Why Charlotte Mason?

After studying various methods of homeschooling, I have chosen to use Charlotte Mason’s style. Her main principles are some of the many reasons I chose this method. Here are a few of them:

~ Children learn from real things in the real world! We use the opportunities in the environment children already live in to educate them. Recently, as we were listing our garden flowers for part of our nature study, my daughter was able to name off at least ten of our flowers without even going outside. That shows me she really is paying attention when I ramble about the flowers as she's helping me weed and learning how to prune the flowers! I just LOVE it when I get validation like that because it proves that learning does happen best outside of a textbook. Certainly, we can supplement our learning with books, but she would not have any desire to earn more about our plants and flowers if she didn’t already have hands-on experience with them.

~ Children’s minds are fully capable of digesting real knowledge, so we provide a rich, generous curriculum that exposes children to many interesting, living ideas and concepts. My daughter just finished first grade, but she reads really well, and I believe that is due, in part, to our love of books. One of these is The Blue Fairy Book. It has some complex, old-fashioned sounding language and difficult vocabulary, and at first, it was awkward even for me as we did our read-alouds. I didn’t think she would understand it at all. I was wrong! In fact, I sometimes catch her “sneak-reading” from this book, and later she’ll tell me about the story very accurately and with great detail! We should never underestimate what our children are capable of learning!

~ Children have minds capable of making their own connections with knowledge and experiences, so we make sure children learn about nature, science and art, that they know how to make things (handicraft fun!), that they read many living books, and that they are physically fit. Charlotte Mason encourages us to get outside and to make sure our children are familiar with their world: their yard and the surrounding areas. They should know North, South, East, and West in relation to home, and so on. We can’t comprehend far-off mountain ranges until we’ve climbed a hill, and if we're familiar with a pond, we can better understand the Great Lakes and the ocean. This is how we begin to understand about the places in our books. In keeping with that idea, I asked Kathryn to make a map of our home and yard.

~ In devising a curriculum, we provide a vast amount of ideas to ensure that the mind has enough brain food, knowledge about a variety of things to prevent boredom, and subjects are taught with high-quality literary language since that is what a child's attention responds to best. We love poetry, and our most recent book of poetry is The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, which is a collection of many poets spanning several centuries. Each day, Kathryn chooses a poem and reads it aloud. This is great practice for her and I can make sure she is pronouncing words correctly. Then she picks a stanza that she likes, and copies it for handwriting practice. Once she has read it and done her copywork, she often has at least that one verse memorized. If she really likes the poem, she ends up reading it more than once. Not long ago, we read "The Mad Gardener's Song" by Lewis Carroll. Kathryn LOVED the poem and thought it was hilarious. She got so tickled that she kept having to stop reading because she was laughing so much! That night in bed, she was reciting the poem again to her stuffed animals. This is most definitely not a child bored with her education!

And here is the BIGGEST reason for me...

~ We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and spiritual life of children, but teach them that the God is their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties, and joys of life. There is unity among both secular and divine subjects because both are of God and, whatever children study or do, God is always with them.

We don't even separate Bible from our other subjects - God is in EVERYTHING we learn. Studying God’s creation (nature study) points us back to the Creator. Studying art and science helps us realize that ALL talent and knowledge is God-given, even if the recipient doesn’t acknowledge it.

There are many wonderful methods of homeschooling, but Charlotte Mason's method is exactly what I was looking for, and I love it! I wish I’d been taught this way! Learning is so fun! I pray every day to be given wisdom in teaching my child, and for her to have a teachable spirit, but I also pray for MYSELF to have a teachable spirit and a never-ending thirst for knowledge about the Creator and about everything He made!

If you'd like to learn more about Charlotte Mason, visit these great links:
Summaries of the CM Series
Who was Charlotte Mason?
Ambleside Online

In The Handbook of Nature Study (a very Charlotte Mason-style book!), I found this wonderful quote:

"After all, what is the chief sign of growing old? Is it not the feeling that we know all there is to be known? It is not years which make people old; it is ruts, and a limitation of interests... It is rejuvenation for the teacher, thus growing old... to go out with her youngest pupil and reverently watch with him the miracle of the blossoming violet and and say: 'Dear Nature, I know naught of the wondrous life of these, your smallest creatures. Teach me!' and she will suddenly find herself young."

So many books and magazine articles address the issue of how to stay young, and here we’ve found the answer: just keep learning! For those of us who homeschool, it’s easy if we just keep our hearts teachable and learn right alongside our children.