them, the goal of them is to get them to be interested in something that they’re gonna look at outside, something that they might want to pursue more closely in an afternoon outside time. 

So in their afternoons, Charlotte Mason gave us some specific instructions that I just want to reiterate today. She said:

The teachers are careful not to make these nature walks an opportunity for scientific instruction, as we wish the children’s attention to be given to observation with very little direction. 

So they’re still trying to find out for themselves. And so the ideas are planted from their Nature Lore books that they read in the morning. And then just like you said, this is kind of their experimentation time, Nicole. They’re seeing if can I actually observe that for myself? And she goes on to say,

The nature-walk should not be made the occasion to impart a sort of Tit-Bits miscellany of scientific information. (3/237)

So I think that also takes a lot of pressure off of us as the teacher, where we feel like, we’re going to have to be saying so much stuff, or I remember reading the handbook of Nature Study and thinking, how do I remember all this stuff to tell? Well, you’re not supposed to. But again, we’re still following the child’s lead, just like in the early years, when if they have questions, we can say, well, let’s go figure it out together, or that might be the time if you do happen to know something else to say that right then.

So your teacher preparation at this age is really to look at the main idea in their Nature Lore book. Maybe you’re gonna find a specimen or a picture…maybe it’s talking about a bird that is in England and you could find another similar bird from the same family that we have where we live and maybe find a picture. Maybe it’s some plant that you really could find a specimen of and bring it in for something. 

I remember doing this with my son and it was a whole lesson on what they call, what do they call squash in England? 

Nicole
The gourd, or… 

Emily
The gourd and then there’s another word. 

Nicole
Yeah. It’s not coming to me. 

Emily
Whatever that is. I feel like it’s the French word, right? And it’s just been anglicized. But I actually brought a zucchini out and we cut it open to look at the same things because that’s what we have here and we just use a different word for it. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
So you might want to do that occasionally, not every time, right? And then your other objective is to prepare an object lesson at most once a week, right? So this is not something that takes a lot of time. I’ve already showed you a lot of the books that we have used at this stage. And I want to tell you that Nicole at Sabbath Mood Homeschool has lists on all the Special Studies topics. We’ll also include a link to our Special Studies rotation so you can get an idea of what categories of things to look at each term for their Special Studies. 

And then Nicole has actually finally, I’m getting to use now with my last child, produced a guide to Special Studies, and Nature Study really. So it’s called Nature Explorers. And through here, you use that rotation. There’s book recommendations, but you also have prepared object lessons. So we get to watch you and follow along and do the object lesson with you, and then you give us goals or things to look for on our nature walks, nature notebook prompts and all of the things. So if Nature Study has seemed…undaunting? Daunting to you, you will be undaunted if you use Nature Explorers. 

Another resource that you would want to have at this age is a nature notebook. I, well both Nicole and I, love the Stillman and Birn series. The paper is archival. The books lay flat, which is so important when you’re trying to paint or draw or write. And the paper is thick enough that they’re not going to bleed through if you’re writing on one side and you have a drawing or vice versa, and it can take a watercolor drawing without warping. 

So I prefer the Stillman and Birn Alpha series. I get the soft cover kind that’s about an 8×10. Nicole, you like a smaller, it’s more of a five by eight, five by six…yeah, about 5×8. And it’s the Epsilon series with a hard cover, but again, still lays very flat and it’s sewn together. So these books are gonna last a lifetime. 

So what I do with my kids is they can keep nature notebooks, but they get less expensive materials and then they turn six and they graduate to getting an actual nature notebook and their own watercolor palette. And it’s like kind of a rite of passage in our house. 

So those are some resources that we can recommend for you. 

Liz
And you know, when I think of problems and questions that moms bring up, I thought of one while you were doing this, which is simply that most or a great deal of children this age can’t write, you know, and so you’re going to have to let them dictate to you. And you can put the words down in their nature notebook if you want to, right? 

Emily
Yeah, yep. 

Liz
Another thing that a lot of people feel is that nature isn’t enough and that there is a lot of homeschool Science curriculum out there for very young children. So what’s wrong with letting them do those books, actual Science books that have experiments and them and all that kind of thing? 

