Last time I shared with you some of the ways that my approach to homeschooling differs from Charlotte Mason’s. Those were my exceptions to her philosophy; most of what she suggests I am on board with. I am no purist, however, and I think we all adapt in some ways to what works best for our families. Today I’d like to go through subject by subject and share how we have done things. This is somewhat of an idealized version. Sometimes it is what we actually did and sometimes it is how I would do it if I could do it all over again. While I have used materials from various publishers at times, I have always put together my own thing rather than using a set curriculum. [There is nothing wrong with using a curriculum, of course (see here for what CM curricula are available). It is really just that I am bad at following other people’s directions and I would end up tweaking anything I used anyway.]
If you are transitioning to CM or even just getting started with littles, don’t feel like you have to do everything at once. See also this Getting Started with CM post on how to wade rather than dive in.
Structuring the Day & Year
Before getting into specific subjects, it is probably helpful to know how we structured our day. When they were little, every school day (4 or 5 days a week) started with our “together time” when we would all sit together on the floor and do certain subjects, well, together. This would usually include what is called in CM circles the extras or the riches — picture study, music study, poetry, etc. as well as some core subjects like nature lore and history. We would always begin this time with prayer and some sort of Bible or theology study (see below). Not every subject is done every day. Usually history and science/nature would alternate so they would each be 2-3 times per week and art/music/poetry/etc. would alternate so they are all only once a week. I would also try to alternate kinds of work so they don’t for instance have to listen to me read a book twice in a row. I never required my kids to sit up (I have often wondered if homeschoolers grow up with weak spines for lack of desks) and I would allow them to fiddle with quiet toys, I found some concentrated better with things in their hands and some found anything like that a distraction.
After our time together, they would have their individual subjects. When they were younger, I just told them what to do. Usually there was a standard sequence like do your math first, then your history reading, and so on. Again alternating kinds of subjects is good. As they got older I had schedules for them. I tried this various ways but we settled on a sheet that tells them what to do for each day (see pic). They didn’t like having to flip to different pages to know what to do. Because little ones often had less to do, they would be done earlier and could go play. The early years especially are a good lesson in patience for everyone. There were a lot of times one child would have to wait while another was working with me or narrating to me. There was often a fair degree of chaos when they were little, but it got better and we all survived it.
I always had a hard start time for the school day, usually 8 am, and I would wake up my kids so they would be ready in time. (I did not require chores or other things before school time.) Usually we were all done by lunch time. As they moved into middle and high school they had a lot more flexibility in when they would do their own work though I found 3 out of 4 kids just liked to get it done early and have the rest of the day to themselves.
I would also take advantage of any times they were a captive audience like lunch and time in the car to either read to them or have us listen to audio books. Mostly these were just good fiction books. Some times I tried to tie them to our period of history but it got so my kids were suspicious of historical fiction and would say, “Hey, is this a school book?!” in very distressed, betrayed tones. We kept up audio books until we reached the point when some kids were staying home alone because when one missed part of the story it threw the whole thing off. We kept up lunchtime read-alouds until kids starting having online classes that interfered with lunch time (this was in late high school).
As kids moved into high school, we still kept “together time” at the start of the day as part of our routine but it went down to 2 or 3 days a week. It also got some more interesting subjects, though, like reading Shakespeare’s plays, Homer’s Odyssey, and Calvin’s Institutes.
In terms of the overall school year we have done various things but eventually settled down to three terms a year, one in the fall up till Christmas and two in the spring. When they were little we kept some work going over the summer but that stopped as they got older and had more camps and things.
Narration
Narration is a core part of what we do so it is also worth mentioning upfront. If you are unfamiliar with CM style narration, it is how the child processes and responds to what they have read or heard. Almost every reading is narrated. Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell is excellent for describing what narration is and why it works. Narration fills a lot of roles. It is reading comprehension and composition all in one. Most importantly it is about what the child gets from a reading, not what we think he should get from it. For more, see this post on Synthesizing Ideas.
Narration starts when kids start formal schooling which is age 6. I found, as is often said, that Aesop’s Fables were wonderful texts for first attempts at narration. It starts orally and around age 8 or 9 they can start to add in written narrations as well. They are supposed to continue to do some oral narrations even through high school. I found it really varied what I got from my kids. One child just preferred written narrations and by the last years of high school I almost never got an oral one from her. For other kids written narrations were like pulling teeth and while I said once a day in high school I was lucky to get that.
History
History is the core of a Charlotte Mason education (no STEM here; well, we do those subjects, of course, but they are not the backbone). I prefer to start with local history and then to go back and start again at the beginning with ancient history and to move through chronologically. I have no particular allegiance to a 4 or 6 year history cycle. We take however much time we need to get to modern times and then we go back to the beginning. I do try to get some variety in during high school so I can put down that they did both American and world history in those years. I like starting more locally because I think kids can relate more easily to what is near them. It also allows for a lot of field trips in the years when they really enjoy them. As we live in New England, it was very easy for us to start locally since local=early American history.
