Name: Thrive! NCHE Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-24T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Winston-Salem, NC

This topic has 35 replies, 25 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 11 months ago by petitemom.

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May 10, 2016 at 1:51 pm
Melanie32
Participant
I thought it would be fun to share the many things that don’t get done in each of our households. Because of the nature of a forum, we are usually sharing how we do things and we usually focus on the things we do well. Let’s be transparent and share the areas that we struggle with or even have given up on. I think it will help many of us to see that everyone struggles and not one of us is able to do everything and give our children a perfect CM education.
I’ll go first! 🙂
We rarely do composer study. I have tried and tried through the years but it just hasn’t ever worked out for us. Instead we read Composer biographies when we come across them in our history studies and we listen to classical music a lot at our house.
We have never been consistent with formal nature study. It always felt forced to us. We have paid attention to nature, read many living nature books, consulted field guides constantly and enjoyed lots of nature walks.
We don’t do 3 picture studies a year. We are only getting through 1 a year at this point.
We don’t like Shakespeare. We have read several stories from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and we even made it through the play for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and listened to the audio version as well. We enjoyed parts of the play but Shakespeare just isn’t our cup of tea. I plan on studying a play or so a year anyway but I won’t pretend to enjoy them!
We’ve covered one life from Plutarch in our 13 years of CM education.
We don’t do hymn study consistently. We do sing hymns and my daughter learns hymns as part of her piano lessons but we do not study them formally.
I never made my kids narrate on their literature books. I do have my daughter discuss her readings with me now that she is at the high school level.
That’s all I can think of at the moment but I’m sure there’s plenty more where that came from!
Your turn!
May 10, 2016 at 2:10 pm
Melanie32
Participant
Oh! We don’t do formal handicrafts either. My daughter loved arts and crafts when she was little and now she mostly enjoys drawing. She has taken sewing lessons, done some jewelry making, a bit of pottery, and a few other things through the years but nothing consistent.

May 10, 2016 at 3:39 pm
beccawalker2000
Participant
As a newbie CM’er, this is quite encouraging to me!! 😉
I look forward to learning more and more about all these areas, but honestly, I don’t know if we will ever be able to do it “all” at any one time.
May 10, 2016 at 4:57 pm
Raines
Participant
Oh dear, we have lots of struggles. I don’t do facebook because it just isn’t pretty.
We are still working on the habit of obedience with dd2 (she’ll be 3 in July). I would like to move to a new habit, but she’s holding us up. We actually started with obedience and attention almost 3 years ago, but we’ve had to revisit obedience. When my husband takes her to the office in the mornings, we get school done in 2.5-3 hours. When she is with us, it takes all day long. She hasn’t got on board with the idea that good habits make for smooth and easy days!
My kids love twaddle and never pick out living books at the library, so I try to avoid the public library, but we had to go yesterday, and they brought home twaddle and I let them read this morning and we didn’t do our morning time stuff, and then it was mid-morning and not early morning so we couldn’t do the morning time stuff according to ds9. Seriously, I skipped the morning time that sets the tone for the day.
This past year we have not done well with memory work and I’m so sad, because last year we enjoyed it so much! I was trying to let my children pick out their own poems to memorize and I just got discouraged because one wanted to memorize The Little Peach by Eugene Field and I just couldn’t take it.
I personally own the Original Homeschooling Series and have never read a whole book. I feel like a fake CM home educator. I also own The Living Page and a bunch of other awesome books that I have not finished. I desperately need some accountability in this area.
I am still in the process of trying to create an atmosphere. This morning I was trying to decorate our mantle and my ds4 asked if someone was coming for a visit. Um no. Just trying to create a little atmosphere for the people who live in the house.
The List of Attainments…the family Book of Centuries…foreign language…drawing lessons…consistent nature journal entries…these are not going well.
Did I mention that I am a registered dietitian, and my children hold vegetables in disdain? Yes, even our health habits are alarming.
That’s okay…we are taking it one day at a time…We say Good Morning, I tuck my children in at night, we go to the creek and play, we love God and our church family, and we saw our first yellow-breasted chat yesterday. We may not have it all together, but together we do have it all!
May 10, 2016 at 5:35 pm
CrystalW
Participant
Oh, this thread has me in stitches and feeling good. I have been combing this website for ideas and I have my notebook of ideas and things I need to add. I hope I open the notebook again when I have time to think about school and how to make it lovely. I try to make our home lovely too, then someone wants to set up army guys all over it. This is a journey and a season and I’m going to go with the flow.
We have morning time together where we read our Bible and work on memorization and that really does set the tone for the day if that can get done I feel good.
I’m trying to set a schedule or really an order of events. So the kids can know what to do when I’m not constantly reminding them. If I’m not ever present, it tends to go south quickly.
May 10, 2016 at 6:40 pm
Tjbowman34
Participant
Boy, this is my kind of discussion…lol! So thrilled that I am not the only one who experiences this sort of thing!
I am a curriculum buying, freebie downloading, book buying fool ;). I switch at the change of the wind! What I mean is this…I find something I love and really do believe it is best for my children and then WHAM….I am reading a blog, listening to what someone else does and is working so well and think to myself…hmmm..if it works for them it will surely work for me! I completely exhaust myself…lol.
We live in the country and have never done nature study, even though I bought these beautiful journals for them.
We have never studied Shakespeare or Plutarch and I really don’t know exactly who or what Plutarch is! Did I just put myself out there..LOL
I just heard about memory work so therefore haven’t done that either!
On the brighter side, we do love the Lord with all our heart, we are very involved with church activities, and my children have sweet hearts 🙂
Hang in there everyone! We can do all things thru Christ! Stay encouraged! I have decided to find what we are doing next year and stick with it!! Because of that decision, I will be limiting myself to this forum only!! I am officially breaking up with homeschool blogs, Pinterest, and homeschool emails!!
May 10, 2016 at 6:51 pm
Tristan
Participant
Really fun thread!
We don’t do Shakespeare until high school unless a child asks. No Plutarch. And unless the child is a high schooler science is likely the first thing I drop when we’re needing breathing room. It’s just one of those subjects that exposure is nice in the elementary years and middle school we try to be more consistent, but we can go a month at a time with no science and then do it every single day for a month. Times and seasons!
Also, I use a dvd to distract my little boys when I’m teaching new math lessons on Mondays. We are all happier for it because really, teaching 5 levels of math at a time takes about every bit of my patience and so I need that hour without wondering what the little guys are making a mess with.

