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What does a Charlotte Mason home school look like?
Usually when people ask that question, they are curious to know what a typical day or a typical week looks like in your home school. In other words, how do you teach in a Charlotte Mason way?
Maybe you’re wondering the same thing. Or maybe you think you know the answer. Either way I’m glad you’re here.
Charlotte Mason believed it was very important to think through the Why, the What, and the How of homeschooling our children.
[The homeschool teacher] must ask herself seriously, Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And, How should they learn it? If she take the trouble to find a definite and thoughtful answer to each of these three queries, she will be in a position to direct her children’s studies.
Home Education, p. 171
In the past couple of weeks we have looked at Why must the children learn? and What should they learn? Today we’re going to discuss How? And probably more than anything else, the How of the Charlotte Mason Method is what makes our home schools unique. Let’s take a look at her methods.
Hopefully you remember what we learned about the Why and the What:
The children learn—why?—to grow (not just to know).
Their minds feed on—what?—ideas (not mere information).
Therefore, we give the children a wide variety of good ideas.
So far so good. Now let’s talk about How the children should learn those ideas in order to grow as persons. We’ve compared it to spreading a feast of ideas, and I want to run with that analogy in two different directions:
How do we spread the feast? and How do we serve the feast? Those are two different, but related, ideas.
How We Spread the Feast
First, let’s look at how we spread the feast of ideas for our children. There are a handful of keystone methods that are used in a Charlotte Mason approach:
- Reading living books
- Observing firsthand with guidance
- Narrating what you’ve read or heard or seen
- Recording what you’ve observed
- Creating something of your own
Let’s talk about each one.
Living Books
First, living books. You got a taste for a living book in the previous post when we talked about giving our children ideas, not just dry facts. Do you remember the passage I read about the Great Fire of London, and how Thomas Farriner was awakened in the early hours of the morning? That excerpt is an example of a living book. It makes the story come alive in your imagination, and it contains ideas—ideas that are alive and will initiate other ideas, all looking for more. Those are the types of books children should learn from for history, geography, Bible, science, and of course, literature and poetry. Living books are a hallmark of a Charlotte Mason education.
Observance with Guidance
A second method is observing firsthand with guidance. I like to call this guided discovery. Any ideas that can be gained reasonably and safely through personal experience, should be. So we bring our children face to face with good music and art. We get them out into nature, so they can form personal relations with God’s creation. We give them firsthand experience in working with different types of materials in handicrafts. We guide them to discover math concepts using real objects and real-life scenarios. Guided discovery is even used for beginning reading and handwriting. In all of these subjects, we give the student something worth observing and then encourage him to observe it closely and carefully.
Telling Back with Narration
Third, we ask the student to tell us in his own words what it is he has read or heard or seen through the living books and his own observation. This is called narration. It is quite different from answering direct questions on the facts or doing true or false or multiple choice questions. Rather, it is asking the student to tell what he knows. So for example, if you read the chapter on the Great Fire of London, you would ask your student to tell what he knows about the Great Fire of London. If you listened to The Minute Waltz by Chopin, you would ask your child what he thought of it and how he might describe it to a friend. If you were looking at The Starry Night by Van Gogh, you would encourage your student to look at that picture for himself until he had a clear mental image of it in his mind, then turn the art print over and have him describe it to you without looking. Those are all types of narration—of having your student tell in his own words what he has just read or heard or seen for himself.
Recording Observations
Fourth, many of those personal observations are then recorded in notebooks. Here’s a key, though: those notebooks are empty when you start out. They aren’t worksheets full of questions to answer or questions disguised as crossword puzzles. No, the personal notebooks simply provide space and organization for your student to record what he has learned through his reading or observations in nature, in math, in literature, and in history.
Create Something of Your Own
And fifth, your student is encouraged to use what he now knows in order to create something of his own—an idea of his own that has grown out of the other ideas he has received. He will use the skills that he learned in a handicraft to create a new project from his own imagination; he will use the phrases and words he learned in Spanish, or in his beginning reading lesson, to put together his own sentences; he will use the concepts he learned in math to create and share an original mental math challenge.
Those methods are keystones when we talk about How to spread a feast of ideas in a Charlotte Mason way: reading living books, observing firsthand with guidance, narrating or telling what he has learned, recording his observations in personal notebooks, and using what he has learned to create something of his own.
To learn more about each method, download our free e-book Subject by Subject the Charlotte Mason Way. It will walk you through each school subject and outline those methods in more detail for you.
How to Serve the Feast
All right, those are the basic principles in how to spread a feast; but I want to also talk about how to serve that feast, for that is also an important part of How the children should learn.
We serve these nutritious ideas in a way similar to how we serve physical food. We serve it in an attractive setting with encouragement to eat small portions regularly with plenty of time to digest.
Do we mash up all this nutritious food and spoon-feed it into their young minds? Do we set up a prize and watch them tear through the tidbits like a pie-eating contest? No. Rather, we serve these nutritious ideas in a way similar to how we serve physical food for them to consume. We serve it in an attractive setting with encouragement to eat small portions regularly with plenty of time to digest.
