What’s inside: Nature Study Games for Preschoolers and older! Here are 3 games that Charlotte Mason recommended for engaging kids without formal lessons.
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Three Games for Nature Study
Charlotte Mason suggested several games for nature study, especially for age groups which included preschoolers – those too young to begin formal lessons (under age 6 or so).
Here are three we are going to look at today:
- “Sight-seeing”
- Picture Painting
- Distance Games
These three games have lots of variations, especially the last one.
Feeling Unsure?
I just read a marvelous post by Brandy at Afterthoughts who tells about when she was first starting with her kids and got her first set of Charlotte Mason’s writings. She was overwhelmed and excited at the same time, intuitively knowing that this was going to work for her family.
She dove in with nature games and just being outside with her little ones – she didn’t have to get it perfect or know everything. Just starting on the journey worked for her.
I totally empathize with her message because it is such a good reminder to just get moving on something.
It can work for you too.
The games
I’ll be quoting Charlotte Mason extensively in the descriptions of these games. The quotes are from Volume 1 of her Home Education Series.
Game 1: “Sight-Seeing”
By-and-by the others come back to their mother, and, while wits are fresh and eyes are keen, she sends them off on an exploring expedition––Who can see the most, and tell the most, about yonder hillock orbrook, hedge, or copse. This is an exercise that delights children, and may be endlessly varied, carried on in the spirit of a game, and yet with the exactness and carefulness of a lesson.
So you can see the idea here. Here are some examples…
- You set up camp – a blanket on the ground. Your kids run up to the top of the hill and look all around, then come running back to you and start talking and describing what they saw.
- Or you sit on a rock by the creek and you send the kids a short distance to see all they can see in a few minutes then come back to tell you what they saw.
How far do they go?
This is based on you. For instance, when I had 2 four year-olds and a baby, the baby could lay near me on my picnic blanket while the boys were right there in sight, but a few yards from the blanket. Maybe they are looking at things close up, like the water tumbling over a rock or the little fishes in the creek. Maybe they are looking at the mud and poking it with a stick. Maybe they are tossing a rock into the creek to watch the splash. Maybe they are looking at the entire thing of what they can see.
They come back and tell you what they noticed.
If you have older kids, the game expands in how far they can go. I preferred to keep a line of sight on the boys when they were young because we were out in public areas. But if I lived in the country, that might be different.
The point
The purpose of the game from your point of view is to train a few things:
- Observation habits: What was there? What did they see? What did a sibling see that they didn’t? What plants or trees did they notice? By the way, you don’t need to ask these questions – but they should learn to tell them as part of the game.
- “Expression”: The kids should learn to get specific in what they saw. “There was a large grassy hill going down to a lake and some birds on the water.”
- You need to get them to describe more detail – what color birds? What else did you see about them?
- The kids describe as much as they can and you tell them more if you can. “Oh, those must be the Canadian geese” and you share tidbits of information and the words to express what they saw.
- If the kids can’t tell you if it was a big bird or a little bird, or any other information – then they might need to give a quick run to look again to see more and come back with enough info for you to identify it. When successful, you go with them to see and confirm.
- By fully seeing a familiar scene, the kids will eventually create a mental image of a childhood memory.
- “By degrees the children will learn discriminatingly every feature of the landscapes with which they are familiar.”— p.47.
Game 2: “Picture painting”
Warning: This game can tax the system and should only be used sparingly.
You are painting the picture of the landscape in your brain so you can see every detail with your eyes closed.
So exceedingly delightful is this faculty of taking mental photographs, exact images, of the beauties of Nature we go about the world for the refreshment of seeing, that it is worth while to exercise children in another way towards this end, bearing in mind, however, that they see the near and the minute, but can only be made with an effort to look at the wide and the distant. Get the children to look well at some patch of landscape, and then to shut their eyes and call up the picture before them, if any bit of it is blurred, they had better look again. When they have a perfect image before their eyes, let them say what they see.—p.48
Picture painting is quite like how we approached artist studies.
Artist Study technique
Sometimes, people are intimidated by artist study because we are not that familiar with the great painters and so the topic seems intimidating.
But it can be simple. Get a photo or printout of the artwork you are studying.
- The child looks at the photo for a minute. (You do too. Best if each person has his own copy, but it can work if sharing too.)
- Flip the photo over.
- The child describes what he saw.
- With multiple kids, you need to take turns. Sometimes it works if each person tells just one thing about the painting or drawing and then you go around in a circle until no one has anything left to say.
- Then you flip the photo over and see what you got right and what you missed.
“Picture Painting” with landscapes
And so you see that “Picture Painting” can be just like artist study. You face a vista. Everyone stares at it for a minute, then puts their back to the vista. Talking and descriptions begin. When you are finished, you all turn around to see what you saw and what you missed.
Warning
The warning revisited…
The silent, intense staring at the vista is actually very taxing on the brain – a “strain on the attention” as Charlotte would say. You don’t want to do it every day or several times a day!
We would do artist study once a week for 5 minutes or every other week. That’s plenty. You can learn the technique and then save it for spectacular vistas.
… it is the effort of recalling and reproducing that is fatiguing; while the altogether pleasurable act of seeing, fully and in detail, is likely to be repeated unconsciously until it becomes a habit by the child who is required now and then to reproduce what he sees.
What is the purpose?
In the course of this ‘sight-seeing’ and ‘picture-painting,’ opportunities will occur to make the children familiar with rural objects and employments. If there are farm-lands within reach, they should know meadow and pasture, clover, turnip, and corn field, under every aspect, from the ploughing of the land to the getting in of the crops.
—p.51
Charlotte Mason knew that these games over time help to increase your relationship with the natural world. And while she was thinking in terms of rural or pastoral, we must make do with where we are.
- Local flowers: “Every wild flower that grows in their neighbourhood, they should know quite well.” These are a good opportunity to use your flower press.
- Trees: “Children should be made early intimate with the trees, too; should pick out half a dozen trees, oak, elm, ash, beech, in their winter nakedness, and take these to be their year-long friends.”
- Seasons: “The seasons should be followed.”
- Living Creatures: “Children should be encouraged to watch, patiently and quietly, until they learn something of the habits and history of bee, ant, wasp, spider, hairy caterpillar, dragon-fly, and whatever of larger growth comes in their way.”
The opportunities for familiarity with crops, flowers, trees, and seasons is the big picture of what will be in your reach. Careful and quiet watching of living creatures will add to your enjoyment.
Game 3: Another post!
This post is getting lengthy and the distance game has much variety and options, so we will save that for another post. Or you can read up on it in her original writings!