I keep all my kids at the same place in history. This is easier for me and leads to good discussions at times when one kid hears another narrating and says, “Hey, that guy was in my book too but it said . . . about him.” Often we have had one history book going as a part of our together time (see above). More often than not this would be a “spine book” which gives an overview and chronological narrative of the period we are studying. Then they could read books at their own level on specific events or people from that period or historical fiction related to it. Typically I would say they would have 2 history books going at a time plus the one we are doing together. At other times what we read together might be historical fiction. Everything would be narrated. For the books we did together they would take turns narrating. Since I have four kids this would usually mean I would read four chunks a day and each would get to narrate one. I often geared the size of the chunk to the kid and what I knew he or she could handle. Some times I would take turns narrating and while narrations are usually not corrected they loved to find my mistakes and omissions. I have one child who would occasionally narrate something that had absolutely nothing to do with what was just read — I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING– it was very hard in those situations not to be critical, especially with other kids there to tell him what is wrong with him. I should say here that while narrations should not be interrupted, if there are wrong facts it is good to correct them, but one generally should not tear apart the whole narration as it is about the child’s mental work and not ours.
One big question is how to find books. Early on it is helpful to use booklists (my history booklists are here btw). I used Truthquest for a number of years. It is not cheap but it is the most comprehensive bibliography you will see. (I didn’t use their questions, just the list.) You can also look at many of the CM curricula to see what books they use. I found it helpful to search my library’s online catalog and then to sort to see the oldest books first. I would check out a stack, thumb through them to decide which seemed the most living, and return the others. Over time I found go-to authors I liked and could skip a lot of the lists.
Science
If anything I regret trying to do too much with my kids when they were little. I wish I had been more relaxed and enjoyed our time more. Here is how I did (or would have done) science by age:
Elementary: Part 1: Go for nature walks. Spend lots of time outside. Maybe keep nature journals. We did a family one when my kids were little for cool things we saw together like rare birds. My older kids still like to look back at it and can remember the experiences. A few things I learned: If you want to observe nature, going with other families doesn’t help. Having friends there is a complete distraction. Walking too much on a nature walk doesn’t help either. There is a time for a good walk in the woods, but to observe things slow or even still is better. “Nature walk” is really a misnomer. Think of it more as a nature sit. Going back to the same places over the course of a year is a wonderful practice as you can see how the flora and fauna change seasonally.
Part 2: Read nature lore. These are books that describe nature in various ways, sometimes fiction, sometimes one person’s experiences. Narrate them. We always did these together at the elementary level.
I think sometimes there is a misconception that science experiments are not CM. They are not a big organized part of the curriculum until high school, but she was all for fun experiments with household products so make those baking soda and vinegar volcanoes, people. [See “The Teaching of Nature Study,” by V.C. Curry from The Parents Review (1925).]
Middle school: More of the same but I tended to pick a topic for a term to focus on for our reading. Good topics include: geology, meteorology, astronomy and the like. (See my science booklists here.) If you want to get into more traditional science subjects like biology and chemistry, Tiner’s books are nice for this age. Ignore the end of chapter questions; just have them read and narrate.
High School: After a brief foray into trying something more traditional, we decided we still liked living books for high school science. Living doesn’t necessarily mean easy. The good news is at this age there are a lot of engaging books written for adults that they can use. I generally did 9th grade biology, 10th grade chemistry, 11th grade physics, 12th grade pick what you want to do. One child did meteorology, one did geology, one will likely do environmental science, and the fourth already knows she wants to do an in-depth nature study. I know some people do the main subjects (bio, chem, physics) all at once spreading them out over three or four years. I like that idea too and might try it if Providence sends me four more kids. I always added in hands-on labs for high school. Colleges like to see lab sciences (see this post on applying to college as a CM homeschooler). My preference is to outsource them to someone else but once I led a local group in doing biology labs and now we have a pandemic so it is harder to find things.
Math
I came to CM when my oldest was 8 or 9 and we already had something going with math. Our transition was gradual and it was a while before I even thought of trying to do math in a more CM way. There were also fewer CM math curricula out there in those days. I did look at one seriously once but decided that as it would require me to have sit-down time daily with each of four kids that it was just not going to happen. If I had to do it all over again, I am pretty sure I would make the same decision. When my kids were in elementary years we used Math-U-See (MUS) and I would use it again. I will say we didn’t always use it according to manufacturer’s directions. We didn’t use the videos and I often had my kids do just a few problems out of each set. This was especially true for long-division. If they could get 2 or 3 problems correct, I wasn’t going to make them labor through more. At some point we added in the Life of Fred (LOF) elementary books. I would also do this again. My kids are close in age so it worked well to read them the chapters and do the exercises aloud together. I would not use LOF as a stand alone curriculum in elementary though the author says you can.
