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I always enjoy hearing your stories of how you started homeschooling with the Charlotte Mason Method. Everybody’s story is unique, yet there are also some similarities that bind our hearts together as we hear those from each other. Today, we want to share with you the stories of a couple of us here at Simply Charlotte Mason. Joining me today is my longtime friend, I won’t say old friend, but longtime friend and coworker Karen Smith.
Sonya: We’ve been friends for at least 35 years now. So we want to share with our listeners the story of how we started homeschooling with Charlotte Mason. And so we probably need to go clear back to how we met and what started this all off. We met because we were going to the same church in the Chicago area. And our firstborns arrived in the same year as each other. And then after your second one was born, you guys moved. Is that about the right timeline?
Karen: Yeah, when our second born was about a year old, we moved out of the Chicago area about an hour and a half-ish.
Sonya: And so we didn’t see each other every week at that point.
Karen: No, but we still got together.
Sonya: We did. Periodically, we were able to get together. And as my oldest got to be 5 years old, that’s when I knew that I needed to start kindergarten. I mean, in my mind, I needed to have a set curriculum, but anybody listening, no, you don’t have to, kindergarten year, you don’t have to do formal lessons. But in my mind, I did. I actually never wanted to start homeschooling, but that’s the year I did begin. Your story is different, though.
Karen: I knew I was going to homeschool when I was pregnant with my first.
Sonya: Yeah, totally different. How did you know that? What prompted that idea?
Karen: I heard some of the things that were being taught in the schools at that time, and I didn’t want my children to be exposed to those things. And dare I say, with what we hear coming out of the schools today, what I heard back then was milder.
Sonya: It has not improved over the years.
Karen: It has not improved over the years. But I also wanted my children to have a unique education. I didn’t want them to learn by textbook. I wanted them to experience their learning, the knowledge, and just life. That was important to me.
I wanted my children to have a unique education. I didn’t want them to learn by textbook. I wanted them to experience their learning, the knowledge, and just life.
Sonya: Now, you’ve had a couple of experiences with that, that I think played into what your mindset was. Because you often refer to that year—was it your sixth grade year?
Karen: Sixth grade year.
Sonya: That was such a highlight of your own education. For our readers who have not heard you tell that story, talk about what happened your sixth grade year.
Karen: So the school system I was a part of, the public school system, would take two students from every elementary school in the system, and half of those students, for their sixth grade year, would go to the zoo and have their lessons. And the other half of us had our lessons at the Nature Center. We had traditional schooling. We had math. We had reading. But most of our time was spent on the nature study grounds, learning about the nature that was around us. We’d spend days drawing wildflowers in the spring. We put a child’s wading pool in one of our classrooms and filled it with pond water and turtles. So that was the learning that I wanted my kids to have, that more hands-on and experiencing things. I knew then that all our learning did not have to come from a textbook.
Sonya: What you’re describing to me sounds like something you made a personal relation with. And that’s what you were after. You wanted your children to form those relations, not just recognize the name on a test and move on.
Karen: I had a class in high school that was along the same lines. It was a human anatomy and physiology class. But the teacher cared so much about us, and he loved what he was doing. When we did dissection, he would do it alongside us, not just stand up front and instruct us on what we were supposed to do. He would show us how to do it, and he was excited about it. We learned all the bones in the body, of course, it was that type of a class. But it wasn’t just all the bones, we learned how to identify each individual bone on its own, plus all the little nooks and crannies and knobs and holes and whatever else was a feature of the bone; we had to know all of those, and it was very hands-on. And for our final exam, our teacher stood up front with a box of bones, and he’d pull one out and ask us what it was. And he’d point to something on that bone and ask us what it was. That was our final exam. It was very different than, “Read this in the book, now take the test based on what you read in the book.”
Sonya: So those experiences showed you that you wanted to homeschool. That’s what motivated that decision.
Karen: And I knew that learning could be different than what we traditionally think it is.
I knew that learning could be different than what we traditionally think it is.
Sonya: That unique experience was what you wanted for your kids. Well, when I was going to start kindergarten with my oldest, I only knew about two different approaches. I knew there were textbooks, and I didn’t want that. The only other approach I knew about was unit studies.
Karen: That’s what I knew too.
Sonya: So I got a unit study curriculum for that kindergarten year. And I’ll tell you, Karen, by the end of that year, I was burnt out. You know me. I am not an artsy, craftsy person. All those hands-on projects really took a lot out of me. Now, my kids enjoyed them. They loved doing it. But what I discovered at the end of that year was that they remembered the projects, but they forgot the readings that the projects were supposed to be tied to. It was like, you do the reading and then the project is going to cement this in their minds. But they would remember the project and not the reading. It’s like when you can remember the song of an ad, or the slogan of a commercial, but you can’t remember what business it’s for. That’s what my experience was at the end of that year.