So many young textbooks though, I feel as we’ve looked them over, are very watered down and they talk down to children, which is what Charlotte Mason didn’t like about textbooks, and that the nature books really promote much more exciting exploration. Children are really more interested in the real world than just what’s on a page. And they develop  their curiosity a lot more, I think. 

And related to that, a lot of moms wonder what is wrong with having their second, third graders participate with older siblings doing their same Science experiments and labs with them. And I would just say that the caution there is…well there’s a couple of them. 

First of all, the child is enjoying the activity because like I said, they’re very interested in things, but they have not learned the associated or informing idea for which that experiment applies. And so it’s just a disconnected experience for them. 

Emily
Yeah. Also adamant we should not do it, right?

Liz
And Charlotte– Nicole, not Charlotte Mason. Nicole points out too that it’s gonna mean a lot more work for you because every time you have that child grow into those grades, you are going to have to find a new experiment that relates. And there is a lot of work, as Nicole well knows from producing this curriculum, into finding appropriate experiments. 

And related to what you were saying about the Arabella Buckley books, I hear a lot, you know, about why should we read these books about English birds or plants when we don’t have these species where I live? Or even within the United States, you know, people in Seattle will complain about having to read a book that shows something in Georgia or something like that. 

And like she said, all birds do have common characteristics. and Charlotte Mason also said that children learn so much by contrast, by seeing differences that’s what sticks out to them anyways. so they can notice how the bird in their backyard differs from the one they were reading about, but they still have common characteristics. And really what we want them to see is, you know, how does this caterpillar’s mouth work? They don’t have to necessarily be seeing the same exact thing.

I and I think of the book Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. He points out, I believe in that book, that most famous scientists and inventors had extensive exposure to nature as children. Experience is so important to sparking interest and later they really will want to know more about stars or cells or things like that.

Emily
Thanks for listening today. We hope you’ll tune in next week as we continue our look at Science and Nature Study in a Charlotte Mason education by turning our attention to Form 2 lessons, which is grades four through six, when new vistas open up for our students.

“Never be with indoors when you can rightly be without” is a common quote we hear in Charlotte Mason circles. But what are we supposed to be doing in all these hours outdoors? In today’s podcast episode we discuss the invaluable groundwork for Science that is laid in the early years before formal lessons begin.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

Also referenced in this episode is Volume 1 – (Amazon) (LBP, same code applies)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

List of Nature Lore Books from Sabbath Mood Homeschool

Handbook of Nature Study by Comstock

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.

Emily
And last week we looked at the overview of Science, so let’s zoom in and really look at its development at each stage of a child’s life. 

First, the book of Nature is one that we do not wait until formal lessons to introduce the child to. We want them to know intimately the wonders of the world around them from a very young age. 

So, Nicole, can you tell us what Science and Nature Study look like in the early years before a child starts school? 

Nicole
Yes.

Emily
Before. So, like you can start this at day one. 

Nicole
Yes, yep. 

So the early years is really where, like you say, the child’s scientific education starts. And the scope and sequence is simple. Get them outside. And let nature do the teaching. Most of the hours are simply for free play, and just letting them discover the things for themselves with the parent practicing what Charlotte Mason calls masterly inactivity. This is where we see a lot of her explanation of it, even though that is a broader thing, but it’s kind of begun here. You, keeping to yourself, letting the children commune with nature on their own terms. 

Then here and there in the day you weave in a few little activities, and there’s no rigid sequence to these. It’s more of a menu for you to draw from as you see something is needed. There are five of them to keep in mind. 

The first is called Sightseeing, and this is where you send the children off to notice everything they can about a spot, say “a hedge or a brook, a cottage on the hill,” she says. I don’t know if you have cottages on your hills, but something like that. And then they are supposed to come back and tell you everything they can remember. And so in 10 or 15 minutes, you’re training their powers of observation and their vocabulary. A lot of this early stuff is them trying to find words to explain what they are seeing. And really the habit also of telling back accurately. There’s this whole thing that she talks about in volume one that’s about no, there’s not a thousand of those, tell me what you actually saw and just being…she has as truthful in it, but it has more to do with accurately describing what they see.

So the second thing is Picture Painting. And this is where the child, and you do it with them, but you look at a bit of landscape and you’re really committing that to memory. So the child looks at it and closes their eyes and looks again, you know, I can’t remember what’s over here. 