Once you hit upper elementary/middle school LOF gets more substantial with more practice problems so starting with the fractions book you could use it alone. I like the LOF pre-algebra books too though they have multiplied and it is a lot to do them all for a subject that frankly doesn’t even need to be a subject. I do like that they introduce economics and physics (and one more subject, I think?).
We did various things for high school math depending on the child and their abilities. My oldest used LOF right through (he is now a math major in college). My second, who is in art school, could just not learn math from LOF though she liked the stories. She ended up using a number of different resources including MUS and Teaching Textbooks, each of which has their value. My favorite approach is what I did with my 3rd and 4th which was to use Ray’s algebra and to sit with them and do it together. I did edit some as I went. We did algebra at the same time as geometry, a few days a week each, but spent two years on that schedule. I really liked that too. We used Ray’s geometry too though I was less enamored of that so if I had to do it again I might use LOF or MUS for that. Algebra 2 can also be done alongside Trigonometry in this way. My second two used LOF for trig. My oldest did LOF calculus but for others we have found other avenues. I do think if you want them to do an AP test, you should use an AP course. That is true for any subject. Official AP courses (which have to be licensed by the College Board) give invaluable tips on how to navigate the actual test. (Again see this post on high school and applying to college.) Multiple children ended up doing AP statistics senior year through an online provider. Though I might not use it again, I would also give a shout out to Teaching Textbooks which got my artsy child through algebra 2 as pain free as possible (she would say it still involved a fair amount of pain).
We also occasionally added in living books for math which the child read and narrated. See the list in this post. I also had them use LOF’s Financial Choices in high school.
Literature, Literary Analysis, Fiction, Living Books
We have read so many books over the years we have been homeschooling and many have been real treasures. There are a lot of good books out there. There is also a lot of junk. My very general advice is to not waste time on the junk. You may begin with little sense of what a good, well-written, living book is, but you will develop a taste for it. Your kids will too. After we had finished a long Dickens novel (pardon my redundancy) during our lunch read-alouds, I chose something shorter to give my kids’ brains a break. My older daughter told me whatever the new book was was badly written and that we should just stick with Dickens.
If you are beginning and don’t have a feel for what is good yet, there are lots of books and lists out there that will point you in the right direction (I have booklists for fiction here). Whether to give up on a book that is just not doing it for you is a tough question. If you are experienced and really think you have a feel for what is living and you don’t like a book, I’d say drop it. But if you are newer it might be worth persisting a little, especially if you have it on good authority that the book you are attempting is worthwhile. It’s a bit like getting kids to eat vegetables; there needs to be a little persistence till they develop a taste for them. Once they eat a good variety, if they really just can’t stand broccoli, it is okay for them to skip that one. For general tips on identifying and selecting living books, see this post (if you are in a hurry, scroll to the bullet points at the end) and this one. FYI all the books you use should be living books, not just the fiction ones. Living does not mean fiction. It means well-written books that convey ideas and not just information.
Some of the books we read at lunch or listened to in the car were certainly literature (like that Dickens), but we also made time as part of the school day for literature as a subject. I went back and forth on whether literature was coordinated with history. I don’t think there is one right answer here. It depends on what period you are studying and the ages of your kids. It makes more sense to coordinate lit and history for older kids and also for some periods like 20th century American history. Just to be clear, I am not talking about historical fiction here. There is a place for that too, but I am primarily thinking of books that were written at the time period one is studying, eg. The Great Gatsby for the 1920s (it is, of course, also about the 1920s). As kids get older, there is also a place for reading books about a time period specifically with an eye to seeing how later people portrayed that period. A good example for this is Gone with the Wind. It shows a particular picture of the pre-Civil War South which is ripe for discussion.
Generally, in a CM education there is not much time if any devoted to what we might call literary analysis. Kids read a lot of books and the idea is that they will develop a feel for them and they do not need instruction in how to read literature and that it can even be dangerous as it tends to tear books apart and make them less enjoyable. Having said which, we did do some literary analysis and I would do it again. Starting around middle school we did some studies based on the book Deconstructing Penguins which is the story of a library book club. It uses mostly easier books (like Mr. Popper’s Penguins) and I think that is very helpful. The child is not trying to understand the book; they can just focus on discussing it. The book is not a step-by-step guide but I found it pretty easy to lead a discussion with my kids based on it. I read the book aloud to them all, chapter by chapter, over a period of weeks without any discussion and then at the end of each book we discussed it as a whole. Along the way you will introduce concepts like setting, climax, protagonist, and antagonist. A big part of what I like about this and why I feel the need to add it to a traditional CM education is that it helps one think about the author’s point of view and what message they are trying to get across. This was probably true in Mason’s time as well, but it seems everyone has an angle these days. They may be trying to convince you of something or they may just be coming from a very different worldview. What we learn about reading books can carry over into other areas of life as well. You can read about what we did in these posts: Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Charlotte’s Web, Babe, Bull Run, Animal Farm, Lost Horizon.