Let’s look at each part of that description.
An attractive setting
That setting is comprised of the good, loving, noble ideas. The beauty of those ideas is one component of an attractive setting. The atmosphere of our home is the other component of that setting. Your attitudes toward learning, toward your child as a person and as a student, toward life in general make up the atmosphere of your home. We can feed our children good ideas all day long, but if we do not live out those ideas in our personal lives there will be a big disconnect. So we want to serve this feast in a supportive, loving, attractive atmosphere.
Small portions
Charlotte advocated short lessons in order to encourage the habit of full attention. If we serve only a small portion, and stop before the child’s mind is ready to burst, we set up the habit of paying attention for the full lesson. On the flip side, if we drag the lesson on and on and on, and every day the child pays attention for only the first ten minutes, we are setting up the habit of paying attention for only part of the lesson. To encourage full attention, serve the lessons in small portions.
How small? Here are the time frames that Charlotte used in her own schools:
Grades 1–3: no lesson longer than 20 minutes, and most were much shorter than that
Grades 4–6: no lesson longer than 30 minutes, still with plenty of subjects shorter than that
Grades 7–9: no lesson longer than 45 minutes, again with several subjects shorter
Grades 10–12: I haven’t found a time table for these grades yet, but if we follow the same pattern, a high school lesson would be no longer than 45 minutes or an hour at the most, with several lessons shorter and tucked in between the longer ones.
Regularly and with Time to Digest
We’ve looked at serving the feast in an attractive setting with encouragement to eat small portions. Let’s talk about the rest of how to serve the feast: eating regularly and with plenty of time to digest.
Some people have a hard time wrapping their minds around short lessons and a wide variety of subjects. They feel like it’s a shotgun-like, scattered approach that will never yield any healthy growth. But Charlotte’s approach was anything but scattered. She had a systematic and scheduled plan for the feast. It was varied each day, but over time it was faithfully consistent. Those small, constant touches add up.
Isn’t that how we serve meals to our family—on a regular schedule? We don’t gorge one day and then starve the next three. No, we try to provide a variety of healtful, nutritious food served regularly in sufficient portions. And it’s the same with serving the mental feast of ideas. To encourage the best growth, we need to provide sufficient portions of a variety of good, loving, noble ideas regularly, not just once in a while.
Sometimes it’s not convenient to go outside for nature study. Sometimes we feel like we don’t have time to have the children narrate; it would be much quicker to hand them a worksheet that asks for short facts. But Charlotte explained that when we take those inferior short cuts, we are robbing the children of what they need: a variety of ideas. She said,
In the nature of things then the unspoken demand of children is for a wide and very varied curriculum; it is necessary that they should have some knowledge of the wide range of interests proper to them as human beings, and for no reasons of convenience or time limitations may we curtail their proper curriculum.
A Philosophy of Education, p. 14
So we serve the feast regularly, in an attractive setting, encouraging the children to eat small portions, and we provide plenty of time for them to digest those ideas.
Charlotte offered the children this wonderful gift of time to digest in a couple of ways. First, because of the short lessons, they were finished with formal schoolwork by lunch time and had the afternoons to pursue personal interests and spend time outside. You’ve probably experienced how free time allows your brain to process and think for itself. That’s why we so often get ideas in the shower. When we’re away from input coming at us from outside, our brains can ponder and create and deal with the ideas we have gained. Short lessons allow our children to have that precious gift of down time to think.
But there is another way that Charlotte provided time to digest ideas. She seldom had the students read from the same book more than twice a week. They would read from different books on different days. You see, there’s a vast difference between plowing through a book at top speed and thoughtfully reading it in smaller portions spread out over a longer period of time. That second approach gives the children more time to ponder and to “live with” the characters in the book between readings; it offers more time to digest the ideas. So to help your children gain the most from the feast, serve those good ideas a little at a time and keep afternoons free for digesting them.
It’s the digesting and assimilating of ideas that causes personal growth. Which brings us right back, full circle, to Why and What the children should learn. It’s all related in a beautiful, comprehensive, brilliant approach to education.
Charlotte Mason’s methods are designed to spread a feast of ideas that encourage growth. That’s the How, What, and Why of a Charlotte Mason education.
Remember, Charlotte said that once you have a definite and thoughtful answer to those three questions—Why must the children learn? What should they learn? and How should they learn?—then you will be in a position to direct your children’s studies. Once you answer these three questions, everything else will fall into place.
Let Us Help
We hope that you have been inspired by this look at the Why, What, and How of a Charlotte Mason education. Our curriculum makes it simple for you to bring this wonderful approach to homeschooling to your family, with open-and-go lesson plans that feature carefully selected books.
Our lesson plans guide you through teaching your whole family together, and they follow these principles we’ve explored of Why, What, and How children should learn.
Take a look at the free samples and see how the Simply Charlotte Mason curriculum can help you bring this kind of excellent education to life in your home school.
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