Tag Archives: Charlotte Mason

Commonplace: Charlotte Mason on … Fad Diets???

28 Wednesday Apr 2021

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I’ve been reading Charlotte Mason’s fourth volume, Ourselves, and while it is full of wise words, this section I’m sharing here today struck me by its almost surprising timeliness.

It’s easy to get the idea that folks over a hundred years ago lived lives so vastly different from ours that they were somehow either more boring and serious or else more backward and superstitious than people are today. The reality is that humanity is humanity, no matter what the era. And apparently there were people getting obsessive over special diets in England at the turn of the 20th century. They may not have the same names or focus, but they perhaps share the same craze. And it’s the craze, the self-absorption, that Miss Mason calls attention to in her chapter on temperance. I’ll let her take it away:

Conscience is not, in fact, so much concerned with the manner of our intemperance as with the underlying principle which St Paul sets forth when he condemns those who “worship and serve the creature more than the Creator.” This is the principle according to which we shall be justified or condemned; and, in its light, we have reason to be suspicious of any system of diet or exercise which bespeaks excessive concern for the body, whether that concern be shown by a diet of nuts and apples, of peacocks’ brains, or of cock-a-leekie. England is in serious danger of giving herself over to the worship of a deity whom we all honour as Hygeia. But never did men bow down before so elusive a goddess, for the more she is pursued, the more she flees; while she is ready with smiles and favours for him who never casts a thought her way. In truth and sober earnest, the pursuit of physical (and mental) well-being is taking its place amongst us as a religious cult; and the danger of such a cult is, lest we concentrate our minds, not upon Christ, but upon our own consciousness. We ‘have faith’ to produce in ourselves certain comfortable attitudes of mind and body; this serenity satisfies us, and we forget the danger of exalting the concerns of the creature above the worship of the Creator. The essence of Christianity is passionate love and loyalty towards a divine Person: and faith, the adoring regard of the soul, must needs make us like Him who is ‘meek and lowly of heart.’ A faith which raises us to a ‘higher plane’ should be suspect of the Christian conscience, as seeking to serve ourselves of the power of Christ, less to His glory than our own satisfaction.
(Ourselves, Book II Part I Chapter III, p. 230-231)

Wow. Fad diets aside, isn’t it so easy to fixate on improving our physical and mental well-being apart from the glory of God? Our culture is drunk with this sort of thing. And while Christians certainly seek to learn and grow, our aim ought to be entirely different.

“Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added,” Jesus tells us in the gospel of Matthew.

It’s good to be reminded that in all our living and striving, our eyes ought to be on Christ and not on …ourselves. Even when writing a book with that title, Miss Mason makes clear that self-knowledge isn’t an end in itself. And neither is self-improvement. In all of our growth, are we growing more “like Him who is ‘meek and lowly of heart'”? It’s a good question to grapple with before the Lord.

What have you read lately? Anything quote-worthy? I’d love to hear about it! Drop a comment below.

How We Homeschool: Hello, Charlotte. Hello, Classical.

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

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In my last post, I shared Why We Homeschool, and part of our WHY included the freedom to choose HOW.

I explained a bit of our story–how my husband was homeschooled and how I went to public school. And I shared our mission statement:

Since before they were born, my husband Nathaniel and I have purposed to bring our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and to educate them at home by means of whole/living books, meaningful work and life experiences, and disciplined habits of wisdom and personal responsibility—for school and for life and ultimately for eternity.

In this post, I’ll give a little more of our story and begin to flesh out just how we have come to do what we do–and how we think about it, summarizing Charlotte Mason and classical philosophies as best I can.

A Little More of Our Story…

That mission statement above was written recently, but it pretty well describes what our aims have been from the beginning, owing much to what Nathaniel’s family passed down and to his experience with the literature-based Robinson Curriculum.

Our initial trajectory found further inspiration nearly six years ago when an older mom-friend at the local homeschool co-op first introduced me to the ideas of Charlotte Mason and Christian classical education (yes, both at the same time–it’s taken me years to sort them out! Ha!).