In high school, I introduce a little more intentional literature study. I have done this in slightly different ways but generally I have had my kids look at American poetry, short stories, and essays in grade 9 and American novels in grade 10. I have them read a work in its entirety (without narrating it) and then do an essay on it. I have sometimes used Great Courses lectures after the essay is done to give another perspective on the book as well (but preview; some of their series contain adult content where you might not expect it). You can see examples of what we did in these posts: American poets, Short stories and essays, American novels. In 12th grade, I let my oldest two pick a kind of fiction to study. My oldest chose Sci-Fi and my second one chose short stories.
We also did one year in high school of “movies as literature” using Grant Horner’s Meaning at the Movies. Horner is a Christian and discusses movies genre by genre and talks about the creator’s intent and what worldviews they are communicating and how they show an innate knowledge of God even if they don’t have faith. I highly recommend the book and it is easy to read, discuss, and watch a movie for each section. Again, the ability to distinguish another’s worldview, to see where they are coming from, is a valuable lesson that will carry over into other areas of life.
Language Arts
Language arts is a huge umbrella. Traditional schooling separates it into discrete subjects like spelling and grammar. CM teaches the same material but through broad techniques like narration and dictation. For more on how it all fits together and works see this post.
Reading
I came to CM’s methods when my oldest was 8 or 9. My oldest two were certainly reading by then and the third may have been as well (I can’t remember the exact timing). I never really looked into CM reading methods. Honestly, if I had to do it all again I would probably not change anything. We used a couple of things but I liked The Reading Lesson best. At the time I used it it was a free pdf book. I think it may have added some bells and whistles since. We also read Bob Books which we loved. After the basic reading instruction, it is really just about finding them new books that challenge them more, little by little. Reading does not have to be a big, ongoing subject and you don’t need special readers that teach it. Some early readers that are also good living books include Arnold Lobel’s books, the Cobblestreet Cousins and Lighthouse Family series by Cynthia Rylant (I don’t like her other series as much), and Thornton Burgess’s shorter books with titles like “The Tale of . . .” The latter are very easy chapter books with nice short chapters. For slightly longer chapter books we liked Dick King-Smith’s books. He has lots about animals.
Handwriting, Copywork, and Dictation
In terms of initially teaching kids to write, we used Handwriting without Tears and it worked pretty well. After that, one moves into copywork. There are many resources out there for copywork and later dictation. I don’t have strong preferences. I never found anything that I thought was the best resource for such things. If I had to pick one again now, I would probably go with Simply Charlotte Mason’s Spelling Wisdom.
As kids get older, they move from copywork, in which a passage is in front of them, to dictation, in which you read to them a passage that they have prepared. (Some people talk of transcription as an intermediate stage; transcription is copying a passage from one piece of paper to another so that one has to look back and forth and naturally starts to remember longer and longer chunks). I found that kids did much better when I let them pick their own dictation passages from books they were reading. When they did so, they had a connection to the passage that made them enjoy it much more. This is probably not strictly CM, but I would have them pick a passage to copy maybe 2 or 3 times a week and then once a week I would pick one of those passages to use for their dictation. Actual dictation was done just once a week. We weren’t rigid in methods but I would encourage them to look over the passage ahead of time and to notice anything that might be unusual in terms of spelling or punctuation. Some times I would point things out to them. Often we would discuss why something was the way it was.
Spelling
In a perfect CM world, spelling is taught through copywork and dictation. This allows the child to see words in context. What I have observed with my children is that my visual learner was naturally an excellent speller but that the others had more struggles. We used a couple of spelling curricula over the years not so much as an intentional rejection of CM’s methods on this but because it was one of those subjects for which we transitioned more slowly to CM’s methods. If I had to do it again, I would probably give copywork and dictation a chance to work, but if I had a child who really struggled with spelling I would also not be opposed to using a spelling curriculum with them for a couple of years. One we used which I would use again is Spelling Power. In one way it is very non-CM in that it has spelling tests daily. In another way I think it can combine with CM methods in that that it gives kids steps to go through to help them visualize words. These steps can be tools they then take back to their copywork and dictation to help them remember words that they think would be a problem for them. Spelling Power groups words by rules and tells you those rules at the top of the section. They are not complicated rules but along the lines of “shun can be spelled -tion, -sion, or -cian.” The options are given in the order of their frequency. Once these rules have been introduced to a child, you can also refer to them in the future as in: “Physician is a tough word. You remembered that that shun sound is usually -tion, but here it is the more rare -cian.” I read the book The Logic of English for myself. I have not used their curriculum, but I found the book very helpful for me to help me understand why some words are spelled they way they are. This gave me tools to help me explain unusual spellings to my kids. Older kids could also read the book themselves.
