Lost and need direction!

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A bit of background on my situation: I pulled my older children from PS when they were finished with second and third grade. They both struggle with math, one has had reading comprehension issues, and we all grew to dislike the pressure over the testing thing, even in those grades.

Give your child some time to find some peace with books, just enjoying them. If she can tell you the story in her own words (narrating), she is comprehending them just fine. Don’t worry about the AR tests, just enjoy the books with a casual discussion. As she is maturing and enjoying, she will naturally become better at the comprehension. If she would enjoy it, have her start drawing a picture of something that happened in the story and tell you about her picture. Again, this is narration – which in CM circles, IS comprehension.

My struggling daughter loved all the different aspects that CM brought into her life – nature study (coolest way to introduce notebooking and attention to detail – more on that in a minute), drawn narrations instead of AR tests, composer study, picture study, handicrafts, etc. These brought her a level of confidence and enjoyment of school that she had never had. Because of these, we were able to help her come up two AR reading levels in less than a year. She told me that going outside in nature and listening to classical music made her brain feel better and school was easier for her. (There are many books pointing this out that you can read.) So we kept it up.

Dictation was such a relief for her after lists and lists of words each week. Dictation is amazing…your child is introduced to great ideas, with proper grammar – and yet, they are only having to learn how to spell a few words at a time IN CONTEXT so that those words actually mean something – which makes it easier to remember later.

As for college, most children who choose that path do well. They have learned to pay attention – listen, observe, and think. It is always an adjustment at first since it is not homeschooling, but face it, college was an adjustment for this public schooled mama, too. =) You can relax about that for now. 😉

I wanted to address the notebooking issue as I have come to better understand it. When we first started CM, my kids were just out of 3 years of public school. They hated the sight of lined paper, so I found the fun looking pages that so many creative people have made for “notebooking” (these are the ones in your packaged curriculum – aka busy work) and we used those for a while. They were more fun for my girls at first, but as I went along, I realized that those pages were a bit of a stress for me because I felt like I had to use one all the time and that I would have a gap if I didn’t use them all. Plus then there is the problem of figuring out long term storage. In reality, they became a stress for my girls after a while, so we quit using them.

A year of that later, after reading a thread on here about using composition notebooks I decided to try it. I assigned one notebook per subject per child (so like one for dictation, one for nature journals, etc.) and we are using those. The beauty of this is that we can add what is of interest to the CHILD from our lessons and thus they are taking ownership of their own education this way. I like it a lot. Every thing is in its own notebook, and I can continue to use these each year until they are full.

I have been reading Laurie Bestvatar’s  book called The Living Page – Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason. It has helped me see the absolute value in a notebook, but not the way the mainstream homeschooling community at large sees it. This is not a mere “artsy” record of the subjects we have traipsed through in our educational journey…notebooks done as Charlotte Mason taught become a very personal record of the child’s unfolding mind as he chooses what to record and the things he chooses becomes his mental hooks for the unfolding ideas he is learning.

The blank page was important to her as it respected the child as a person with his own important thoughts, ideas, and interests. Of course, you can not just hand a child a notebook and expect it to be this amazing thing at first. You need to start one yourself and model it to your children, showing them the proper way to do it.

Start with a Nature Journal. This is the simplest and a very neat one to start with. Go for a nature walk and ask your kids to look for one thing that they really think is cool…be it a bug, flower, tree, rock, etc. Have them really study it and describe it to you. What does it feel like? Look like? Sound like? Smell like? Taste like? (be careful with that one!) After they narrate to you their observations, ask them to draw it as best they can in their notebooks, then label and date the entry. Do this once a week. You will be amazed at how quickly they start looking for things and how much they enjoy it. Then start the next journal for your stage of this CM education. After a while, when you have studied more about CM philosophy and methods, you can slowly add in other notebooks as needed.

The main point of a notebook is that it teaches a child to slow down, really observe, think, and then record those ideas. This is true education – which has become somewhat lost in our world of fill in the blank, true or false world. You mentioned that your daughter is artsy – she will probably really enjoy a true CM notebooking experience.

Truthfully, starting out fresh, I would follow the SCM Curriculum guide offered free on this site. It has all the ingredients in place for you as you continue to learn about CM, and will allow to offer a wonderfully broad and stimulating education to your child as you find your personal path. I did that and have no regrets at all. =)