We were already legally homeschooling our five-year-old at this point–attempting to use my mother-in-law’s KONOS unit studies curriculum. Think: a text-only Pinterest board in a three-inch binder (though I’m sure it’s more up-to-date these days). I had already found that, rogue that I am, I took the subject matter we were supposed to cover in KONOS, ignored the binder and its overwhelming amount of options completely, and simply went to the library to check out as many quality books as I could find for us to read aloud on a given subject.

I’m not a crafty mom, nor do I like Pinterest.

While carting books home from the library for our immediate needs, I began to explore Charlotte Mason via Ambleside Online and some of my friend’s Well Trained Mind materials (which are Classical, too).

Somewhere in that first year I also acquired Educating the WholeHearted Child, an excellent resource on Christian homeschooling, by Clay and Sally Clarkson–and I found Charlotte Mason quotes littered throughout.

Hmmm…Interesting. The wheels were spinning.

Half way into our second year, now invested in a couple of those Well Trained Mind materials and a practice called Morning Time (recommended by my friend and expanded upon by Pam Barnhill), I found myself tuning in to a new podcast called Scholé Sisters, “a casual conversation…” for “the classical homeschooling mama who seeks to learn and grow while she’s helping her children learn and grow.”

Inspired by the podcast to “find your sisters,” I invited the friend who had started this mess 😉 as well as a few others to form our own book club and read Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s For the Children’s Sake–arguably the Charlotte Mason gateway drug.

At this point my research perhaps turned into somewhat of an addiction.

I began to see that Charlotte Mason’s ideas about books, habit training, and real-life learning lined up with so much of what we were already doing–and they challenged me to grow further out of my push-through-to-the-next-thing mindset that I’d acquired in my own school years.

I also began to explore classical education a bit, but never really hopped on the Trivium-as-stages Train. I was delighted to find in further listening and research that the “stages” application of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric was a gross oversimplification–classical education, as I had hoped, has far more to offer.

Since that first year where I didn’t-really-follow-KONOS, we haven’t used any sort of all-in-one curriculum (though I have borrowed a lot from Ambleside Online and we do use curriculum for math).  We appreciate the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason and Christian classical education, and we choose materials eclectically guided by a lot of the principles from these philosophies.

So, what exactly are they?

Hello, Charlotte

Charlotte Mason, a British educator who lived at the turn of the 20th century, describes education as “an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” Atmosphere refers to the naturally occurring environment of the child—the home in which they live, the people they live with, the world outside their front door. This also includes the attitudes that they pick up from, say, their parents.

Discipline refers to the formation of habits, whether personal cleanliness, academic, or other habits of character. Again, who we are as parents teaches a lot!

Life might be a bit confusing. By life Mason means “living ideas,” or knowledge that is vital. This kind of knowledge is found by being in living touch with the world around us and especially by being presented with a rich curriculum that puts us in touch with the knowledge made available in books—and particularly books of literary quality rather than dry textbooks which can often strip knowledge of its delight. When Charlotte Mason mamas speak of living books, they’re in this realm of “education is a life.”

Our mission statement corresponds with this framework for education:
“…meaningful work and life experiences…” — a big part of atmosphere.
“…disciplined habits of wisdom and personal responsibility…” — discipline.
“…whole/living books…” — and there’s the life.

Now, that’s Charlotte Mason on a very general level. She also has a list of 20 principles and six volumes in which she develops her philosophy and method. Some of the key elements include training the habit of attention, growing in self-education, narrating back what one has heard or read after just one reading, spending time outside in nature, studying a wide range of beautiful things, and resisting the urge to over-teach so that the child does the work of thinking for him/herself. But that’s just scratching the surface.

When I list Charlotte Mason as part of how we homeschool, I mean that we are happily influenced by her ideas, but I do not mean that I follow her method anything near completely. Her principles resonate with me and challenge me to be a better mom, but I implement them very much in our own way. And that’s perhaps why I sometimes feel that we fit more easily within Classical education (a philosophical umbrella with arguably various methods up for grabs) than we do in a strictly Charlotte Mason approach (a philosophy with a prescribed method to go with it). But they really do meld together well in our home!

