I have been gleaning wisdom from this forum for over a year now and have finally decided to say hello. 🙂 My daughters are ages 3 and 21 months, and when I first stumbled upon the Charlotte Mason method and this website during homeschool research about a year ago, I had a very big, “Aha!” moment. However, my brain keeps trying to fight my inclination to raise my girls with a living education and I don’t know how to follow my heart.
Perhaps it is just the insecurity of being so new to homeschooling I haven’t “officially” begun yet. Maybe it is the fact that using something very structured and easy to explain, such as Memoria Press, would make me feel more comfortable when showing family and friends “what we do all day.” I can’t quite articulate it, but I’m sure others who have chosen CM have been here before. It’s choosing the road less travelled. I look at curriculum in a box and think it would validate what I teach, but then there is always something that doesn’t look quite right. My husband and I heard Sonya speak twice in Greenville this past March, and I was delighted that my sweet husband said he was totally on board with CM. He loved practicing artist study in Sonya’s workshop and we tried narration with each other, and he could see the benefits and was very excited about it.
I have all of the green lights…so why can’t I just take that leap? I even ordered many of the read-aloud selections from the Early Years guide, and my girls are in love with Carl and McDuff books. I think I have been CM my whole life and just never knew it. 🙂 I grew up playing outdoors for hours, making up imaginary games, writing and illustrating stories, and then becoming an English teacher with an art history minor. I love everything about this method and way of living. I just fear planning my own curriculum, even with the extremely detailed help of the SCM guide, which I am tempted to follow almost in its entirety.
Nudge me in the right direction, please! Feel free to share why this method works, how it has blessed your lives, etc. For those of you who use SCM exclusively (or pretty closely) I would love to hear from you, too!
Blessings,
Jessica