Looking Back at Charlotte Mason

I've been homeschooling now for 18 years. Right from the beginning I was influenced by Charlotte Mason. The third book I read on homeschooling was Karen Andreola's A Charlotte Mason Companion. (The First was Nancy Wallace's Better Than School and the second was Laura Berquist's Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum). I was utterly charmed by Andreola's interpretation of Charlotte Mason, all those lovely Victorian illustrations; it just seemed so cozy and gentle. One of the first things I ever did on line was join the Catholic Charlotte Mason yahoo list which was an immeasurable source of wisdom, ideas and camaraderie for me. I still know people on line because of that group. It has now become 4real, which unfortunately I have had computer glitches with ever since it started. I get can on but then something will happen that will prevent me from posting and I'll let it go for years. So I have not had that source of encouragement for a while.

Anyway, there are many, many things about Charlotte Mason's approach and philosophy of education which I really appreciate, but as I look back, I think I incorporated precious little of it in my homeschool. At least not in any consistent way. The things I was most successful with:

1. The idea that education is 'a life, a discipline, an atmosphere.' I think I did best with the life and the atmosphere; the discipline part was harder to be consistent at (due to my own lack of discipline!)

2. Read alouds - this really was a core of our homeschooling. We read aloud lots and lots and lots!

3. Copywork - copy work helped my terrible at handwriting/dyslexic/dysgraphic kids a lot. I am completely sold on its wonderful ability to train and transmit knowledge. Even at our most unschooly, we did try to do copy work at least a couple times a week, usually more.

4. Short lessons - perfect for all our short attention spans!

5. Oral narrations - sometimes done formally and most times done informally.

But that's it! Things I never could get the swing of:

1. Studied dictation - we did this for a short while but I never could get into the habit. I regret this because I do think this would have helped enormously.

2. Speaking of habits - we have terrible ones! Total failure in the forming good habits category!

3. So many read alouds at a time. If you read Mater Amabilis or Ambleside on line or lists that the PNEU had for all the different books going at the same time, we just never could handle that many. Inevitably one or two would get dropped or forgotten. We could handle three or four at a time but even this was at the outer reaches of our capacities. I could read one at breakfast, one at lunch and then alternate on other days and then have a good book for bedtime, but that was our limit. We did not care for books being broken up into such small chunks and read so slowly; too piecemeal and frustrating for us.

4. Written narrations - this totally tanked at our house. The year I decided to do Mater Amabilis just like Charlotte Mason would, I made Josh (he was the guinea pig for this) write out narrations for his history. He hated it! He developed a writer's block that he struggles mightily with to this day. One hope we have is that his experience at Christendom will free him from this burden. My other kids were much more unschooled in writing with occasional projects or focused units on writing - they have fared much better. Becky seems to have done fine with a couple years of IEW while in the Prima II Aquinas Learning and now, currently, using Lost Tools of Writing in the Schola Alta. I think the idea of learning to write in a group helps my kids for some reason.

5. Nature study - I tried to do nature notebooks and planned nature study so many times and it always ended in frustration. We did impromtu nature study but it wasn't combined with drawing and we never developed those beautiful nature notebooks that I always dreamed about.

6. Composer/Artist study - again we learned much better from impromptu stuff than from planned, even though I tried over and over again to get into a rhythm with this. The best way we've done this is with Aquinas Learning.

7. Languages - we did so many stops and starts over the years, trying to get a language under our belt. Alas, we never did have any success. Latin is the one language we've managed to cling to and that is mostly because we had a great Latin teacher that we took classes from.

8. Memorization/recitation - again, we were much more successful when this was not planned and just plain done for the love of poetry.

So most of Charlotte Mason was too schooly for us. We needed outside influences to keep us steady, like Aquinas Learning, or in our earlier days the TORCH co-op we belonged to for eight years. In between those years though, when we were on our own with no back up external force to keep us on track, we just couldn't keep up. It just seems like my style of homeschooling is a little bit of rhythm (like set read aloud times, math lessons when kids are older via a tutor, and copy work. But that was usually all the structure I could muster on my own. Then I needed outside commitments to channel our learning, like a co-op, or individual classes such as Latin, science, etc. Everything else was just unschooled.