Hello, Classical

Christian classical education aims at wisdom and virtue and at cultivating an appreciation for what is true, good, and beautiful. It emphasizes an ancient and long-standing educational tradition that has been abandoned in the past 150 years or more, but it’s making a strong comeback today. Training in The Seven Liberal Arts of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric (the arts of language); Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music (the mathematical arts) is a key part of the curriculum. But this isn’t the sum total of learning, either. Other elements in this tradition include training in piety, gymnastic, music (in more than a mathematical sense), common and fine arts, sciences and history and philosophy–with Christian theology as both the guide and the goal.

There is a learning curve here, especially since the words I just used to tell you what’s included in a classical education all have older definitions and understandings that are either completely abandoned or else eclipsed by the way we understand them today. There are helpful resources out there, though. Podcasts like the Scholé Sisters, Ask Andrew, and Cafe Schole have been helpful. As for reading, these articles at the Circe Institute can get you started, and the booklet Introduction to Classical Education is a helpful overview. But once you’re ready to dive into a thorough treatment of Christian classical education, be sure to grab The Liberal Arts Tradition (revised edition) by Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain. This book ties all the pieces together with lots of historical references so that you come away with a better and deeper understanding of the whole paradigm and where it all comes from. There’s also a short glossary of key words and concepts at the back of the book that’s a very handy reference!

Charlotte Mason and classical both aim at a holistic education that respects the nature of the child as made in God’s image. As such, children ought to be nurtured and educated in body, mind, and soul–and primarily by those that love them most. Today’s secular school system doesn’t acknowledge the soul of the child, so it falls short even when it aims at a holistic education.

Some of what we do will sound flowery, but that’s because our focus isn’t just on academic skills—it’s on all of life enjoyed and lived to the glory of God—and this includes a lot of things that are both enriching in an enjoyable way and pay dividends academically, too. What we do is academically rigorous, but in a very different way.

We’ve found that both Charlotte Mason and Christian classical education each resonate with our priorities and direction, while also giving a greater depth and breadth to our efforts than we knew was possible.

Do you have to follow either of these philosophies or methods to homeschool you kids well and raise them in the ways of the Lord? No. The best way to do that is to be humbly and constantly immersing yourself and your children in God’s word, believing it and living by it together in your everyday, everywhere life. But both classical and Charlotte Mason philosophies can be extremely helpful to that end–not only for the way they give you many positive things to implement in your teaching, but also for the way they challenge you to peel back the layers of negative influence from our modern, materialistic education system.

Stay tuned for more in this series as I begin to post specifically about how we handle various subjects in our homeschool (without actually concerning ourselves much with “teaching all the subjects”).

In case you missed it, here’s the first post in the series: Why We Homeschool.

Next up: How We homeschool: Bible

April Foolishness ~ New Living Books Consortium Video Chat!

01 Wednesday Apr 2020

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Join us as we indulge in a little foolishness!

living books april fools homeschool literature

What kind of foolishness do we find in living books? And what role does it play in our favorite stories? In this chat we take a tour of literary folly: starting with the childish charm of Frog and Toad; to the growth away from foolishness in coming-of-age novels like Anne and Little Britches (and the lack of such growth in Tom Sawyer); and finally to the full-grown foolishness that wields its destructive power in Austen and Shakespeare.

Growth from foolishness to maturity often comes by way of trial–in literature and in our own lives. As we consider the characters in the stories we read, we find insight and inspiration for navigating the crises we face with wisdom and courage.

When it comes to fleeing danger, where’s the line between wisdom and selfishness? In facing danger head-on, what’s the difference between courage and foolhardy recklessness? We hope you’ll join us and find encouragement–both for your family’s literary adventures and for the real challenges you face in these trying times.

For Easy Navigation: 

00:00 – 00:54    Introduction
00:54 – 03:48    Charming, Childish Foolishness
03:48 – 04:52    Foolishness Grows Up a Bit
04:52 – 14:53    Foolishness to Maturity in Coming-of-Age Novels
14:53 – 27:46    Manifestations of Folly in Austen and Shakespeare
27:46 – 37:20    Facing our Current Crisis with Wisdom and Courage
37:20 –  End     Wrap Up

Books Mentioned

The Bible, especially the book of Proverbs 🙂

Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne

Paddington Bear by Michael Bond

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham

Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Little Britches by Ralph Moody (audiobook linked below)

Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

Jane Austen:

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Emma

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

King Lear by William Shakespeare

 

Check out our past episodes:
Chat #1  Introducing the Living Books Consortium
Chat #2  Living Books Meet Real Life–Letting the Magic Happen
Chat #3  Living Books in the Large Family–with Amy Roberts

 

Introducing the Living Books Consortium (and a Video with Tabitha Alloway)!