And then she says the parent can help a little bit. So like if you’re looking at a lake, you might point out I see the reflection of the trees on the lake. So you’re helping them to observe more than they maybe would on their own, and they’re really committing a piece of that to memory. And this is just an occasional thing, but Miss Mason said it’s well worth giving the children the habit of getting a bit of landscape by heart, which was really fun. 

The third thing is Bird Stalking. This is so funny. I always teased that we needed to do nature sits more than we need to do nature walks because when we walk we scare everything off. Especially when the kids are little.

Emily
That’s true. 

Nicole
But she talks about this time in which you would hear a bird, and you might have to just sit and be quiet for that for a minute, and you hear a bird, and then you would kind of creep and stalk that bird until you could see it in the trees where it was at. 

One thing I love about this is there are a lot of bird types that live only up in the trees. They don’t come to your feeder, they’re not eating off the ground. And if you don’t look up, you’re not going to see these kinds of birds. Lots of the warblers and things like that. And so this was a really good practice for them to do. 

And she said that when they reach that bird, when they discover it, that it is a possession for life. They’ve kind of made that connection. 

Liz
And they usually scare it away. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
I remember my first bird stalking. I was probably 28, 29 years old. And I don’t think I ever realized that female cardinals look different than the males. 

Liz
Oh goodness. 

Emily
And I saw this bird and I’m like, what is that bright orange beak? And I just kept, like it was on the ground, you know, and it was flitting from one part of undergrowth to the next and creeping along. But I got it in my mind and when I went back to my field guide, I was like, this is not a new bird, but I had never realized it. 

Nicole
Yeah. Yeah. There’s people, friends of ours, who take bird photographs and they are always including pictures that I think I never see that bird. I never see that bird. And what it is is they are really looking for the birds. They’re not just having them in passing, you know. 

And I would also note that this is a great activity for winter. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
Because there’s not leaves in the trees a lot of times, and so they’re easier to see, and there’s fewer birds. So a child can really get a handle on a handle on birds that they make acquaintance with before more come back. 

Emily
And where we live in the southeastern United States, you know, in the summer in Michigan, lots of birds summer. That’s like their end migration, is up north. They don’t want it where it’s too hot. And in the winter they don’t see as many. We kind of have a lot of those northern migrants that are here in the winter that we don’t see the rest of the year because they fly north. 

Liz
Or we see them as they’re passing by on their way back and forth. 

Nicole
I discovered a whole new bird this winter that only comes for the winter and it’s a gull that lives out on the lake. 

Emily
Oh wow. 

Nicole
Yeah. It was really fun. 

So okay, the fourth is an Object Lesson. And this was really fun. So lots of you have heard me talk about object lessons before, but these early ones you do with the little kids, Charlotte Mason says that the little kids just float from one thing to another like a butterfly, never staying long enough to truly know any of it. And she says it’s the mother’s part to build that habit of attention. 

So she gives an example, and this is also in volume one. She talks about little Margaret and her daisy. And instead of letting it be just tossed aside, the mother helps her see it as a bright yellow eye with white lashes. She says it’s the day’s eye that opens to the sun and shuts at night. And now Margaret has looked long enough to really know the thing. 

Emily
So these are so just not like fully drawing, but you’re just trying to help extend their attention. 

Nicole
Yeah, just wait just a minute, look a little closer, tell a little story if you got one you can come up with just to get them to hold that attention just a bit longer. And I just can’t tell you how valuable this can be to prepare them when it’s lesson time. Kind of learn to look a little closer and just stop their attention for a minute. 

Emily
Think about it a little bit more than just a passing acquaintance. 

Nicole
Right. 

So the fifth one is not necessarily while we’re outside, but to coordinate with these activities that I’ve already mentioned is that they can already be keeping a Nature Notebook. So Miss Mason said to begin as soon as the child can keep it himself, which there’s kind of a caveat to that because she says the mother taking dictation while the writing is a labor for the child, and by five or six, he starts adding his own drawings. So you’re thinking, okay, just do the math on that. That nature notebook could be kept with a four-year-old, maybe a three-year-old, you know, like if they have anything they noticed… 

Emily
…if Mom is writing it down.