Grammar
Both CM and modern theories of child development say that kids are not ready for grammar till around middle school age. All the formal grammar they need to know can then be taught to them in a year or two at the middle or high school level. My preferred grammar curriculum is KISS Grammar which is free online. The website is a little hard to navigate so I created this document to help on that end. What I like about KISS grammar is that it takes a functional approach. That is, it looks at how words are used rather than starting with parts of speech (which ends up being very confusing in English anyway). I have read some articles by the creator and his goal is very much to create a grammar curriculum which actually improves students’ writing (he is a university professor so I guess he has a personal interest in this as well). KISS also uses sentences from real books, from fairytales to Dickens, in all its exercises. It can be done together as a family as well. We often did this. If there were a new concept I would introduce that briefly (which is all KISS requires) and then we would look at a few sentences together. Because it is one overall sequence, it is very easy to use with multiple ages. Though you don’t need formal grammar till middle school, you can start KISS in grade 2 so that helps if you have kids of multiple ages as well.
Writing
We never do writing as a separate subject. Until high school their writing comes in the form of written narrations (which start around age 8-10) and end of term exams (see below). If a child wants to write and/or do creative writing on their own, that is fabulous, but it is not something I required. Often thinking of what to write can be the hardest part. Some kids are fine with it and for some it is a major source of stress. Narrating something you have read gives you the what and allows you to focus on the writing itself. There are a lot of skills involved in composition and narration allows one to separate those out and to build them gradually. (Again, see Karen Glass’s Know and Tell for much more on this.)
When my kids reach high school age, I introduce the idea of a five-paragraph essay. This takes at most five minutes. It is not a hard concept to grasp. Then I start requiring these of them. I am not terribly strict on the form beyond maybe the first assignment or two. It is more important to me that they have their own style and I found that they usually do. At times I have seen it quite influenced by what they have most recently been reading. They are still writing narrations and end of term exams which are longer works which require them to pull information together. I also assign essays as a part of their literature (see above). Occasionally I require revisions but I try not to make writing too much of a chore. Writing can be very personal and having someone else criticize your words can be hard. We never did a research paper as part of their schoolwork though the idea of citing sources came up in conversation so they knew that you should not use another’s ideas without giving them credit. They often had online classes that required papers with some degree of research. Colleges like to tell all freshman how to cite sources — each college usually has a system it uses — so they will be shown that at the right time.
The Arts
The Arts have never been my strong suit, either in terms of my own abilities or in terms of me fitting them into our schedule regularly. In a perfect world, we would have been doing picture and composer study weekly. We were a little better at the former than the latter. Here are some of the things we did do over the years that at least kind of worked:
Artist/picture study — In a perfect world (and some terms we did this) we would pick an artist and just spend 5 minutes once a week looking at one of their works of art. I do really feel like you can get a feel for an artist this way. Perhaps the simplest form of picture study is to let kids look at the picture for maybe 5 minutes (big prints are helpful for this) and then to turn it away and ask them to “narrate” the picture to you by saying what they remember from it. Because I did not grow up looking at art very much, I found it helpful to have some resources occasionally that directed our attention by pointing out techniques the artist may use like having the figures in a painting all look at one point or constructing a picture in a triangle arrangement. One very good resource we used for this was Adventures in Art from Cornerstone Curriculum (I got it at one point as a free pdf; I believe it is fairly pricey now). It is designed to be used with a number of different approaches including CM. It looks at art from various time periods and does not group things by artist but I don’t think you need to approach it that way every term.
Books on art and music — At times we read biographies of artists and musicians. These ended up feeling tedious after a while. In turns out a lot of artists had dads who wanted them to be lawyers but they bucked tradition and, lo and behold, became famous artists or composers. For something quick and fun (and silly) I do like Mike Venezia’s biographies (he has them of presidents too). There are some nice picture books on artists too (see this booklist).
For art history I highly recommend V.M. Hillyer’s Child’s History of Art. It comes as either one complete volume or three separate ones on painting, architecture, and sculpture. For older kids Van Loon’s history of art is also good. My older daughter (who went on to art school), did an art history course specifically which you can read about here. For older kids Sister Wendy’s art videos are also good (they can a little risque).
Music — If I know little about art, I know even less about music. What music study we did was when my kids were littler. We used some CDs made for kids that play bits of classical music and put words to them. This is probably not very CM but to this day they remember those bits of music when they hear them. Again, you can see this post for resources. One nice resource is a radio program called Classics for Kids that you can find here.
Art Instruction — With one child who was just a natural artist, art just seemed to happen in our house. My kids did do some formal instruction or lessons over the years, some more than others. This is something I like to outsource if possible. There are some nice resources for creating art as you learn about it. They may not be very CM but I like MaryAnn Kohl’s books for this.