Karen: I had a similar experience with the unit studies that we used. Now, we lasted more than one year, but having mostly boys, I wanted more hands-on learning. They loved the projects, but they couldn’t tell you why we did them. And the thing that we liked most about the unit studies that we were using were the books that were scheduled for us to read.
Sonya: And those were living books.
Karen: They were living books. Yes, they were. We just started enjoying those, and that’s what I started looking for. I had never heard of Charlotte Mason. I didn’t even hear about Charlotte Mason until several years after we started doing Charlotte Mason things, naturally, on our own.
Sonya: Yeah, you would bring those in just because it was common sense to you, second nature to you, “let’s do this, let’s do this.” And then we went to, at the end of that kindergarten year, we went to a homeschool convention in Illinois. And I remember going to a workshop. I don’t think you were with me.
Karen: No, I did not go to that one.
Sonya: I think I told you about it later. I narrated to you later. But in this workshop, the speaker said, “Yes, you’ve got textbooks and you’ve got unit studies, but there are other ways you can approach homeschooling too.” I think she probably only did like a paragraph on Charlotte Mason. But, oh, what she said just resonated with my heart. It was like, “That’s it. That’s what we want to do. And what do I do now?” Because we didn’t have the internet back then.
Karen: We had catalogs. If you could figure out which companies to get them from.
Sonya: When I got out of that workshop, I made a beeline to the exhibit hall and just started looking for anything that had Charlotte Mason’s name on it. We didn’t have access to the six-volume set online, like you do now. It was: Look for books. And so I found the purple book, A Charlotte Mason Companion, Karen Andreola’s book. And I found the little green one, A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levison.
Karen: Very good books.
Sonya: They were wonderful and they still are. They are still classics. That’s all I could find in the whole exhibit hall. So, I took those home, started reading those and just tried to do what I was reading, little by little; implemented it little by little, as we went along. And I would say, I don’t know about you, but I do know about you, we did a lot of things wrong at the beginning.
Karen: Oh, yes. There were so many things we didn’t know.
Sonya: And you don’t know what you don’t know.
Karen: So we read The Charlotte Mason Companion, and it would say, “this is how you do this.” But it wasn’t detailed.
Sonya: Right. It contained the wonderful ideas, great encouragement. It would show you what it could look like in your home.
Karen: And then we had to go find the materials, without the internet, and try and piece it together on our own because there were not places, companies, that we could go to who said, “here, we have Charlotte Mason for you.”
Sonya: Picture study, for example.
Karen: Oh, picture study was so hard to do.
Sonya: It’s like, where do you find a picture? You can’t go up and bring it up on your computer screen. That wasn’t available. I remember we would go to discount bookstores and make a beeline for the discount table and look through and try and find those great big coffee-table art books. And it was like, if you found any of them, “Yes, gold!”
Karen: And calendars. So that’s what we had. I also found that at that time, I think it was the National Institute of Art, had prints available, really nice prints available. But you couldn’t get eight prints of an artist, one artist. They would give you a mixture. You could get one, two, sometimes you might, if it was an artist like Monet, you might be able to get four or five. But most artists, it was maybe one or two, so it was difficult.
Sonya: I’m so glad that we can now make available materials and resources like we wish we had had back then. That’s just such an encouragement. I just love doing that.
Karen: I wanted dictation for my children. That was the way I wanted to teach them spelling. And there were no resources.
Sonya: No, all you could find were lists. Things that would give you spelling lists.
Karen: So you kind of held your nose and chose the one that was the least offensive to you, and used it not exactly in the way it was supposed to be used.
Sonya: Yeah, a lot of it was taking something and trying to tweak it into a Charlotte Mason approach.
Karen: And you didn’t write Spelling Wisdom until after I didn’t need it anymore.
Sonya: Yeah, after your kids graduated. Sorry about that. Let’s talk, though, about our kids graduating. Because, yes, we made a lot of mistakes. But, well, before we talk about our kids graduating, let’s talk about how we discovered that we had made mistakes. I discovered that you don’t just send your kids outside with their nature notebooks and say, here, go find something to draw.
Karen: Draw what you see.
Sonya: Because they come back with the mailbox.
Karen: With the mailbox. Or the house.
Sonya: And that’s fine for a drawing lesson, but not for nature study. So as we learned more and more about these subjects, one thing that I had to remind myself of over and over is, don’t waste time beating yourself up for what you didn’t know.
Karen: Move forward with what you do know now, and tweak and refine what you have been doing, but don’t have a pity party, if you will.
Sonya: You’re wasting valuable time doing that.
Karen: Don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t do it the right way. If you love your children, you care about them, you are doing your best to give them a good education. You’re not going to ruin them if you make mistakes with whatever you’re using. It doesn’t just apply to a Charlotte Mason education. It applies across the board. You are going to make mistakes.
If you love your children, you care about them, you are doing your best to give them a good education. You’re not going to ruin them if you make mistakes with whatever you’re using.
