Nature Study Part 1: Confessions of a Former Free Range Kid

 

“The woods were my Ritalin.
Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.” 


― Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

There is a curious term applied to kids who play outside beyond their backyards: Free-Range Kids.

I was a free range kid in the seventies, but we all were. I ran wild, free, and barefoot through the woods with my little brother and our feisty wee terrier dog and sinister-looking Doberman. Usually a half dozen neighbor kids ran with us. My dad would holler at us to put on shoes because we might step on a scorpion, but we never did and it never happened, probably because we were so loud they all skittered away before we could trample them. On occasion we were met with copperheads who would suddenly poke their evil heads up through the copper-colored leaves. Ra, our Doberman, unlike us, moved silently and elegantly through the forest shadows, and would suddenly emerge to kill them in a wink. Sometimes he would get bit and his head would swell for days. He looked more like a Rottweiler after a snakebite.

We always ended up in the creek, where there was a tree that grew right out of the creek bank, parallel to the ground. Most times, the creek was dry, and we considered it to be our “Indian camp” (we usually pretended to be Native Americans). There we held war councils, stirred meals of stone soup and pine needle salads, and sometimes pretended to be Pa and the girls searching for beads in the abandoned Indian camp.

Every tree was known to us, every bit of red earth had touched our feet, every bird witnessed our comings and goings, and sometimes we witnessed theirs. The wildflowers delighted us in the springtime, and found their way into our play, as did the nuts and cones and leaves of the seasons. It was our world, and parents rarely figured into the equation. Yet, they were near, and when my dad loosed his ear-splitting whistle, we bolted home, lickity-split.

Many times, it might have looked as though we were idling in the woods. Not so. In a place teeming with life, there was so much to see. Uncovering a simple stone revealed a micro world of minibeasts, or a closer look at our parallel tree revealed an ant assembly line storing up food for the winter. Glancing through the lacy pines could reveal a spider web so intricate and so full of ghastly victims that surely it must have been Shelob’s labor, and not that of the more friendly Charlotte.

“On inspection it turned out to be a tiny toad, a quarter of an inch long, hopping mightily after an escaping millipede, itself no bigger than a thread, both going for all they were worth until they disappeared in the grass. Then a wolf spider, startling in size and hairiness, streaked over the gravel, either chasing something smaller or being chased by something bigger, I couldn’t tell which. I reckoned there must be a million minor dramas playing out around the place without ceasing. Oh, but they were hardly minor to the chaser and the chasee who were dealing in the coin of life and death. I was a mere bystander, an idler. They were playing for keeps.”

― Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Our senses were full in the woods: the smell of the earth, different when wet than when dry; pine needles underfoot, silky when fresh but pokey when dry; sunlight reaching through the trees to the forest floor, sometimes dappled and sometimes in ethereal columns that revealed a floating world of organisms otherwise unseen; the rare drifting of a quiet snowflake. Later, as a Christian, I would understand the meaning of “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” – the fullness was personal. It is the fullness of beauty bestowed on our souls by our lavish Creator who spoke it into existence, the One who never tires of calling out the sun every day or the moon every night, nor crafting humble daisies:

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

 

My husband was raised similarly, very close to nature, and would certainly have been called “free-range” today. His personal knowledge of every fish, crab, snake, and prawn in our resaca reveals a childhood spent swimming and fishing in the big lake in the center of Olmito with the neighborhood kids. As a teenager, he widened his love of the water by getting acquainted with the fish and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico. As a young man he planted trees, and as a lumber salesman he appreciated the details of the finest of woods. Today he grows our food.

It was important to us to provide this type of childhood to our children, and we did, in spite of the fact that kids cannot be quite so free range today. In future posts, I will share how we created an atmosphere of nature study, how we practiced Charlotte Mason’s ideas to enjoy nature right here in the Rio Grande Valley, resources we found helpful, and how and why nature study builds virtue.

“A love of Nature, implanted so early that it will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health, and good humour.”

– Charlotte Mason, Volume 1

Internet Resources:

Ambleside Online’s free Nature Study Curriculum

8 Reasons to do nature study

Linda Fay’s fantastic website on applying CM’s methods; here is the nature study page

Podcast on Free Range Kids

 

Books:

 

Shelob v. Charlotte:

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Fairy Tales: Awakening the Moral Imagination

“I didn’t believe in Magic until today. I see now it’s real. Well, if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories.
Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

When my children were young, I questioned the wisdom of Charlotte Mason’s enthusiastic support of fairy tales. After all, they were often heartbreaking (Hans Christian Anderson) or grisly (The Arabian Nights). Some were heartbreaking and grisly (Grimm’s). Ultimately, it was my children who would trust her more than I, as they took me by the hand and led me farther up and further into their most cherished worlds of fantasy.