Hymn study — CM’s approach calls for hymn study, Our church sings only psalms, not hymns, so we did psalm study instead You can read all about that here. Because the Hebrew Bible is my area of expertise, we were able to do more with this. You could also just pick a psalm and read through it and discuss it. Most of these things don’t have to be fancy.
Poetry
Poetry is really pretty simple. Once a week (in a perfect world, but certainly no more often) we read a poem and maybe talk about it a little. Sometimes we have picked a poet and stuck with him or her for a bit; sometimes we have gone through books of favorite poems and just done what is next. When we have done one poet, I found a 12 week term was just too long. We might spend 3 weeks on one poet and then move on. Discussions are open-ended — Did you like this poem? What did you like about it? What was happening in this poem? In high school I do tend to assign some poetry with questions that introduce more literary ideas. You can read about that here. We were never terribly consistent on memorization of anything but my kids also chose poems to memorize some terms. I usually gave them some degree of leeway in their choice. Occasionally we read a longer poem, the kind that takes more than one sitting to read. Some we did were Reynard the Fox, the Fairie Queen, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As a side note, one of our favorite fun series is MaryAnn Wood’s Incorrigibles. The children in the book learn many poems from their governess and this got my kids interested in certain poems, like Poe’s “Raven,” as well. Another series that gets kids interested in such things is Lois Lowry’s Goonie Bird Greene series. NEW: Find my booklist for poetry here.
Drama, including Shakespeare
My firm conviction on Shakespeare is that his plays are meant to be seen. Also it helps to know what is happening before you see the play. We started reading narrative versions of Shakespeare plays when my kids were in elementary school (Lamb and Nesbit are two good authors to look for). This would be one of those subjects that alternates with others like poetry and music and doesn’t get done more than once a week. Though the narrative versions are short, we would read them over a number of weeks in very small chunks. Usually there is a lot of plot even in a small passage. We often kept lists of characters and who they are and their relationships to help us keep them straight. My kids loved these stories at this age. There are a lot of crazy mix-ups and my kids always ate that up. For a while we also used the books How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare which also lends itself to having them memorize some portions. This book is very helpful for adults who are Shakespeare-shy to help them appreciate and understand the language.
Starting around middle school (probably when my youngest was in middle school) we began to read Shakespeare plays aloud. I would intentionally assign smaller parts to younger kids or those worse at reading aloud. A play would usually take a term to read, reading it maybe twice a week. Then if at all possible we would see a live performance. Movies are a second choice but live is much better. In fact, we often picked which play to read based on what would be available near us.
Which plays to pick? They actually vary a lot (though some plot devices get reused a fair amount too). Titus Andronicus which my kids insisted on reading is the slasher film of Shakespeare plays. My kids loved it. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often one people start with with younger kids. Some parents object to the fantasy aspects in this one. Romeo and Juliet seems like a must do but I just always want to slap those teens upside the head. My problem with Romeo and Juliet is that the teens are too much like real life teens. The big names really do tend to be the best: Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing. I wasn’t crazy about All’s Well that Ends Well and As You Like It. Some of the others like Coriolanus, The Tempest, Comedy of Errors, and King Lear are in the middle for me. In recent years we have been working our way through some of the plays about England’s history. We like Falstaff but overall they are not my favorites (thus far).
Not through any design of my own my kids ended up reading plays with a local group. Another mom lead and they would read a play together in one or two sittings and then see a production of it (most live; virtually during COVID). Plays were picked based on the availability of performances. They read and saw a lot of plays this way.
Civics: Plutarch, Government, Economics
Civics is a very broad umbrella. For Mason the study of Plutarch’s lives fills the place of civics in the curriculum. Many of the lives covered are of political leaders and they are also very much geared towards showing how good or bad leaders behave. Plutarch is meant to teach one how to be a good citizen. We did some Plutarch using the readings and guide available at Ambleside Online. I am not a huge fan of Plutarch. I think there is some value there, but I also think there are better things (like Calvin’s Institutes) to spend our time on. A few notes if you do attempt Plutarch: Don’t start too early. The simpler versions for younger kids I found too watered down. I would wait at least until middle school with this. I was reading Plutarch aloud to all my kids together. They were having a tough time with it. I found it went a lot better when I printed out copies for each of them so they could follow along. It uses a lot of paper but it was worth it. Also, there is a lot of variation in the lives and how interesting and/or easy they are so if one is not working for you, maybe try another. The life of Julius Caesar is a good one (and clearly Shakespeare’s source). One plus: Plutarch really helped my one son who took the National Latin Exam with the history/culture portions.
Other subjects that usually come under the civics heading include government and economics. We covered government periodically in the course of our history studies, and then when my children reached high school I had them use The Everything American Government Book which I am not sure is completely living but Ambleside Online uses (and has the readings broken up for you here; we did the 18 week version). Three of my four kids also participated in the iGovern camps run by HSLDA.