27 Monday May 2019

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Friends, I am so excited to share this with you! About six months ago my friend Tabitha Alloway (of Pursuing Logos) started a community on Facebook dedicated to living books–discussing the books we find, asking for recommendations, sharing reviews, and yes, even sharing some hilarious book memes. Sifting through all the books out there is a big job. But it’s a little easier (and more fun) if we do it together!

What is a living book? Well, that’s what we sought to address in this first video chat (below!) where we discuss the motivation behind the Facebook group, our own relationship with books, what living books are, and how we go about choosing them for our families.

Want to chime in? Request to join the Living Books Consortium group on Facebook.  Here’s the group description:

Welcome to the Living Books Consortium! We share a passion for books here–but not just any books. We’re interested in good books; books that fire the imagination, stir the soul, and challenge the mind and spirit. As John Milton said, “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.”

Charlotte Mason was the nineteenth century British educator who coined the phrase “living books.” To her, a book was a living book (as opposed to dull and lifeless “twaddle”) if its text was engaging, its literary elements fine, its teaching qualities commendable, and its truths timeless.

She wrote, “As for literature – to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.”

Here in this group we share with one another “the best that we can find.” This page is meant to be a tool and resource for those in search of good literature as we share reviews and exchange recommendations with one another: be it a children’s picture book, a classic, or a fine work of non-fiction, etc.

So whether contributing to this page or just browsing it, enjoy your time here and be inspired to pursue the treasure and pleasure that good literature holds–in the company of fellow book enthusiasts. Ultimately, whether we “eat,” “drink,” or “read books,” we desire to do all to the glory of God. 

We’ll be releasing a new video chat each month in the group. We hope you’ll join us!

Show Notes Below!

For easy navigating:
00:00 – 09:44 — Group History and Introduction
09:44 – 24:00 — Discussion of Some of OUR Favorite Books
24:00 – 33:00 — What is a Living Book? How Do We Choose Them?
33:00 – 35:04 — Handling Questionable Content
35:04 – 40:35 — Resources We’ve Used
40:35 –  End  — Preview Next Month and Wrap-Up

Books Mentioned:

How to be Romantic

A Gospel Primer

Trusting God

Sherlock Holmes

The Scarlet Pimpernel

A Tale of Two Cities

The Count of Monte Cristo

Les Miserables

Sense and Sensibility (Check out Close Reads podcast on this book now!)

Close Reads is covering Sense and Sensibility right now!

The Ultimate Living Book: The Bible
May we suggest this Bible Reading Plan?

Knowing God

Keep a Quiet Heart

Pride and Prejudice

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Resources Mentioned:

Lithographs (Sherlock shirt, Pride and Prejudice bag)

Ambleside Online (Much more than a book list, but a great reference for the book list it contains)

Honey for a Child’s Heart (Great list of children’s books by age)

Robinson Curriculum Book List (Actual curriculum website HERE)

Educating the WholeHearted Child (Excellent and thorough resource for Christian homeschooling, including a recommended books list)

Librivox.org  (Free audiobooks! Yay!)

 

The Homeschool Review: Spring 2018

31 Saturday Mar 2018

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Ever wondered what homeschooling looks like in our family? Here’s a peak into what we’ve been up to since ringing in the New Year.  Since this is the first post of its kind, I’ll include a bit more detail about our usual daily routine.  Just make sure you scroll to the end to find out about some of our more exciting learning adventures since they don’t quite fit into a “usual day”.  😉

A Graceful Start

This semester began much like fall of 2017–with me landing on my rear.  Literally.  There’s just something about that first day back to school that makes me miss my step, aparently.  Or maybe it has something to do with fuzzy socks on a carpeted staircase at dark-thirty in the morning.  At least I wear shoes to go down my stairs now.

