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How often do you eat? I assume you eat every day. Our bodies need good food, and not just once or twice a week. That food gives our bodies energy, and we can use that energy to accomplish beautiful and noble things.
Charlotte Mason believed that, just as our bodies need good food, so do our minds. Our minds use that food to accomplish beautiful and noble thoughts, which lead to our actions.
Now, feeding your mind is not the same thing as exercising it, just as eating is not the same thing as jogging. Both are good, but it’s easy to slip into an exercise mindset when it comes to our minds and neglect to feed them with good, loving, noble ideas that they can ponder and “chew on,” as it were.
Feeding your mind is not the same thing as exercising it. Both are good, but it’s easy to slip into an exercise mindset and neglect to feed our minds with good, loving, noble ideas.
So today I’m going to give you two simple ways to serve your children (and yourself) daily, nourishing mind food.
We’ve been discussing how to make the transition to the Charlotte Mason method in five stages. We’ve already talked about Stage 1: The Basics and Stage 2: things you will do just Once a Week. Today, let’s look at Stage 3, which is two things that I want you to start doing every day.
Literature
The first is literature, a family read-aloud book. Choose one of the great classic children’s literature books, such as Black Beauty or The Wind in the Willows or Heidi or the Little House books or the Little Britches books. Mix in great books from your family’s heritage and from other cultures and countries. The key is to make sure the book is well-written, that it tells a good story, and that it presents good ideas to think about.
Our kids can learn a lot of life lessons from well-written literature books. Take Winnie-the-Pooh, for example. We learn that it’s good to have a “thoughtful spot,” to take some time to think about things; we learn that some people are “Eeyores,” but we love them anyway; and if you go all the way to the end of that book, you learn that nothing lasts forever on this earth, things change. From Charlotte’s Web we learn about the sacrifice that one friend makes for another; we also learn how to work with cynical people, like Templeton the rat. You can learn so much from good literature books!
Reading together as a family connects your hearts. And that reading doesn’t have to be done during school time. We used to read our literature books at snack time, three o’clock every afternoon. Other families do their read-aloud at bedtime. Make it fit your schedule and your family culture, but make a commitment to choose a great literature book and read a chapter aloud each day, sharing it together as a family.
Scripture Memory
The second thing I want you to do every day is Scripture Memory. You can’t beat Bible verses for feeding the mind and heart good ideas. And it doesn’t take long—just five minutes a day.
Here’s what you do: Choose a verse or a passage or a whole chapter that you want to memorize. Write it on a 3” x 5” card. Or you can download verse cards from our website; we have hundreds of pre-printed verse cards that you can download for free and use.
Now, each day, simply pick up that card, read the reference, and have everybody say the reference after you. Then read the passage through once; everyone should listen closely. At the end, everyone should say the reference again.
- I read the reference.
- Everyone says the reference.
- I read/recite the passage. As the others hear the passage every day, they’ll start to recognize portions of it, and they can join in on the parts that they know.
- At the end, everyone says the reference again.
As you do this process every day, the others will start joining in more and more, because they will know more of that passage, until eventually, everyone will be able to recite the verse.
It just takes five minutes or less. We used to do it at breakfast all the time. Now I do it during our school time with my youngest. Choose a time of day that works best for you. It doesn’t take long, but those small, constant touches, every day, reviewing the verses, is going to give you some great results.
Once everyone has memorized that verse, put it in a system to help you review it often and then start working on a new verse that you want to memorize. We have video that demonstrates a quick and easy Scripture Memory System. It helps you review every verse you’ve ever learned, every month, plus you’re constantly learning new verses. And it takes only five minutes a day.
You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to feed your children’s minds with Scripture Memory each day.
So there you go. Just two things: Reading aloud your family literature book and memorizing Scripture, every day. That’s Stage 3.
Good Habits
I want you to do them every day, because I want you to make those two practices a habit. Charlotte Mason emphasized the importance of good habits. We talked in Stage 1 about keeping lessons short. The reason we do that is because we are trying to cultivate the habits of paying full attention and giving best effort. Short lessons help our students attain those habits. And there are many other habits that Charlotte talked about.