Nicole
Right. So, and then also you can be keeping a family calendar or diary, and that is just a shared record of firsts, and this can be done in any way just on an old calendar or a list and it helps the child to recognize, she says

…the first oak-leaf, the first tadpole, the first cowslip, the first catkin, the first ripe blackberries, where seen, and when. The next year they will know when and where to look out for their favourites. (1.54)

So really woven all through this is a simple pointing out of beauty also. 

And there is again a caveat to this that she says just it was every so often to point out the beauty that–

Emily
We don’t want to be a barrage of deadening that for them 

Nicole
Exactly. 

Liz
And every time you’re outside, you’re constantly going look at this, look at the cat…

Nicole
Exactly. That’s very hard for us Charlotte Mason moms who also get very taken with nature. But we want to make sure that we’re kind of holding ourselves back a little bit and just– 

Liz
More is not more. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
Yep. 

Well, I always talk about the lesson format. So obviously in these early years, the lessons are not a set amount of time. They’re not a set amount of frequency. 

Liz
By the way.

Emily
They’re by the way, during these hours daily in the out of doors. Charlotte Mason says 

not two, but four, five, or six hours they should have on every tolerably fine day, from April till October. (1.44)

Obviously, adjust that for your climate, your location. Here, we could go a lot earlier than April and go a lot later than October most years. 

Nicole
Might want to take off July. 

Emily
Yes, when I don’t want spend six hours outside, you know. 

Nicole
Exactly. 

Emily
But it is in this context of this quote that Charlotte Mason says that she speaks of

not what is practicable in any household, but what seems to me absolutely best for the children; and that, in the faith that mothers work wonders once they are convinced that wonders are demanded of them. (1.44)

So whatever you need to do to make it happen, you need to be spending hours outdoors. 

And then those things that Nicole just itemized, those are just a fraction and not every day, all of them. Like probably one at most every day, right? The goal is play and games. But again, to try to think about, we can do an observational exercise like a sightseeing or a picture painting. But they should be learning to know by sight the plants and animals, the weather, too, the stars, even of your own neighborhood, all those things that they can actually see around them. 

And Charlotte Mason’s very adamant, this is not a place for us to lecture, right? To follow the child’s lead, if they show an interest in the daisy, to then maybe use that as our opening to say a little bit more. 

But Charlotte Mason does give us a lot that we need to prepare at this age. So if this is a new field for you, Charlotte Mason said

there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in. Let them once get touch with Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life. (1.61)

So they need this knowledge. So just to lay that out as our kind of requirement or our goal, it’s their duty to do that so we have a duty to come alongside them and help them grow in this. 

So as far as our preparation, our duty is to learn about nature ourselves. Charlotte Mason said that

The mother cannot devote herself too much to this kind of reading, not only that she may read tit-bits to her children about matters they have come across–

So again, this is not just telling them things we find interesting, but things they’ve already observed for themselves–

but that she may be able to answer their queries and direct their observations. (1.64)

So Nicole on your website, and we will throw a link to a great page to start in the show notes, but you have lists of all kinds of books that help a mother who has maybe not any of this knowledge for themselves. 

But then of course the gold standard among us Charlotte Mason educators is Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study. And that little tidbit about the day’s eye is something that is very similar to what you will find in the pages of this. It looks very daunting. 

Liz
Like an encyclopedia.

Emily
There is a very short 20 page-ish introduction about teaching Nature Study. And then the rest of the book is divided into classes of things and comments. So find something that you can see in your yard and you as a mom read up about it. There are object lessons in here. You don’t even have to, you can ask one of those questions, maybe if it’s something that your child knows. But if they do come to you and want to know more, this is how you stock your knowledge to supply those answers. 

Nicole
And each specific thing is usually like two pages, three pages. 

Emily
With pictures. 

Nicole
It’s small.

Emily
Yeah, it’s small. 

So this again is not the time of a child’s education to do a lot of direct teaching and not a lot of object lessons. And again, when you think about what we talk about object lessons, and we will cover in future episodes here, it’s very, very gentle at this stage. 

But the principle to keep in mind is again that those observations and interests that they have made, that they are curious about and wonder about, that is what is dictating what we share with them and when.

And I would just direct you as a final resource, it really can be your handbook for child rearing at this age, is the Out of Door Life of Children section in Volume one. And that is included on your reading schedule if you’re following along with us this season. 

So, what questions do people ask at this stage? 