For economics we started with the Uncle Eric series but soon discovered that its philosophy was not to our taste. I still had my kids read the first book in the series, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?, but then my husband (who is an economist) chose another one, Lessons for the Young Economist, for them to do after that. This was done in high school in the same year as the government book, one each semester. [The two economics books do actually come from similar perspectives; they are both of the Austrian school of economics, but Lessons takes a more general approach.]
Geography and Current Events
Geography was another one of those subjects that I sometimes managed and which sometimes went by the wayside. Geography in a CM education consists of two parts: map drill and reading about various locales. It can also include physical geography (i.e. studying about land formations, map features, and the like). We used various resources when my kids were younger including Simply Charlotte Masons’ Visits to . . . series (I think we just used one of these). In elementary we used (I think this is the right one) C.C. Long’s Home Geography. Mason herself also has a geography she wrote but I found this redundant after having done Long. Often we just got books about different places and read and narrated them. When my kids were older, they also read some books about navigating and finding one’s way around including Tristan Gooley’s books and Dava Sobel’s Longitude. A word on Holling C. Holling’s books (which one tends to see recommended frequently): I did not find these overly helpful or engaging. We liked the ones on cowboys and Native Americans, but most of them my kids did not connect with until middle school age.
We did some map drill when my kids were in elementary. We probably did not do it in the CM approved way. I never had my kids draw maps of the world, or even the country. We did go through continent by continent and learn the countries as well as learning U.S. states and their capitals. We tried to come up with mnemonics for remembering them and just reviewed until we had each one down. I would print out blank maps of the region we were on for each of my kids. At the time the older ones had to write in the names and the younger ones had the names pre-printed and had to tape them on the right locales. We used a few games and digital resources for geography as well. For the U.S. the Scrambled States of America is a fun game.
When my kids were a bit older, we would occasionally just look at maps of various statistics and briefly discuss why things fell as they did. We also combined geography with current events for a while and would just read a current news story and look at the map and again perhaps discuss why the situation was as it was (eg. is there a resource two nations are fighting over?). Some previous posts on geography which explain a little more are here and here.
Foreign Language
When my kids were little, we did Spanish all together. We used La Clase Divertida curriculum (at the time we had DVDs and even VHS tapes; today I think it is all available online). Though it is not a CM curriculum, I think it lends itself to a CM approach. We skipped most of the worksheets. There are some CM foreign language curricula out there now and if I were doing it all again I would be tempted to try them.
In terms of what languages to learn, I am a fan of whatever works best for you. That means especially whatever you are most likely to stick with. A language you have some connection to is always a good choice — because mom or dad knows it, because you have family that speak it, because it is close to you geographically, because it is just easier to learn. We never did the multiple languages at once thing.
For high school I let my kids pick a language (within reason; I had to be able to find resources for it). For one this meant a private tutor; for the others, online classes. I required at least three years of the high school language (for more on high school to college planning, see this post).
Bible, Theology, Church History
We usually began our time together with prayer and some kind of Bible study. As the kids got older we studied things other than the Bible at this time, including reading through Calvin’s Institutes (over many years) and some theology and/or philosophy books. I don’t think one necessarily needs resources other than the Bible. You can simply read the Scriptures and spend a minute either having them narrate or discussing what you have read. My kids at times also read and narrated theological books I assigned. Church history was not a subject we did constantly, but we did read and narrate books on it at various points. You can find a list of resources for all of these here.
This is one area where I have some mild disagreement with Mason — I do think we are told to teach our children about the Lord, and to do so at every opportunity (Deut. 6:1-9), and so I am a little more deliberate than she would have me be in making sure they understand what they are reading and know the plan of salvation (see this post on where I disagree with Mason).
Quite a lot of learning in this area also comes from non-school time. For brief periods I assigned my kids specific Bible reading to try and get them in the habit. This was not narrated in any way but was for their own benefit. But after a while I trusted them to have their own time of Bible reading and prayer. Weekly church attendance, participating in church Bible studies (with all ages, preferably), Sunday school, and family worship are all part of their religious education. I don’t think enough can be said either about just sharing your own life and faith with them as a part of everyday life and conversation.
Philosophy
I tried to introduce philosophy beginning in middle or high school. My goal was to give them a sense of the viewpoints that are out there, how to recognize them, and how to evaluate them. It was not to give them a thorough grounding in classical philosophy. We used a number of resources over the years. Some are included in my theology list (above) and some are mentioned in this post on political philosophy (this was a one year class my oldest chose to do). I particularly found books that teach one to discern the worldview behind various media to be helpful. We covered some of this when we did literature based on Deconstructing Penguins and more when we did movies along with Grant Horner’s book Meaning at the Movies (for both, see “literature” above).
Technology
I left technological considerations to my husband. He started the kids out learning turtle (do you remember that little guy from the ’80s? He is a small triangle that you have to program to give commands and make him move in certain ways). They then used a book called Hello, World and finally moved on to learning Java.