May 10, 2016 at 7:16 pm
my3boys
Participant
Foreign language, unless you count the sign language class that my ds takes (my oldest took ASL for two years, I think), isn’t happenin’. And unless they can do it themselves, it never will 🙂
Composer is on the back burner, may pull it out again soon, but I’m not sure about that. We used to do so well with it but not so much right now.
Handicrafts, well, that’s not really “scheduled” as much as it may just happen by accident. We’re going to change that up a bit soon, tho, I think.
We love Shakespeare and Plutarch but didn’t begin them as early as I would’ve liked. Love Nature Study…my boys beg for it.
I’m sure there are plenty more where those came from 🙁
May 10, 2016 at 8:36 pm
KMHStore
Participant
Well although I love everything I read about CM, we have spent our year just doing skills work: phonics, math and handwriting. We paint and do crafts daily but have never done an artist study. I love music, took piano for 12 years and sang in a choir for 12 years but we rarely even listen to music, much less do a composer study or learn hymns. No poetry. No memorization. No nature study.
We have good bones in place. Bible story is always first. Then the 3 skills – short and sweet. And lots of time spent outdoors. But the idea of adding everything else is overwhelming!!
Planning is easy. Implementation is hard…….. Maybe I should just add one extra at a time and get used to doing it weekly before adding another, and build in layers.
May 10, 2016 at 9:00 pm
SowingLittleSeeds
Participant
While I try to point out some sort of nature observation to my children every day, we only actually get out our nature journals to draw/paint once or twice a year.
I do we don’t do actual mapwork, we just do some drill at the maps all together about once a month.
I’m a schedule/planning junkie. I just love making schedules – even for other people. If you need help with a schedule I can have one all planned and color coded in a snap but ask me 2 weeks later how I’m doing sticking to my plans and I will either make excuses or try and change the subject.
I have never had success teaching reading the CM way. With every one of my 4 older kids I have ended up using a phonics workbook (explode the code) and Alpha-Phonics and some easy readers. Very non-CM.
Sometimes we skip school so that I can sleep late/take a nap (pretty much the same thing I did through High School – go figure!) or sometimes just so that I can browse forums and blogs for a while.
May 10, 2016 at 9:39 pm
Des
Participant
wow, I’ve found my herd at last! Thank you ladies for being so real in this post. I found Lies homeschooling moms believe today at half price books and I’ve been reading it so this post is really resonating with me. We’ve only done one life of Plutarch in all the time I’ve been homeschooling. I have managed to do Shakespeare only because I was teaching it in a co o class, I too own the 6-volume set and have not been able to make it through a whole book. No nature study, composer or artist study has been done and I really like the CC memory work, when I remember to do it, lol.
May 10, 2016 at 11:31 pm
Regan
Participant
I think this thread is awesome! This is our first year doing Charlotte Mason anything…lol! I had planned to do Tapestry of Grace and was comparing it to MFW (My Fathers World), then while searching online, I came across SCM and it really resonated with me! The next week, I was sitting in a class listening to Sonya at the Honeschool convention in Birmingham, AL. We haven’t done any picture study, composer study or hymn study this year, although I have ordered all 3 for next year :). I bought some wonderful nature journals and we went on an adventure in the outdoors with a bag full of our journals and colored pencils! As everyone was getting settled and deciding what tree each one wanted to draw, my 3 younger kids were squilling with delight and rolling around on the ground in the leaves! Then my newly potty trained child announced he needed to go to the bathroom! Ha ha! At the time, I