Sonya: Absolutely. And the other thing that reminds me of is that we intentionally kept studying. It wasn’t just, oh, every once in a while we would suddenly stumble upon something that we had done wrong. We were being very intentional to keep learning about the Charlotte Mason Method. Whenever we would find a new book or a new resource, or finally got our hands on the six-volume set, “woo-hoo, look here, we got it!” You remember, it had the apple, little decorative thing around the six volumes. But once we got those, we would keep learning and more and more intentionally kept learning about the Charlotte Mason Method so we could keep improving.
Karen: I don’t know about you, but I think I read The Charlotte Mason Companion and Catherine Levinson’s book, A Charlotte Mason Education, I think I read those every year before we started formal lessons, at the beginning of the school year, just to refresh my memory or to learn more, or to find something that I might have missed the other times through.
Sonya: Yeah, I’d look through, and my highlighting had gotten a little bit gold instead of yellow. Then it was like, “Oh, there’s a sentence!” and pretty soon it was like, “Oh, the whole page is highlighted, never mind.”
Karen: But it was even refreshing our memory on what we were supposed to be doing or how we could be doing things. It was that how we were teaching our children was important and not just going, “Okay, I know all that and we’re just going to wing it from here.” That continual education for us helped refine how we were educating our children.
Sonya: Let’s talk about graduation now. I mean, our oldests, both of our oldests, are 34 this year. And I think they turned out just fine. More than just fine.
Karen: They are creative people. They still love to learn.
Sonya: They do.
Karen: And not just our oldests, but our other children also.
Sonya: All of them, yes.
Karen: Sometimes I’m amazed with what they know.
Sonya: Because they’re keeping up with learning. Even now. Learning new things all the time. All the time.
Karen: And they enjoy different things.
Sonya: Yeah, a wide variety.
Karen: And the things that they enjoy sometimes is, to me, remarkable. Sometimes I view my learning experience, and because of that, I mean, I continue to learn, but probably in a more narrow sense than my children do. My children have a wider variety of interests, I think, because of the education that they had.
Sonya: I think that I could see, especially with you guys, with your sons, how you helped them find, each one, find his unique calling and the bent, if you will, of his personality and help him funnel that into what he was going to do as an occupation and guide him and coach him in that area, but wasn’t tunnel vision. Even as you did that, you continued to spread a wide feast. It’s wonderful to see that balance. Not a lot of kids have that type of balance. But well, ours do.
Karen: And I know Doug and I, we enjoy being with our adult children. And we enjoyed being with them when they were teenagers because they were interesting people.
Sonya: And they were not just interesting, but they had the character as well. They were respectful. They told the truth. They were kind; because of educating the whole person. And that’s not to blow our own horns and say, “Look what we did.”
Karen: No, it’s not what I did.
Sonya: This is the result of implementing these methods, these techniques, if you will, even this mindset. That, with a lot of prayer…
Karen: Oh, daily.
Sonya: …brings about the wonderful result. I mean, if anyone new to Charlotte Mason homeschooling is wondering, “What do I get at the end of this? Is this worth it? Is it going to achieve what I hope?” I would say, unequivocally, yes.
Karen: If what you hope for your children is to have children who know how to learn and love learning, if that’s your goal, yes.
Sonya: That is so true because, number one, the Charlotte Mason approach that we used kept our children’s love for learning alive. They were encouraged to pursue interests, they had the afternoon occupations to specialize wherever they wanted to, but we kept giving them the wide variety. So they love learning, still to this day, and the methods are not complicated. Narrate: you read it, you tell it back. It can be a difficult ask sometimes because you really have to focus on it, but it’s not a complicated method at all. The more the kids used those, and the more we used them, because it rubs off on the teacher too…
Karen: The more they became second nature.
Sonya: I often compare it to using a knife and a fork. When a kid first starts with utensils like that, he’s looking at the knife and the fork and he’s watching what he’s doing with it. But after a while, you know, when you ate breakfast this morning, I didn’t notice you staring at your spoon.
Karen: No, I didn’t.
Sonya: We were looking at each other talking the whole time.
Karen: You didn’t stare at your fork.
Sonya: No. But we were using them; it was second nature. And that’s the way it is with Charlotte’s methods. They become instruments to help you keep learning, but you don’t look at the instruments anymore.
Karen: I think they become a part of who you are. It’s the way you live life to learn. It’s just part of who you are. Life is interesting, and you want to learn more about all aspects of it.
Sonya: And you want that personal relation. You want to learn more for yourself. Because as Charlotte said, it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake. That’s not Charlotte’s exact words, of course, but that’s the main focus of our schools: knowledge for its own sake. Loving that knowledge, growing as a person, it’s all included. So yeah, I like your kids.
Karen: I like your kids.
Sonya: And it’s good because one of yours married one of mine. And we share grandkids, so it’s a good thing we like them.
Karen: And, I don’t know for you, but seeing our grandchildren now being educated using Charlotte Mason’s philosophies and methods is such a joy.
Sonya: That is icing on the cake, isn’t it?
Karen: It is.
Sonya: I love it. Thanks for sharing your story.
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