Exploring Nature with Children: A Year-Long Nature Study

If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a field with your children, meaning to “do some nature study,” and realised you have absolutely no idea where to begin – you are in very good company. Nature study is one of those things that sounds simple and turns out to be quietly overwhelming. What are we actually looking at? What should we notice this week? Which book helps? Most of us end up wandering about, losing momentum by October.

Exploring Nature with Children by Lynn Seddon is the curriculum that solves exactly that problem. It hands you a gentle, open-and-go plan for an entire calendar year, so that every week you know precisely what to explore, where to look, and how to draw it all together – without spending your evenings hunting through websites.

A nature curriculum made in Britain, for British seasons

This is the part that makes it such a natural fit for home educating families here. Lynn Seddon is a home educator herself, living with her family in Lancashire, and she wrote the book she wished she’d had when she started out. Because of that, the whole curriculum follows the Northern Hemisphere’s four seasons – the conkers and bare branches and first snowdrops that your children are actually seeing out of the window.

Most of the well-known nature study resources come from the United States, which means a fair bit of mental translation: their seasons, their wildlife, their timings. Exploring Nature with Children needs none of that. When the curriculum says it’s time to study the harvest moon, gather autumn seeds, or watch for the first signs of spring, those weeks line up with the world right outside your door.

How Exploring Nature with Children works

The structure is beautifully simple. The year is divided into the four seasons, then into the twelve months, then into weeks – giving you 48 weeks of themed, guided nature study, four for every month. Each week has one clear theme: cloud shapes one week, minibeasts the next, the night sky, seeds, birds, frost, and so on.

You don’t have to start in January. You can begin in whichever month you happen to be in and simply work through the year from there, which is one of the reasons it suits real family life so well. You can also dip in and out, follow it loosely, or go deep on the weeks that capture your children’s imagination. If your child becomes obsessed with butterflies, there is nothing stopping you from spending a whole month on them.

What you get in each week

This is where the curriculum really earns its keep. Every single week gives you a complete, self-contained plan, so there’s no extra prep required. Each themed week includes:

• A guided nature walk – a Charlotte Mason-style walk laid out step by step, telling you what to look for and talk about, so you’re free to actually enjoy being outside with your child rather than improvising.
• A short lesson for the parent – a clear introduction to the week’s theme so you feel confident, even if natural history was never your strong suit.
• A themed book list – a generous list of living books for a range of ages, which you can borrow from the library or use what’s already on your shelves. (You also get the full book list as a separate planning document.)
• A poem – a classic piece tied to the week’s theme, perfect for reading aloud, copywork, or dictation.
• A piece of art – a named artwork connected to the theme that you can look up online or in a library art book.
• Extension activities – written directly to your child, with ideas spanning crafts, writing, science and maths. Crucially, there’s no busywork — just genuinely useful ways to go deeper.

The Charlotte Mason connection

Exploring Nature with Children is rooted in the Charlotte Mason approach, which placed enormous value on children spending real, unhurried time outdoors – observing, noticing, and recording what they see. You absolutely do not need to follow a Charlotte Mason philosophy to use it, though. Plenty of families with completely different approaches use it simply as a ready-made nature spine for the year. The method sits quietly underneath; it never demands anything of you.

What ages is it for?

The curriculum is pitched primarily at the early years and primary stage, but in practice it stretches much further than that. The weekly themes work as a launchpad: you can keep things light and playful for little ones, or use the same theme as the starting point for more in-depth study with an older child – proper science, more detailed journaling, independent research. Families with children spread across several ages tend to love it for exactly this reason. Everyone studies the same theme together, each at their own level.

Do you need the Handbook of Nature Study too?

You’ll see Exploring Nature with Children paired with the Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, a classic reference that the curriculum cross-references each week. It’s worth being clear: this is entirely optional. Exploring Nature with Children is self-contained and gives you everything you need on its own. The Handbook is there for families who want to delve deeper into a topic – a lovely thing to have on the shelf, but in no way a requirement to get started.

Format, price and how to buy

Exploring Nature with Children is a digital download – a 236-page PDF priced at $19 (roughly £15, depending on the exchange rate), bought directly from Lynn Seddon’s site. There’s a free sample available too, so you can see a complete week’s lessons and the full list of themes before you commit, which is well worth doing.

Because it arrives as a PDF, you can read it on a screen, print only the weeks you need, or have the whole thing printed and bound. Many UK home educators get theirs spiral-bound through a print service so it lives in the bag and goes out on walks with them.

Buy Exploring Nature with Children here →

Free resources to go alongside it

One of the nicer surprises is how much free support exists around this curriculum. Lynn offers free seasonal title pages and a free sample on her website, and Twinkl has an entire curated collection of free, downloadable resources designed specifically to accompany Exploring Nature with Children, organised by season and month. Between those, you can build a really rich year without spending much beyond the curriculum itself.

Exploring Nature With Children Calendar

A free calendar to guide you as you plan your year.

Included are all the dates and themes in one handy place, and the occasional week that needs to be changed, (such as Harvest Moon Week) is already switched around & planned for you. Download your free calender here →

A quick, honest note on content

The curriculum gently weaves in some seasonal festivals and the occasional reference rooted in a Christian calendar, simply because it follows the traditional turning of the British year. Many families of all faiths and none use it happily and adapt the odd reference without any trouble — it’s very light-touch – but it’s worth knowing in advance so you can decide what suits your household.

Is it right for your family?

If you love the idea of nature study but never quite manage to make it a habit, this is the curriculum that finally makes it stick. It removes the planning, gives you a reason to get outdoors every single week, and grows with your children year after year – because the second time round, they bring a whole year of noticing with them.

It won’t suit families who want something rigid, screen-based, or heavily structured, and that’s rather the point. What it offers instead is a calm, seasonal rhythm and a genuine excuse to close the books and go and stand under a tree for half an hour. For most home educating families, that’s exactly what nature study was meant to be.

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