At any rate, once I’ve picked myself up off of the floor at the bottom of the staircase and limped into the kitchen to make coffee, our day moves along fairly smoothly:  from quiet time for the parents, to breakfast and Proverbs as a family, then to chores and personal Bible time for the kiddos (while Mama gets her homeschool game face on).

My boys have enjoyed listening to The Jesus Storybook Bible and the free dramatized audio bible available from Faith Comes by Hearing.  In the past few months, C-age-8 has begun to read about a chapter a day from the New Testament in his own bible, so the transition from bible listening to bible reading is going pretty smoothly so far!

Then there’s this lovely thing called Morning Time.  A dear local mommy friend who’s a little further down the road of motherhood than I am turned me onto this idea several years ago.

“Do things together as a family first!  Then split up to do independent work.  That way you’re not having to corral everyone back together multiple times throughout the day and you can start with things you value and enjoy most.  Like prayer, music, poetry, a fun read-aloud…”

 

I latched on to this idea and went searching the interwebs, eventually finding further inspiration from Pam Barnhill’s Your Morning Basket podcast and resources (and she has a new book available on the topic if you’re interested!).

homeschool morning time books

That groundwork having been laid and tested over the past couple of years, we usually start out our school day with lighting a candle, going over our calendar and plans for the day, prayer, singing a hymn, reciting from our memory work binder, poetry reading, and currently reading aloud from Story of the World Volume 2 and a children’s adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress.

This week, I’ve also re-attached our Preschool Prodigies Music lessons as well as 5-10 minutes of Spanish to our Morning Time routine.  I tried to shorten Morning Time by moving these things to the afternoon, but found that they simply didn’t get done!

music lessons homeschool

Confession: there have been many days in the past quarter that I have skipped Morning Time to dive right into math because we were just short on time, but I have been finding lately that when life has gotten heavy and my energy reserves are running thin, starting the day with Morning Time ministers to my soul, helping me to take a deep breath, enjoy the time with my kids, and humbly move forward with my heart more focused on the Lord.

Turns out biblical truth and delightful learning are a great way to start the day.

The Three R’s

Moving on to math, D-age-6 finished Right Start Math Level B in February and has moved on to Level C after a well-earned week of playing math games.

homeschool math games right start

My older son, C-age-8, is half way through Level D, currently working on mastering multiplication facts and applying them to solving area problems.

homeschool right start math area

As for me, I’m learning to read ahead in our math books and plan our lessons accordingly.  This subject has been the hardest for me to keep to short lessons.  Partly because my kids just take longer than expected, and partly because the lessons sometimes require two days rather than the one day suggested by the book (or more realistically speaking, the one day expected by their mother).

I started out last semester working with a timer, keeping our math lessons to 20-30 minutes.  That worked well until I stopped using the timer (oops).  This quarter, I still haven’t been using the timer so much, but I am learning to repent of the pride that drives me to want to push my kids further and faster.

I’m teaching my kids, not a lesson.  This is not a race.  Our math curriculum itself is built upon understanding and enjoying math, not racing through to the next thing.  Embrace the time it takes to grow.

When I keep things in perspective, it’s a lot easier to see how much work is reasonable for a given day (it’s a lot less than what I used to think!).

For language arts, we’re continuing to work through First Language Lessons levels 1 and 2. My oldest could have been into level 3 by now, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after level 1, so we stalled out for a year.  That means his brother is only one book behind him.  Oh, well!  They’re both learning and enjoying their lessons on basic grammar, poetry, story and art narration, copywork, and dictation for my oldest now in level 2.  I love that this curriculum has been a gentle introduction for me to these classical methods of teaching.

homeschool language arts mcguffey first language lessons

We also have enjoyed these free copywork resources from Simply Charlotte Mason this quarter.  They include scripture, poems, and hymns.

Overlapping a bit of reading and language arts, C-age-8 reads aloud to me from McGuffey’s second reader about once a week, narrates the story to me, and then says and spells the words listed at the end of the lesson.  D-age-6 is reading aloud to me almost daily from McGuffey’s pictorial primer in order to continue progressively practicing his budding reading skills (we used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons to start the process).  I use these readers because they’re progressive, they use older English so that we’re starting out in the direction of classic literature, and because they were hand-me-downs (read: free).

