Real Living Life Blog
Ties That Bind
For a girl from Nebraska not accustomed to spanning wide bodies of water on a suspension bridge, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge a few years ago was, to say the least, thrilling. In Nebraska most of our water ways are crossed by a mere heave-ho and a jump. Before this ride across the Golden Gate, my only encounter with this bridge was through…
Nature Journals For the Long Haul
Often the words charming, delightful, reverent, joyful, peaceful, even sacred accompany descriptions of Nature Journaling in a Charlotte Mason Education. Bright walks, invigorating fresh air, beauty for every eye with subject matter abounding, is bound to make for refreshment and mind feeding. Take, for example, this quote from Charlotte Mason, “As soon as he is…
Definitely a Workable Time
Charlotte Mason always gives us a gentle way to handle our home learning quandaries- and, for that matter, our life. Sometimes it takes thought, time and stretching to find, but it is there if we interrupt our habits, cease our incessant march, and get outside our normal box to bring in fresh Living Ideas. One quandary…
Crafting a Charlotte Mason Education
It has helped me to use this process to develop my children’s Charlotte Mason Education. For this type of education, it is important to know what subjects to do and how to do the subjects in a Charlotte Mason way. Sounds easy, but it is often easier said than done. This is the step-by-step…
Subject List for Form 1a
This is taken pretty directly from CM, I added Service Projects and Handiwork (chores). The items with * are things that we do during Together Time (the whole family). Form 1a= age 7-9 / grade 2-3 Bible *-Old Testament-New Testament Literature-imagination stories like fables, fairy tales, and legends-poetry (read)* History-own country-charts of the lives of…
CM Craftsmanship
Using a Living Charlotte Mason Education is a craft. To implement it, we approach learning in our homes as a craftsman would approach his medium. I’m using the definition of the word craft as in making something, forming something – not the other definitions as crafty being deceitful or a craft as in a…
First Reading Lessons coming this fall -UPDATE They’re Here!
“—but grant it, who in the world could get through all the pasting and cutting and general messing preparatory to the great lesson? No; the method of the books may be only second-best, but ready-made books must do for me. I have no time to make my own apparatus.” I must own that the…
It Happens Every Day
“A Basis of Facts.—Of the teaching of Natural Philosophy, I will only remind the reader of what was said in an earlier chapter—that there is no part of a child’s education more important than that he should lay, by his own observation, a wide basis of facts towards scientific knowledge in the future. He…
What is a Charlotte Mason Education? Questions Answered 1.
Charlotte Mason states several times in her volumes that the mind best learns when it asks itself a question and then answers it. So with that in mind, perhaps we should start delving into what a Charlotte Mason education is by asking some basic questions. Perhaps you are new to home teaching or interested in…
What is a Charlotte Mason Education—Questions Answered 2
If there are no tests or quizzes, how do you know the student is learning? A Charlotte Mason education relies on a child’s inborn desire to know and their natural curiosity. A child who has been reared with this underlying philosophy from the beginning will have the God-given natural desire to know and learn at…
What is a Charlotte Mason Education-Questions Answered 3
Do I personally need to learn about a Charlotte Mason Education? I’m happy to tell you Yes! If you want to know something, then yes, like anything else, you will need to devote time to the study of it. This is good because studying Charlotte Mason will change your life—for the better. If it seems…
What it is NOT, What it IS
Sometimes it takes too many words to explain what a Living Education IS. It took Charlotte Mason herself 6 books and hundreds of pages of other publications to explain and describe it. A quicker approach might be to look at it from the reverse—What it is NOT. -A Charlotte Mason Education does not use textbooks…
A Brief History of Charlotte
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who lived from 1842-1923. She was born near Bangor on the Northwest tip of Wales. She lived during the Victorian area. This time period is known for its hierarchy of social, class-based social order. Women wore, long, bustled flowing dresses with ruffles and ornaments on the bodice cinched with…
Science of Relation-ships
“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” – Leonardo da Vinci Every moving thing needs a steering mechanism. Whether it be a steering wheel, a rudder, a torso with attached legs, arms and handle bars- movement needs…
Confessions of a CM Educator: I Do Random Bible Verse Memorization.
I didn’t have this type of Bible verse memory as part of our homeschool for a long time- the Bible memorization that chooses random, single, stand alone verses for memorizing. I had not come across it in what I read from Charlotte and so I didn’t work it into the schedule. We did use, as…
Bible Memorization and the Child
So does random Bible verse memorization fit into a CM Education? I think it does, because the mind food we are feeding them is Living Food. This is not just man’s history, discoveries, and facts born from and relegated to this earth. It comes from a plane above the earthly realm, rising from our…
Memorization? Yes! a CM Educator Can Embrace it!
In reaction to the educational philosophy which centers around children learning facts and information and the superficial nature of this supposed learning, CM educators may flounder knowing if or how memory work fits into a CM Life. Although we shun memory facts for a test, and memory for spouting off as if participating in an…
Tell It & Know It
One of the foundational tools in a Living Education is narration. It is a practice, stemming from Charlotte’s philosophy that children are persons, that, probably more than anything else, distinguishes her method from all other methods. Narration is not a test to see what knowledge the student has, but rather the way in which we…
Details. How to Do Narration
I wrote a post -Solving the Mystery of Narration- intentionally making the point that narration is not complicated, and truly it is not. Telling back is the complete essence and practice of narration. But, of course, there must be more said on it. And there is… giving us a few more details into how narration…