Physical Education
Charlotte Mason used something called Swedish drill in her schools. I have seen references to this in other books and it seems to have been something of a movement at the time (i.e. it was not unique to Mason). It is a kind of calisthenics but with deliberate movements designed to build good habits of observation and control. Personally, I never got very far with Swedish drill but of you want to look into it, Brandy at AfterThoughts Blog has some resources on it.
My children got physical exercise through some combination of ordinary life and classes they took at local places like the Y and a local gymnastics academy. These things varied over the years according to their personal interests. We did do some exercises as a part of our together time when they were young. These were as much to vary their activity and to get the wiggles out as anything else. I had a set of cards called Fit Deck Junior which has individual exercises on them and would let the kids take turns picking them at random to see what we would do that day. The exercises are things like a crab walk and jumping jacks.
Handicrafts
This is another aspect of a typical CM education that we were never good at getting in in a formal way. On the other hand, there were always a lot — and I mean a lot — of crafts happening in our house. Handicrafts in a CM education are not integrated with the curriculum per se. There are no dioramas showing how Native Americans lived or Styrofoam ball models of the solar system. Personally, though I enjoy crafts, I am very glad for this. I find doing crafts as part of the curriculum very fiddly and distracting and I can never get my act together for it. But we always had lots of craft supplies around. At times we outsourced arts and crafts classes (eg. pottery). I do really like the CM idea that crafts should be practical, i.e. that one should make things that are actually useful. With four kids, the house very quickly gets filled up with things that have been made and sit around with no purpose and yet can’t be thrown away. There is only so much one can give to the grandparents. Crafts we did over the years include: pottery, working with polymer clay, making folded paper suncatchers, knitting and crochet, sewing, felting, origami, twirling, paper mache, paper making, tie dye, painting and decorating glass, cross-stitch and plastic canvas, mosaics, basket weaving, jewelry making, friendship bracelets, quilting, scrapbooking, calligraphy, wood burning and wood carving, soap carving, and candle making.
CM also includes something known as paper sloyd which is kind of like origami but more deliberate and is supposed to contribute to geometrical understanding and again to attention to detail and direction following. We never did paper sloyd. Honestly my kids are just not that good at following directions. We are a lot more freeform in our crafting. You can see some examples of paper sloyd and a link to a book with directions at Crossing the Brandywine.
Exams
We did not initially do exams but over time I introduced them and I actually find them quite a valuable part of the educational experience. My kids tend to like exam week. We do a three-term school year so three times a year, every 12 weeks or so, we have an exam week. During this week they do not do their usual work but for every subject or every book that have done that term, they are given an exam assignment. When they were younger, I told them what to do on what day but as they aged I would just give them a list and let them do the things in whatever order they chose. For subjects like grammar and math, the exam would be akin to a traditional test with a page of problems reviewing the range of what they had learned that term. For most subjects, they would be given an essay type assignment for every book they had read. I tried to give choices for exam questions and to keep them open-ended. If a child really had no idea what to write, they could come to me so we could try to talk through the topic together before they wrote and/or they could suggest another topic. The point is not for me to evaluate them but for them to further integrate the knowledge they had gained that term. This is also a time when their writing skills are called on a bit more as I expect, at least with older children, a decently written essay. I found I had to give my kids lengths of what I expected for each assignment. I did not grade these exams (except perhaps math ones) but would offer some degree of verbal feedback. I might occasionally ask for a rewrite from an older child if they handed me something clearly unedited or very poorly edited, but this is not meant to be a time for criticism. Again, exams are for the child’s benefit, not mine. Below are some pics of exam sheets for my high schoolers.
Pursuing Individual Interests
Despite common misconceptions, CM is not an interest-led kind of learning (see this post). The idea is to spread a broad feast and to give children what they need, not necessarily what they want. Yet we did find lots of time for kids to do and study things they were interested in. Sometimes this was done outside of the formal school curriculum; sometimes it was included in what we did. I often geared what we did to an interest I knew one child had. For example, I have one who loves birds so that might be something we spend more of our nature lore time on (and all children would have to participate, not just the one who is most interested). I might gear the particular books they read on a broader subject to their interests — eg. we are all studying the Gilded Age but the child who is into art reads a book on the art of that era. When they got to high school, I usually let them pick some of their classes. I would say they need a literature or a science class but they would pick the specific subject. I did this particularly in their senior year but also occasionally before that. They might also pick elective classes, either through an online provider or that I prepared for them. Classes that kids ended up doing include: science fiction, short stories, constitutional law, meteorology, environmental science, diseases, art history, AP art history, AP music theory, the history of country music, Hamlet, and political philosophy.
I think I have covered every subject but I am sure there is more that can be said. Feel free to comment or to contact me if you want any clarifications or have further questions.
Letters from Nebby 