Nature Study--Entomology

I have to fight the urge to turn everything the kids do into a lesson. My kids like to explore and just learn, especially when playing outdoors. As an adult, I want to capture this enthusiasm and turn it into a life lesson on nature. I imagine a structured environment with lots of workbooks, labs and lectures on nature. However, Charlotte Mason instructs us not to do that. She tells parents that the children are to be "'let alone, left to themselves a great deal to take in what they can of the beauty of earth and heavens.'Give them time and space to wonder, grow, watch, see, hear, and touch. During the nature walk, they may sketch and record their observations. In addition they may want to collect small natural treasures in a bag to take home for further study. (Out of Doors for the Children Volume I, Part II). She's right in warning a parent not to speak too much during a nature study. But she also encourages a parent to be in presence to help a child learn.

While I believe in many of Charlotte Mason's concepts with an emphasis in teaching about the natural world, using classics and living books, there's the urge to structure the learning. Mason encourages a mother to be present but I would argue. My children E, G, K & M all were outside teaching one another. I have yet to introduce a nature journal to them the way Mason suggests, but I plan to.

Mason is very much right when she says, "Watch a child standing at gaze at some sight new to him––a plough at work, for instance––and you will see he is as naturally occupied as is a babe at the breast; he is, in fact, taking in the intellectual food which the working faculty of his brain at this period requires. In his early years the child is all eyes; he observes, or, more truly, he perceives, calling sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing to his aid, that he may learn all that is discoverable by him about every new thing that comes under his notice. Everybody knows how a baby fumbles over with soft little fingers, and carries to his mouth, and bangs that it may produce what sound there is in it, the spoon or doll which supercilious grown-up people give him to 'keep him quiet.' The child is at his lessons, and is learning all about it at a rate utterly surprising to the physiologist, who considers how much is implied in the act of 'seeing,' for instance: that to the infant, as to the blind adult restored to sight, there is at first no difference between a flat picture and a solid body,––that the ideas of form and solidity are not obtained by sight at all, but are the judgments of experience."

So instead of squatting next to the children and taking over their own living lessons, I grabbed my camera and took pictures of their learning at work. I am so blessed to be able to home school these wonderful children and am truly thankful for the opportunity every day to be witness to their incredible intellect.