Living Books

Any further discussion of reading blends into everything else we’re learning:  history, literature, nature/science.  C-age-8 has recently finished The Tale of Desperaux, The Secret Garden (with some guided discussion on the ideologies presented), Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Great Brain, Julie of the Wolves, The Little Prince, Because of Winn Dixie, and The Burgess Animal Book, among most of the books in the Boxcar Children series (these are free reads).  I can hardly keep up for record-keeping purposes!  Nathaniel decided to give him a more challenging read to slow things down a bit:  G. A. Henty’s For the Temple, historical fiction covering the Roman sacking of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD.  We just covered this event and the diaspora in Story of the World, so he’s got some points of connection with it already.  He’s also reading a chapter a day in Seabird by Holling C. Holling for geography and natural history.  I ask for him to narrate, or tell back in his own words, what he has read on days when I’m paying attention.  Admittedly, there have been several days (weeks perhaps?) in the past quarter that I have been too busy to ask for a narration for every bit of school reading!

D-age-6 has recently enjoyed moving from Frog and Toad readers to The Boxcar Children and Amelia Bedelia books.  He’s enjoying reading more fluently for himself, but soon I think he’ll be ready for more assigned books.  I think Whinnie the Pooh is in order next.  We’ve read it aloud many times over, so I think he’ll be delighted to read it for himself!

Learning from Life

This section could be a post all its own, so I’ll try to let pictures do most of the talking with a few extra words here and there for things not pictured.

We enjoyed a Little House book club party with a local Charlotte Mason group.

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Exploring historic Ft. Smith after mama read True Grit.

 

 

 

 

New strategy games: Risk, Battleship, Ticket to Ride

We took in a stray German Shepherd dog that followed me home last fall–right after the 500th anniversary of Luther posting of his 95 theses, so naturally we named him Luther.  C-age-8 had almost full responsibility for feeding him each day.  There was plenty of character development in caring for a dog, and even more when we decided he needed a family who could care for him even better.  It was hard to let go of Luther since he had been a part of our family for three months and had in that time doubled in size and made it through the coldest winter we’ve had in years.  It was hard to let go, but we all learned a lot and are thankful for the part we had to play as a doggy foster family.

german shepherd dog boys

Hiking in 20 degree weather to see this 95 foot waterfall when it was mostly frozen.  Petit Jean State Park.

petit jean cedar creek falls frozen

Bird poster and Calendar of Firsts helping us to learn to pay attention and take note!

 

 

Gardening, listening to classical music, watching the ants in our ant farm.

Our four-day backpacking trip on a 24-mile section of the Ouachita Trail in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma.

 

 

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Field trips to animal shelters and to learn about hippotherapy (that’s with horses).

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Ice and roller skating and get-togethers with our Schole Sisters group–watercolors, poetry and tea, fish feeding and nature walk.

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Homeschooling through Chaos

The past two months have been a bit crazy.  There were many times I said to my husband, “I just don’t think we can do school next week with all we have going on.”  He gently encouraged me to try.  And we did.  We kept going through sickness (though we did take a week off when it was really bad), a job change and consequent change of insurance and all other such things, two grandmothers in the hospital, a car wreck, among other things.  I think I would have given up somewhere along the way, so I’m thankful for my husband’s gentle encouragement to just keep going.  Like I said above, our scripture and praise-filled Morning Times were a balm to my soul during a such a hectic season.

Up Next

I suppose in terms of the average school year, we should be wrapping things up in about two months.  We plan to keep going with our current routine, and we’ve got some fun activities planned with our homeschool group, including Field Day which my husband and I coordinate.  Should be a fun spring!

How about you?  What’s up in your homeschool world?

Embracing Short Lessons

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

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I had an a-ha moment today.

And who would have thought that it would come from two very different experiences happening on the same day?

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I’ve posted before about the initial struggles I had with our math curriculum.  Since that first-year learning curve, it’s been pretty smooth sailing.  Until this week.

Our curriculum made some huge leaps this week, as far as I’m concerned.  My oldest son struggled with two separate lessons that took his addition skills and subtraction skills up a few notches.  And by a few notches, I mean like FIVE.  There were some tears, and I decided to split his work for one lesson over two days.  “Short lessons” is one of many principles of education promoted by Charlotte Mason, a British educator at the turn of the 20th century, whose methods I have been reading about in For the Children’s Sake.