Certainly, Charlotte was right, in that fairy tales are infinitely more interesting than tired little Dick-and-Jane-type morality tales. She felt that they sparked imagination, and that such imagination was necessary for invention and innovation. Albert Einstein agreed. He attributed his accomplishments to his imaginative mind, having been cultivated by, of all things, fairy tales. He urged parents to read fairy tales to their children if they wanted them to be intelligent.

Charlotte also felt that fairy tales did far more than amuse the children, but had the power to awaken the moral imagination, and inspire children (and adults) to noble deeds. Anthony Esolen, in his fabulous book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child, finds the moral laws of fairyland to be important to the child’s proper inculcation of virtue: “And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. .. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation.”

Fred Rogers of PBS’ Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood understood that children are already quite aware of the fact that the world is full of evil. He had the ability to look through the television camera and speak directly to children’s fears. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, he told parents that the best way to calm their children’s fears was to tell them to look for the helpers – the policemen, firemen, brave moms and dads who were helping the wounded. Children raised on fairy tales know there is always a helper who will come to the rescue. This is because the fairy tale, like all living tales, fits into the true “master story” which is revealed in the Bible. Peter J. Leithart wrote of this idea in his book, Heroes of the City of Man, saying: “All heroes may be compared to the true hero, Jesus Christ; all damsels in distress are comparable to Christ’s Bride, the church; all rescues are acts of salvation; all weddings anticipate the feast of the Lamb; and all villains, serpent-like, spread their several varieties of poison.”

The best part about fairy tales, is of course, they all live happily ever after, which serves as a glimpse at our own ever-after in Gloryland.


“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories

Suggested reading:

Links:
Why Fairy Tales?

Books:

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The Large Room

“The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”


― Charlotte M. Mason, School Education: Developing A Curriculum

 

My elementary school in the 1970s had a large and lovely library with sunny windows and bright yellow walls . Even the radiators were painted yellow to match the walls, although I do not ever remember the radiators actually being hot in central Texas. The floors were wooden and brown, and there were rows and rows and rows of beautiful books. There may have been tables and chairs, but my favorite spot was on the floor under a window facing the biography section. In my young child- mind, it seems like a large room, but if I were to return as an adult I suspect it would be quite a bit smaller.

In my classroom, we often worked on what were then called duplicates. We would call them copies or worksheets today, but back then they were made on a duplicating machine and thus the moniker. They were white sheets of paper with purple writing. The writing could be very dark purple or faintly lavender, depending on how much ink was in the duplicating machine. Upon these sheets, we practiced our capitalization and punctuation, answered reading comprehension questions, or drew lines to match the gross national product with its proper country or some other social studies type question.

Then the bell would ring, and I would go to the library and my real education would begin.

Heading out to Indian Territory with Mary and Laura in a covered wagon, I would learn all about the pioneer life, Indian culture, the natural world of the American west, agriculture, heritage arts and homemaking, music and poetry, and the self reliance that made Alexis de Tocqueville marvel. When I devoured the whole series, there was only one thing left to do: write my own. I had never physically traveled anywhere in a covered wagon or made a rag doll or proved up a homestead or watched a line of Indians being removed from their land, but the characters in the stories scribbled into my Big Chief notebooks did all of that and more. Often these stories were illustrated Garth Williams-style in my childish hand.

Years later, I would find myself grown up and with my own little baby placed in my arms. I began to read of the ideas of Miss Charlotte Mason, who believed that children are born persons and thus entirely worthy of the very best of books to learn of all sorts of things. She maintained that a child learns best by reading “living” books of well-told stories rather than dull, pre-digested textbooks. Her students practiced their penmanship and grammar by copying passages taken right out of those glorious stories. Children narrated, or told back, everything they remembered from their readings. Sometimes these narrations were oral and sometimes they were written, and children inevitably picked up the vocabulary and style of the author. Sometimes the narrations were drawings of scenes or impressions from the books.