You see, education, in a Charlotte Mason approach, is more than just a set of books; it’s a lifestyle. And much of that lifestyle involves instilling good habits in our children. In fact, Charlotte said that one-third of our children’s education is the habits that we instill in their lives. We need to be constantly instilling good habits and keeping watch over the ones that have already been formed.
So let me encourage you not to neglect habits in favor of checking off a lesson plan. Pay attention to the habits that your children are developing. Good habits will give you smooth and easy days, and they will lay down railroad tracks, as it were, on which your children can run smoothly into their adult lives. We have some great resources to help you with habit training.
So now you know Stage 3: read aloud a chapter from your selected literature book and memorize Scripture every day. Once you get that stage up and running, you’ll be more than halfway there! You’ll have three out of five stages done.
Next will be Stage 4. I hope you and your students are enjoying this new way of learning!
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When you mention keeping lessons short… I could not agree more that my children learn better that way, but how do you keep up with the lesson schedule of curriculums in doing so? They always have more than a short portion each day. For example- apologia science…
how do I handle this?
If you are referring to the upper-grade Apologia science courses, lessons in those grades (7–12) can increase to 30 or 45 minutes. If the student is not yet able to pay full attention for that length of time, you could split the day’s work over two shorter time periods. So you could have a 20-minute science time, then do other schoolwork that uses a different part of the brain (not reading and narrating). Then later in the day, come back and do another 20-minute science time to finish the day’s work.
You could also take a close look at what is being done in that time frame. Is there any busywork that could be eliminated? Would it be more efficient (and helpful) to have the student narrate what he read, rather than answer lots of questions? In other words, make the curriculum your servant, not your master. Use the curriculum as it fits your student and your situation best.
And keep in mind that you don’t have to be handcuffed to a curriculum’s outlined schedule. It’s more important that your student learns the material and fosters the habit of full attention than that he completes a certain number of pages by a certain date.
I’m really enjoying this series! I have three daughters that I’ve homeschooled from the beginning, and although we started out using Charlotte Mason’s methods, we drifted from them over the years due to my own fears about their simplicity. Now that I’ve had some experience with other methods, I realize the value of what we left behind and am switching back.
The one problem I’m having trouble solving is how to do read alouds. In the past, my youngest child was too young to pay much attention to read alouds, so I’d read picture books with her and then do a read aloud with the older two. But now that she’s 7 and has a longer attention span, I’d like to include her, but my oldest is 13, which is a big age difference. Should I choose a book at the 13yo’s level and let the others glean what they can, or at the 7yo’s level so as not to lose her, or try to choose books somewhere in between? My hesitation about trying to find books easy enough for everyone to understand is that I’ll never get to dig into some of the good books for older students. How do CM families handle this?
With that age spread, Marie, I would recommend that you choose a read-aloud to do with your 7yo on her level. Invite your 13yo to listen also, if desired. (Or invite your 13yo to do the reading aloud sometimes, so that skill can be practiced.) Then have a separate literature book going with your 13yo. You could either read that aloud with your older student at a different time of the day or have a little private book club for the two of you, with a certain number of chapters assigned each week for independent reading and then a get-together one day per week to discuss what’s happening in the book.
You might also do a combination approach, choosing books to read all together sometimes and sometimes having separate books going with the two age levels. My main concern, at this point, in combining the age levels is not that the 7yo wouldn’t follow along; I’m sure she could get a lot out of it. My main concern would be content. Some of the books for older students contain ideas and situations that might be unsettling or confusing to a 7yo. So for the books that have family-friendly content, go ahead and read them all together. For the books that are more geared to older, more-experienced emotions, separate into two tracks for a few weeks.
Thank you, Sonya, those are great ideas! I wasn’t even considering doing separate read alouds but that would certainly simplify choosing appropriate books. And although it would use up more of my own time, it IS a delightful way to spend time!
Thank you for this series! Reading through it, I see that I’m incorporating a Charlotte Mason approach with my school year without even realizing it. This has been great to see how I can add in more things without feeling overloaded. My oldest is turning 8 and my next 2 will be kindergarten and preschool age so I’ve been mulling over ideas for us as a family to do together. This approach really seems great for us.