We would revisit his worksheet tomorrow, I said. In the mean time, I did some digging.

Looking back over our lessons, I realized that while the jump in addition may simply be larger than I agree is appropriate (at least for a child who is young-for-grade-level), the leap in subtraction was mostly difficult for two reasons:

  1. I didn’t exactly understand what I was to be teaching, since it is something that simply isn’t taught in a traditional approach to elementary math (let me know if any of you are used to learning to mentally subtract two-digit numbers with borrowing BEFORE learning the pencil-and-paper algorithm, k?).  Once I did MY homework, however, and began to really understand the strategies for myself, I realized that I had made things more complicated than they were intended to be. 
  2. The curriculum did not focus on subtraction for nearly 30 lessons!  Sure, there was occasional practice in a warm up or on a review sheet, but the concepts were not discussed in the slightest.  I had to realize that the lessons alone were NOT sufficient to prepare my son for the challenge of mental subtraction with borrowing.  But, as I examined my text book, they weren’t intended to.  Our curriculum, you see, is more than lessons–it includes many suggested math games and facts practice sheets.  The lessons introduce new material.  The games provide the bulk of the practice.  But we rarely played the games if they weren’t already included in a lesson’s activities.

My conclusion from this negative experience is that I’ve been too focused on getting to the next lesson.  Or to the next child on a given day.  My son is slow to get his work done, so we’ve not had time leftover for games.  Instead of seeing that as a hint to slow down, take a day off for a “Game Day”, and build the skills that would help him work faster, I’ve plowed forward, getting us further in the book but not necessarily further in skills and understanding.

As all of that was sinking in this morning, I had the pleasure of a very positive experience with my younger son.

Today I got to introduce my five-year-old to “one-thousand”.  Place value may not seem that exciting to adults, but when you’re five, and you’re the little guy, it’s pretty exhilarating to finally feel like you are catching up with your big brother.  After the concepts were introduced, one of the exercises was to write in his math journal “5000 dogs”, “8000 pigs”, “3000 cats”, etc.  This little man is just beginning reading lessons, and we’ve been stuck pretty much at the beginning.  He often forgets his letters and their sounds, and the idea that sounds, once identified, can be blended together to form words has been pretty much lost on him.

But today…

I helped him say each sound of each word in turn, then write the correct letter.  He actually guessed the letters correctly most of the time.  Then we worked on sounding out the words he’d written.  He blended sounds together rather painlessly for the first time ever!

We were both thrilled!

He happily copied his name and the words “can read!” right next to where I had written them on his paper.  A math lesson turned into our most successful reading lesson yet!

We were so excited and felt so full that it seemed silly to do anything more!  In the past, if we had made some progress on reading I would have thought “more is better” and pressed on to do the next lesson–or at least tried to re-focus us on finishing the math lesson.  But today I realized that the joy of learning is the ultimate goal.  And I saw very clearly how pushing for more would have ruined the moment for both me and my son.

It made me wonder:  How often has my son had a “moment” in his learning, but I didn’t detect it?  How often have I squelched his joy in learning by trying to move ahead too quickly?

With my oldest’s recent painful math lessons, I saw how my desire to “finish this today” and “check off a box and move on” over the past several months has done him a disservice.  We would have done much better to have played more games by insisting on less arbitrary “progress”.  Behold, the negative effects of ignoring Charlotte Mason’s concept of short lessons.

Once I got around to my second-born, I was ready to put the rubber to the road, and we had the incredibly awesome experience of seeing the joy of learning spill over into the rest of the day because we didn’t bury it in any more school work.

Less is more.  Especially when you’re five.  And maybe even in your thirties, but that’s another post for another day.

We are forging ahead, but our destination is now a more distant consideration.  Stopping to smell the proverbial roses along the way is now on my list of “objectives”.

I have learned today that I am teaching a child, my child–not a subject or a curriculum.  I’ve heard others say that before, but now I own it by experience.

Any other teachers or homeschool mamas out there?  Have you had this “a-ha” moment, too?  If you’re into Charlotte Mason’s philosophies, how has implementing the principle of short lessons helped you and your students?