Hi Erin,
Have you heard the story of the boy who wanted to grow potatoes but kept digging them to check their growth, hence hampering the end results? So often I feel that is my experience with a Charlotte Mason education, especially now that I have a child in high school. I have been thinking a lot about these things as I plan out our home school.
Literary analysis wasn’t exactly taught through a neat class or textbook in her schools. Each term, Charlotte’s students sat down to an incredibly generous feast of literature and poetry, much of which was ancillary to their history studies, though not all. A term could include a reading of essays, poetry (including contemporary poetry), fables, Shakespeare, an ancient epic and a historical novel -and we can also include Plutarch, which was read for Citizenship, along with the reading in the other subjects. Narration, oral and some written summaries, were performed by the students and, as they got older, they added written narrations done in blank verse, ballad, dialogue, etc.. Charlotte tells us readings were with attention and concentration thus the students had “perfect recollection and just application.”
In about our seventh grade, Charlotte’s students began “History of English Literature” or “English Literature for Boys and Girls” by H.E. Marshall. This is really quite an amazing book and gives name to things like blank verse, sonnet, essay, lyric writing, tragedy, novel, etc. The pages read coordinated with the time of the history being studied just as the literature, for the most part, did as well, so the students were given “a sense of the spaciousness of the days.” In this English Lit. book, we meet some specific literary criticism, which students would gain a more intimate acquaintance with in high school by reading Carlyle’s Essay on Burns, or Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books.
Teachers also gave some small object lessons. So, say, if your high schooler were going to be reading Kipling this term, you could talk about what a ballad is (which he would have met in the reading of Marshall, perhaps in 7th or 8th grade), he would then hear examples of ballads by Kipling, would choose a poem for recitation, and then later you could ask for a narration from a different subject’s reading to be done in ballad meter. Since your child has been hearing, reading and reciting poetry since childhood in a CM education, he may now make the connection with ballads he’d heard and recited when you studied Dickinson, Tennyson, or Longfellow.
Anyhow, this is getting long and I’m really just thinking aloud. The information can be found in SCM’s “Hearing and Reading, Telling and Writing” along with other of their resources and blog posts. It can be had firsthand from Charlotte Mason’s “A Philosophy of Education” under The Curriculum, ‘Knowledge of Man.’
If I’ve made it sound difficult, I apologize as it isn’t. The resources SCM puts out now weren’t all there when my kids were in the lower grades but just having the original Family Studies ensured much of it played out in their younger years. Matching the time period of history with literature, poetry, composer, and artist; adding in “English Literature for Boys and Girls” at about seventh grade and up; varying written narrations to include forms met; not including the writing of essays until the students have carefully read some of the famous literary essays in high school; these are all simple methods found in that idea of a Charlotte Mason education. I’m seeing that since I didn’t dig up my potatoes in those earlier grades, I’m seeing real signs of their growth now.
Warmly,
Richele