I return to the large, sunny, yellow room when I need to be reminded of this “real” education. I cannot remember the GNP of Ecuador or Argentina. The memory map of my mind cannot seem to pull up the white pages of purple information. But I remember the pack behavior of wolves on a lonely starlit prairie night, the way the wind moans across the lonely moors and wraps around the wall of a secret garden, and the dignity of behaving as a kindly princess even if you are rudely treated and live very poorly in an attic. The sound of my pencil scratching across paper, the words coming faster than I could write – it is a drone in the background of my childhood, still sounding.

My feet are planted firmly, and I care, deeply.

 

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Folksongs

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,
it would be a merrier world.”
– J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

In third grade, my teacher was Miss Carson, and she had a ukulele and a large repertoire of folk songs. She wrote the lyrics on the blackboard. I can still see those words, white chalk against black board. We sang along every morning, no doubt increasing our literacy skills. I loved the silly ones (Yes! We have no bananas!) as much as the songs of courage (Follow the Drinking Gourd) and love of country (America the Beautiful). It was the only year of my life that I learned folksongs in school, but because of it my soul was forever enlarged.

Nothing in our Charlotte Mason lifestyle of education has given me more personal joy than the study of folksongs. As a child I had devoured Laura Ingalls’ Little House on the Prairie books. I eagerly read each one to my own children. Imagine my delight in learning of the Pa’s Fiddle project, which endeavored to resurrect the songs Laura had embedded in her stories, songs of the European heritage of the pioneers who settled the west.

As we delved deeper into folksongs, we reached back even further in time, some as far back as the middle ages. We sang songs of battle (The Battle of Otterburn), tragedy (An Emigrant’s Daughter), riddles ( Scarborough Fair), and love ( Star of the County Down). We were touched by homesickeness (Carrickfergus ) and delighted by boisterous sea shanties which we belted out in our best pirate voices ( Blow the Man Down). We shared them with friends, we played them at nursing homes on fiddles and tin whistles, and they began to become our songs; songs probably sung by our ancestors had become ours.

We learned songs of other countries, as well (Land of the Silver Birch, Farewell to Nova Scotia, Waltzing Matilda) and we became part of a conversation with the world, it’s pageant of history and the universal themes common to all people.

Folksongs are immortal, and they are still being made. Recently my kids and I were delighted to hear of Ed Sheeran’s latest song, Nancy Mulligan, about his Irish grandparents. We find ourselves singing it throughout the day. As we listened to the song a couple of times, the wheels were turning and we quickly figured out that that one of the grandparents was from the north and was Protestant, and the other from the Catholic south. We rushed to the map on the wall to try to find where the western border county of Wexford, mentioned in the song, was located. One of my teenage children, raised on folk songs but no stranger to the music of today, commented, “Wouldn’t it be great if the old style of songs came back?”

“We are educated by our intimacies.” – Charlotte Mason

 

Links:
Pa’s Fiddle Project
Ambleside Online Folksongs
Homestead Pickers – Homeschooler’s Folksong Collection
Angelfire.com
Ed Sheerhan’s Nancy Mulligan
The song that changed our dog Jack’s name to Jackie Boy (don’t miss this one!)

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Days of Gold and Colbalt Blue

EDUCATION IS THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books; for we know that our business is, not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of –

‘Those first-born affinities

That fit our new existence to existing things.’

Charlotte Mason, vol. 1

The sunflowers seized her imagination the year she was 12.

But her relationship with Vincent Van Gogh had begun years before, when she was very, very young and swirls of sky heralded the birth of our Saviour . She and her brothers released those swirls across our golden wall, just as they remembered them from their picture study.

“The art training of children should proceed on two lines. The six-year-old child should begin both to express himself and to appreciate, and his appreciation should be well in advance of his power to express what he sees or imagines.” – C. Mason, vol. 1

They would meet other artists: Giotto, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, Cassatt, and so many more through our picture talks.

“When children have begun regular lessons {that is, as soon as they are six}, this sort of study of pictures should not be left to chance, but they should take one artist after another, term by term, and study quietly some half-dozen reproductions of his work in the course of the term.” – C. Mason, vol. 1

But Vincent remained her most intimate artist friend. His story made us all weep, but especially her.

 

 

Years later she discovered the true hero of Vincent’s story when through her reading, she met his younger brother, Theo. Inspired, and with three brothers of her own, she took up her pen, for “behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” Psalm 133

“An idea is more than an image or a picture; it is, so to speak, a spiritual germ endowed with vital force – with power, that is, to grow and to produce after its kind.” – C. Mason, vol. 1

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