Liz
I think a lot of moms feel pretty daunted, especially if they didn’t learn a lot about nature themselves growing up, which is pretty common in our machine technology type of culture that we grow up in. We might watch nature documentaries on TV, but actually going out and smelling and looking and hearing and all of that. I think a lot of moms have asked me, how do I direct my child’s attention if I am so unfamiliar with nature myself? How can I interest them without having any background? 

And I will just say that your children are your best resource, they are naturally curious. If you go out, they’re going to wonder about everything they see because they do that in your kitchen too, right? So if you begin to just look at things the way they do, they’re going to follow your suit. And if you stoop and just take a moment to look more closely at a bush or an insect crawling in the grass, they’re going to be right there at your elbow wanting to do it too. And just start observing yourself.

Let your knowledge build slowly. I mean, you have to start somewhere. And it is okay to not know anything. Neither did your children when they were born. But they are willing and unafraid because the whole world is new and unfamiliar to them. So follow their example. 

Emily
Yeah. So good. 

Nicole
It reminds me that we are really learning along with our kids in a lot of ways. 

Liz
Yes. 

Nicole
And often we’ll say, the book is the teacher, you can just learn with your kid. But in what we’re talking about today, nature is the teacher in a lot of ways. And we are learning along with them, just keeping that curiosity open.

Emily
We hope you’re inspired to head out of doors with your young students and begin a lifelong habit of noticing and observing the amazing world just outside our front door. There is no better time to begin to look at nature with awe and wonder than today. 

Next week we’ll start to look at Science and Nature Study for Form 1 students, so in those first three years of their formal lessons. We hope you’ll join us then.

Does the Charlotte Mason curriculum prepare students to live and work in today’s STEM-focused world? Once again, we believe Charlotte Mason was ahead of her time and gives children not just the education they need, but the one they deserve. Join us in this podcast episode to look at the big picture of Science and Nature Study in a Charlotte Mason education.

Listen Now:

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ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

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Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill.

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.

Emily
We’re kicking off season 12 by diving into Science and Nature Study. So as we work through this season of the podcast, just as in last season, we invite you to read along with us out of chapter 10 of Charlotte Mason’s An Essay Toward a Philosophy of Education, her sixth volume, and we have a reading schedule you can find in the show notes to follow along with us and really dig into everything she says about these subjects.

So the first thing we like to consider is why this subject in the first place? So why Science and Nature Study? It’s pretty integral in a Charlotte Mason education, but why is it important? And should we still include it in today’s–I mean, it seems silly to even say, do we include Science for our children? But just to look at its place in the whole curriculum and why Charlotte Mason felt like it was an important field of study. 

Charlotte Mason’s goal for every child’s education was for them to build relationships in as many directions with as many things that they encounter in the world around them. So the very first relationships a child forms are really the seeds of their science education. Observing, naming, experimenting, and deducing are all as natural to persons as breathing. So from infancy, Charlotte Mason exhorts us to go outside with our children, with our children, so they can explore and get to know the world around them.

In the first place, do not send them; if it is anyway possible, take them; for, although the children should be left much to themselves, there is a great deal to be done and a great deal to be prevented during these long hours in the open air. (1.43)

And then as they grow, they add to their vocabulary and they begin to not just understand the what of what they’re seeing, but the why behind their observations. So in appropriate developmental stages, the knowledge of the universe is open to them in their Science lessons. And they learn loads of scientific information because they’ve already built relationships with many things around them that they’ve directly observed.

So Nature Study and Science, we believe, are essential to a child’s education. They cultivate the habit of attention by looking closely at even small things around them. They help develop their curiosity and wonder about the world around them. They also provide opportunities for mental training and reasoning. Charlotte Mason said:

The power to classify, discriminate, distinguish between things that differ, is amongst the highest faculties of the human intellect, and no opportunity to cultivate it should be let slip. (1.64)

And overall Science, and particularly Nature Study in the younger years, really help a child build relationships, which is the ultimate goal of education. So children…it’s knowledge owed to them, right? 

Nicole
Absolutely.

Emily
So Nicole, why don’t you give us…paint that big picture that you were talking about in our last episode. What is the overall progression of a child’s scientific education? 

Nicole
Yeah, so in Form 1, that’s grades one through three, there’s no formal Science yet. They are really, this is all Nature Study at this time. All of their Science is Nature Study and Nature Lore, which we’re gonna talk about more in the next episode, and it’s very important. 

