Teaching Science, history, language arts etc…

CM is more of a philosophy than a curriculum. You can use many different living books or even curricula sets and still have a CM homeschool.

I suggest you read some of CM’s works. They are all free online.

When I was researching CM, I actually made a webpage: http://www.squidoo.com/CMbasics

There are links there to CM’s works and many other good articles that put her ideas in a digestable format.

Try to change one thing at a time. For example, use living books. Add narration. Then add copywork. Those are some really easy things to change. (The hard part is maybe changing your thinking. But doing them is really easy once you get the hang of it.)

Then add in poetry study. Then add artist study, composer study, Shakespeare, etc. (These are just examples. You choose what order works best for you.)

Don’t try to do it all at once. It’s too much. Make small changes. It may take two or three years for your HS to go completely CM. Last year, we added composer, nature, and artist study. This year I’ve successfully added poetry and I’m still working to add Shakespeare and a more living math approach.

Jimmie

Hi, Kimberly –

I don’t think Charlotte herself used the term “living math” that I can recall, but we use it to refer to a math curriculum that makes learning math come alive. In other words, it uses manipulatives (working with things before doing symbols on paper) to allow the child to explore the concept; it helps the child understand why you should add in this situation or subtract in that situation; and it incorporates real-life examples to help the child apply what he or she is learning (word problems or story problems). Many moms also like to read living-book biographies about mathematicians.

Several math programs fit these descriptions: the two that come to my mind first are Math-U-See and RightStart. But you can find other comments about other programs in the Math section of this forum. Is your son working on grade level in math for an 11yo? If so, you can probably skip RightStart because it goes through only fourth grade (or maybe fifth). My autistic daughter is 10yo but we’re still working on counting with her, so I’m using RightStart.