- Even if you live in the middle of the city,
you can still do nature study.
Here's how.
(gentle music)
I'm Sonya Shafer with Simply Charlotte Mason.
Many of you know that Charlotte Mason
was a big advocate of taking nature walks
and doing nature study.
She scheduled her students to get out into the fields
one half day every week,
and Charlotte herself did a nature walk everyday.
But Charlotte lived in a beautiful, rural setting
in the picturesque lake district of England.
She didn't live in downtown London.
Perhaps some of you are struggling
with living in the middle of a city
and figuring out how to do nature study
with your children there.
It is possible,
and my nature study go-to person, Karen Smith,
is here to give us some ideas.
Karen, I'm so glad we're going to be able
to talk about this topic.
Why do you think it is challenging
for homeschool moms, well for anybody,
to do nature study in the middle of a city?
- I think because we forget that nature is all around us,
and sometimes, instead of noticing what's around us,
we wish that we had other things.
- It's true. - A different location.
- Yeah, when I think of nature study,
I picture the rolling hills
- The forest. - And the beautiful lakes,
and woods, and mountains, and beaches,
anywhere but right here.
- Exactly.
- But nature is all around us.
- All around us.
- No matter where we live,
even in the middle of a city.
- Even in the middle of a city.
- So would you recommend that a homeschool family
who lives in a city
get outside the city to do nature study?
- Sometimes, but they can do a lot of nature study
in the city right where they live.
- Okay, like what?
Give. (laughing)
- Everybody can see the sun, the clouds, the sky,
pay attention to the weather.
Insects are everywhere
so you can always find insects wherever you're at.
Maybe stop and watch ants on the sidewalk someday.
You can have plants, maybe a container garden,
or even houseplants are nature.
- That's true.
- You can grow mold on bread.
- (laughing) Some of us are really good at that. (laughing)
- But then examine it with a magnifying glass,
or take several different pieces of bread
and put them in different locations in your house
and see how the mold grows in those different locations,
one in light, one in dark.
- That sounds like a science experiment.
- But it's part of nature.
Mold is nature.
- Good point, good point.
- So you can use science experiments
because experiments are just studying nature
in a more controlled way.
Even with that, you can study more abstract nature ideas
such as physics and chemistry
by doing experiments in your home.
Grow crystals, rock candy,
there's other crystals you can grow
with common household items.
So all of those are nature study things that you can do,
and there's more.
- One thing that I struggle with
is I think of nature so often as just what I can see,
but there's more to doing nature study
than just what you can see.
Yes, as you said, there is a lot that you can see in nature
even in the middle of a city,
the insects, and the birds,
and all the other plants and things that you mentioned.
But we also need to remember that nature study,
as you've told me,
I'm not bringing this up
because I knew it just automatically
because you've told me this before,
nature study is about using all of our senses.
- Yes, as many as possible.
You can listen for birds, the buzzing of the insects,
all kinds of things.
I mean, you have to kind of block out
the airplanes and the traffic noise,
- Exactly.
- but if you concentrate, you can do that.
And perhaps that's something that you do
when you go to a park
or maybe when you're on vacation and you're someplace else.
You can notice the nature there,
and how is it different from what you have in the city?
Recently I read a comment from a mom on doing nature study,
and she lives in the city,
and she mentioned that she's taken her kids frequently
for nature walks just in their city neighborhood.
And it's amazing the number of things that they notice
that change over the years and even over the seasons
because they're so familiar with their neighborhood.
- Oh, that makes sense
because you're going to see the same trees,
the same whatever.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
And when you said that you have to tune out
the sounds of the city,
I got this flashback to that's exactly what I do
when I go to my favorite park
because it is in the middle of a town.
It's not out in the country at all,
and I'm listening to birds and listening to the bees,
all the insects and everything,
but I have to pause.
Whenever I try to get it on camera,
like I want to take a movie of this,
then I'm suddenly aware of the airplanes and the traffic.
But otherwise I'm able to separate it auditorily.
That makes total sense.
- But using other senses, you can touch tree bark.
Some insects, if you know what they are,
you can pick them up and handle them.
So there are things that you can touch and feel also.
But look for those opportunities when you are outside.
- What about pets, do they count?
- Certainly, they're nature.
Observe your dog or cat or your goldfish
or whatever you might happen to have.
What does it eat?
How does it eat?
How does it behave?
All those things are things that help you learn
about nature things.
- I know you have had dogs forever.
- My whole life.
- And you're like the dog whisperer in a way.
To me you are.
And you have learned so much about
their language, if you will,
things that they can communicate to you
just from observation.
Is that how you have picked up on it so much?
- Observation and I have also read some books
on canine behavior.
Not instructional books,
but books that were just somebody relating
things that happen in their life,
and those were things that I picked up from those books.
- So you can figure out what that dog is saying to you
because you've observed the position of the ears,
the position of the tail.
- The position of the body and how they move
and that sort of thing.
- So there's a lot more that we can observe
about even pets than we might realize.
Maybe not goldfish.
- There's plenty to learn about goldfish too.
- Okay.
(both laughing)
So it seems like what you're saying
is as you said, nature is all around us.
The thing is, so often, we don't look at it as nature.
We look at it as just the same old surroundings.
- I think sometimes we're looking
for the big and exciting things to happen
rather than looking at the details.
And when you notice the details,
that's where the wonder starts to open up.
- I love that.
So it's very much about opening your eyes
to what is around you.
- Yes. - It's there.
Thanks.
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(gentle music)