The lessons are short, but the work is so valuable. The child is, like you said, really learning to pay attention at this time, which will serve them really well in other subjects, by the way. They learn to observe closely, to put what they notice into their own words. Miss Mason said that 

“out-of-door Nature Study lays the foundation for Science.” (Mason, A P.N.E.U. Manifesto) 

And that is exactly what these early years are really doing. We build the habits of attention and the accurate observation that all real Science depends on, and this is going to be vital. 

Then in Form 2, so that’s grades four through six, then we begin this gentle transition to formal Science. The child keeps reading nature lore at this time, but now a Science book is added alongside of it, introducing them to the everyday marvels around them. Weather, magnets, light, and sound, and basics of Astronomy, things that they can really observe and wonder about. This is what Charlotte Mason called the Philosophy of Common Things. And the goal here isn’t mastery at all, it’s to keep the wonder alive. 

You know, we really see a shift with our kids at this age, where they can lose that wonder, but she wants to keep that wonder alive, allow them to begin asking questions, to see that the world is orderly and governed by laws. So we’re starting to get there. 

Then in Forms 3-4, so that’s grades seven through nine, and that’s how Charlotte Mason grouped this, Science becomes a fuller study and the students take up Biology in earnest and they also work through all the major branches of Science. And now the student begins keeping a science notebook and in there they’re keeping written narrations of what they’ve read or experiments they’ve made. They start reproducing diagrams and they become a treasure, they really do.

Their powers of observations have matured. So in Nature Study, they began looking at things that are like cross-species things. So we’re not just doing your average object lessons anymore. Now they’re looking at things like pollination and seed dispersal across many different plants and animals.

Then by Forms 5 and 6, so that’s grades 10-12, students are studying the four core Sciences by this time: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Science every year. And Nature Study matures into Ecology, so the study of a whole biome at this point and how living things interact within it. And the work is really preparing them to step into life as people who can read about scientific discoveries and ask sensible questions about it and weigh the evidence for themselves. They really become so grounded in Science as an idea that is around us all the time by this point. 

So, across all these years, the goal is just this study, and really it’s twofold. First, we want our children to feel the wonder and reverence of the world around them. Charlotte Mason was very blunt about this. When you hear that quote: 

Where Science does not teach a child to wonder and admire, it perhaps has no educative value. (6.224)

That’s huge. But second, we want them to gain what she called the common information. And this is really what we would call scientific literacy today. 

The real question at the end of a child’s education, she said, 

…is not,––how much does the youth know?…but how much does he care? (3.170)

And when she uses that quote, it’s Science that she’s talking about. And how many orders of things does he care about? So that’s where that broad feast is really important. In other words, 

how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? (3.171)

I love that quote, but it’s always so exciting to me to think that’s about Science. 

Emily
And when your study is the universe, their room should be really large. 

Nicole
Really large, right.

Emily
Illimitable, actually.

Nicole
So we are aiming at this the whole way through. A student who has spent years observing, reading living books, narrating experiments, who walks into adulthood with both a sense of awe and the ability to think clearly about the scientific questions of their time. 

Emily
Yeah. So important. 

Well, Liz, do you want to share with us some of the common pushback or questions that people have when you explain to them, you know, the scope of Charlotte Mason’s Science education? 

Liz
I think a common concern that a lot of parents have, especially in this area of Science, is isn’t this approach out of date and out of step with modern Science, which has progressed and expanded astronomically in the last hundred and hundred and fifty years? And I would say yes, Science has increased in knowledge and scope exponentially. 

But all learning begins with the basic information that Nicole was just talking about, the foundational, general, concrete, simple ideas before building on those with more detailed specifics. And observation is the most fundamental aspect of Charlotte Mason’s approach to Science. She encourages attention, as Emily was saying, and inspires wonder in the children. And the questions that are raised in the Science reading and exploration just promote, spur them on to investigate things. 

Another common concern is how can children get the most up-to-date information when they read older living books on Science subjects? Anyone ever heard this before? 

Emily
Yeah, I would say they don’t have to read older books, but they do need to read living books, and that is sometimes the harder thing, is to find a more in depth Science book that is not a textbook. 

Liz
Right. Where we’re not just presenting information. ‘Cause she said that older books– 

Emily
That’s been pre digested. 

