CMP Review 2025-10-09

October 9, 2025

Elizabeth Ellis attended Manor House School in 1940. Manor House was a PNEU school in Northern Ireland founded in 1936. The first headmistress was Claudia Shelley. Mrs. Shelley was a House of Education graduate (1912) who had also served as principal of a PNEU school in Scotland. Shelley was a contributor to the Parents’ Review, and one of her articles can be found on our website.

All the students at Manor House, of course, kept nature notebooks. Elizabeth Ellis was no exception. She saved her nature notebook after leaving school and eventually handed it down to her daughter, Heather Wadsworth. Heather was kind enough to share these images of her mother’s work as a student.

Elizabeth’s nature notebook has three main elements found in the canonical form prescribed by a Charlotte Mason education: (1) narrative descriptions of nature observations, (2) brush-drawn images of specimens, and (3) tables of flowers seen. This form had been in place for almost 50 years when Elizabeth learned it. The form is still followed by Charlotte Mason educators today.

The fact that Elizabeth kept her notebook and gave it to her daughter shows what an important possession it was to her. I think there are some important lessons we can learn from this. One is that the drawings and writings we make in a nature notebook may seem to be activities of the moment, but in fact they live on in our hearts and in the hearts of our loved ones.

A second lesson is that we don’t need to go to museums to find nature notebooks in the form developed at the House of Education. We can also find them in the homes of former PNEU students. In fact, we can even find them in the homes of Charlotte Mason educators around the world today. Anyone who keeps a notebook in this way is preserving a tradition that has touched hearts and minds for more than a century.

@artmiddlekauff