had a 3 year, 2 year old and a 1 year! I have discovered all those fun extras are so lovely in my head, but with littles, there are interruptions, distractions and life happens :). Needless to say, we have only done our nature journals a few times all year! No clue who Plutarch is, although I’m sure he’s lovely! Is he a he? Lol. Anyhow, my mom was a high school English/Lit teacher and loves Shakespeare! I never cared for any of Shakespeare’s plays! I figured there was something wrong with me, lol! I have a child with Autism who I am still learning how to best teach her! My son seems to be a right-brainer, like me and has to understand the whole before the parts! He is getting hung up on some Math stuff! Explaining something to someone who thinks so much like me is harder than I though! This year I did a homemade planner and did handwritten lesson plans! Glory, I need something with more flexibility so we can just do the next thing! We are all learning and growing, including me :). The good news is everyone is thriving and we get to apply what we have learned and do it all over again next year:). Whew!!!
May 11, 2016 at 6:28 am
Melanie32
Participant
I have loved reading this thread!
I confess that my kids read twaddle as well. When they were little I provided stacks of books for them to choose from but as they’ve grown older, they often choose twaddle based on a friend’s recommendation or hearing about a popular book. I do make sure all of our school books are living books and that they spend time reading from classics each day.
My kids also play video games. If I had my way, there wouldn’t even be televisions in our home, much less video games, but that’s just not the world I live in. Though I am an idealist, my hubby doesn’t share my extreme views. 😉
Des-I’m so glad to hear that I’m not the only one who doesn’t care for Shakespeare!
My daughter way prefers Plutarch to Shakespeare so we are going to be reading more of Plutarch’s Lives and less of Shakespeare.
For the record, Plutarch was a man who lived long ago and wrote stories of the lives of famous Romans and Greeks. Charlotte Mason had her students read one life from Plutarch each term for citizenship. She was a big fan.
SowingLittleSeeds-I am a scheduling/planning junkie as well! It’s so much fun to make a new schedule and I love planning out each year even though nothing ever goes as planned and I end up chucking the schedule and plan pretty quickly! The only planning that really works for me is weekly planning, and a schedule? Forget it! We have certainly settled into a routine over the years but tight schedules just don’t work in our home!
We’ve never been consistent with any kind of memory work. To be honest, we really haven’t even tried! I find rote memory work incredibly dull for the most part. We do memorize scripture but were never super consistent with it either until we started using the SCM method a couple of years ago. I do love Sonya’s method! I am so pleased with how much scripture we have memorized and actually retained! I highly recommend it!

May 11, 2016 at 6:58 am
Melanie32
Participant
I did want to add that I’m certainly not recommending my way of doing things, or not doing things I should say! I think the feast that Charlotte Mason sets before us is more than worthy of partaking of each and every day. I just thought it would be fun to be transparent and share the truth that not one of us has it all together and is able to do every thing exactly as Charlotte recommended.
I especially wish we could have been more in line with her teachings on nature study. The idea has always seemed so wonderful to me! However, the implication has just never matched up with the idea! I really think that I will keep a lovely nature book when I am done homeschooling and have more time for gardening and bird watching and the like. I just adore The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and would love to create something similar of my own.
May 11, 2016 at 7:35 am
Melanie32
Participant
Oops! I meant implementation not implication!!