Liz
Yes. Yeah. Or written by a hundred people. She said that these books…when a lot of these scientific discoveries were new, Nicole was just pointing this out to me, and it was fresh information, they were very inspired and the enthusiasm comes through. Those authors knew what was developing and the narrative style that these books are written in, Charlotte Mason said made retention much greater. 

And since then, of course, we have developed much more micro and macro knowledge. A lot has been added, but they still need that basic understanding to go on later to learn those more specific things. Right now, in the formative years of their early schooling in Science, we’re trying to build their appetite and their delight for the subject. 

You know, it’s kind of like we read poetry to children to catch their attention and increase their delight in it long before they ever analyze it. And we cannot skip past introductory information in the Science field. You have to start at the beginning to understand all those really high level theories and practices. 

Emily
Yeah. And I think like what you were just saying, Nicole, about it building on the common information, that scientific literacy, if children can care about that, then they can attach and go on and use a textbook in later years in college or whatever. 

Liz
Exactly. 

Emily
And they have that passion and understanding. I can read really dry books about something I’m interested in because I’ve already built that relationship. And I’m just thinking of a great example is John McPhee’s Annals of a Lost World. You know, when he started that series, which became kind of his magnum opus, like the through line of his career, he thought he was gonna write an article on, you know, crossing the North American continent on I-80. 

But he was doing it at a time when Plate Tectonic Theory, it went from having never been proposed when he started that series, to by the time he ends it was now the accepted way. And I think about it kind of almost like the Copernican revolution, like what they had to do to figure out you know Kepler’s planetary motion, you know, and the hard things…like all that with geosynclines that I cannot understand. How did they think this happened before, right? 

It just is much more simple and all-encompassing, and his passion as he went through and really worked with geologists, you see the field developing at that time, but he’s on a journey, it’s a living book. He was there, it was exciting, and then he brings it to bear for us that we can understand this whole shift in Geology. And then we care about it. So then I can actually have conversations about what were geosynclines?. I talked with my brother in-law, who’s a geologist, you know, very, very crazy. But because I had that connection from reading a living book.

Liz
And so not all the books that are best are the old ones, but they are still good, many of them. They’re invaluable for instilling curiosity for the most part. And children want to know about the most basic things in life anyway when they’re young. And their curiosity should increase over the years. And let’s be honest, we cannot know about everything in Science, but we have to begin somewhere.

And then, sort of related to what we’ve been saying here, is a lot of people are concerned they want their children to be in the best STEM programs because that’s where they think the most advanced knowledge is. And I just want to remind us all that Charlotte Mason’s method helps achieve critical thinking in the Sciences, but life is huge, the world is big, and our children need to be in contact with all kinds of knowledge. Science needs to be kept in balance.

Nicole
I would even say that Charlotte Mason didn’t skimp on the amount of time or the amount of material that she gave to students in the Science category. That it is second only to…

Liz
…foreign language, I think. 

Emily
Or all of language.

Nicole
If you take all the languages together, that’s the only thing that takes more time. 

Emily
Well, and when you think about it, she lived at the– 

Nicole
Like Dictation, Copywork, all the languages. 

Emily
She was living at a time of great technological advancement.

Liz
It was exciting.

Emily
We are in the digital age, but like they went from horse and buggy to like airplanes in her lifetime when she was creating. You know, it just was a huge leap too. So it was also an important topic at the time. 

Liz
But I think my point is that all of education is equally important and Science needs its place in our life and will mean more to them if…I mean some of the best modern Science scientists’ books that I’ve read in the last year, I cannot believe how much they quote the classics, poetry, music…

Emily
What was that interview about the man who was a scientist, but he became a poet. And he lives in Ireland or… 

Liz
White, I think. 

Emily
Yes. And just, we see the best scientists need to not just be scientists.

Nicole
Walter Lewin has a whole chapter in the very end of his book on his real love of his life…

Emily
Which is not Physics?

Nicole
Which is abstract art. And he has a whole collection of it. It was just..so yes, and I mean just think of Michelangelo. 

Emily
Yeah. Or Leonardo. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist and an artist.

Emily
We’re so glad you joined us for this discussion of Science lessons across a child’s education today. Please join us next time as we zoom in to look at what these lessons look like for the youngest children.