How do you start CM with High Schoolers

Hi,

I read this post earlier, and didn’t have time to write anything then, but I was shocked to actually get back on here and see no responses yet! Wow! Well, I have a son entering highschool this year, and I read in “More Charlotte Mason” by Catherine Levison, that highschooling using CM is not any different than that of younger aged children, you can just use more difficult or longer poems or quotes for dictation. And you can replace oral narrations with written narrations, but not ALL the time because oral narration is still good in that this helps them in the area of public speaking. Also, don’t quit nature study because it is still essential that teens get out and appreciate nature and observe, write, journal, and draw what they see. Math lessons continue, just higher math levels of course, and you really can’t get around the whole “textbook” thing with it. You can still use hands on though, when cooking, measuring, etc..Everyday math, like real life math! She writes in her section on homeschooling the highschooler that SO many parents begin to freak out when it’s time to start highschool, and think that they should just suddenly quit CM, and these last four years start cramming in things they think they may have missed in previous years, as if a textbook is a magical source, and that this will provide them with a better education as opposed to a literary/liberal arts education. NOT! Real learning comes from REAL books, AND she also mentions that it is still very important to still READ ALOUD to your teens. Even college professors read aloud to their students! So, don’t quit the read aloud time! But, just keep up the CM ways, and by the way, this book is an excellent read, and very helpful if you could get a copy perhaps at your library, or at amazon. It really encourages me to read about other mom’s out there that continue using CM in the highschool years. It’s hard to find those few brave ones that don’t depend on textbooks to get them through these years. Their still our little ones! They are just more mature, and that’s a GOOD thing, because now, they can appreciate the arts, and enjoy the Shakespeare stories that were just a little too hard to understand in earlier years, and see the beauty in Creation! Hope that helps some! Hey, and some of the Great thinkers from the early western world didn’t use textbooks to learn, they read great living books, and got out and studied the night skies, and observed nature, and kept journels, so, they only created textbooks for those who couldn’t understand these difficult classic books!

So she wants to enter the science field. No problem, use Apologia Science textbooks and a Math textbook. Save Charlotte Mason for the History, English & electives.

I’ll just add my two bits, having some experience with high school children who have graduated from college. Doing high school in the Charlotte Mason way doesn’t look like what everyone else is doing and it was unnerving to my children, but when they got to college, they did well. In particular, it was because they had formed relations through nature studies or copywork, dictation and narrations, that when they were in courses such as college biology, they excelled because they had viewed the processes so the text readings and explanations actually connected in their minds to what they’d observed. No other students in the classes had the same advantage.

I would recommend reading “The Living Page:Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason” by Laurie Bestvater. This book really synthesized the whole approach in my mind better than any other, giving a long term view of the benefits and growth that happen with consistent application of the techniques she taught. Had I the opportunity to help my older students again, I would have done more vision casting, starting when they were still pre-teen so they would understand the whole process, the goals of education, their role as learners and the outcome they could have expected. But it’s never too late with the younger family members or older students just beginning the process as long as you have a good relationship with your children and the Spirit leading.