If you’ve been following along with our series on Charlotte Mason Bible lessons, you likely have some lingering questions. Where should I place my students in the progression if they’ve not been doing Charlotte Mason from the beginning? Or where can I, and where ought I not, combine my children? What about specific translations or how to assess my child’s progress? We’ll do our best to answer these and more in today’s podcast.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
Episode 224: Combining Multiple Students
Episode 290: Bringing Older Children into the Charlotte Mason Method
Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…
Liz
…Liz Cottrill…
Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.
Emily
And today we are concluding our series on Bible lessons in a Charlotte Mason curriculum. This subject, Charlotte Mason believed, was the most important of a child’s education. In fact, she said a child might, in fact, receive a liberal education from the Bible alone, for the book contains within itself a great literature.
There are still some common questions and concerns that we often hear about Bible lessons and we’re going to be addressing those today. So Nicole, why don’t you start us off?
Nicole
Yeah. So one of the big questions is can I combine my children for Bible lessons? And this is a question we often hear, and with some subjects there’s some flexibility in that. But in this one, I hope that you’ve seen with the big picture that it’s not really possible. It’s not advisable. Forms one and two are already combined, so that is a blessing to you and those students where you’re going to need to read aloud, you have everybody together. So that is good. But once the student moves to form three and beyond, the Bible lessons shift. They begin reading independently at that time and the readings increase in complexity and depth, both spiritually and intellectually. And at that point, it’s important that that student work at their own level.
Over the course of 12 years, the Bible curriculum offers a truly sweeping and comprehensive exposure to scripture, covering the overarching story of both the Old Testament and the New Testament and the exhortation to Christian living. All of the New Testament is read and all but three and maybe four ones touched on of the Old Testament are read.
That kind of depth and progression won’t be accomplished if you hold back your older students so that they can be working with you. And it’s not appropriate, developmentally if nothing else, for those younger students to be pulled ahead for you to go on and do that with the older kids so that you’re keeping everybody together. The beauty of this curriculum lies in its gradual unfolding designed for the student to grow in maturity and understanding as they go year by year through this course of study.
So no, the Bible lessons aren’t a subject to combine any more than she has already done there with form one and two and three and four together. It’s really essential.
Emily
And anywhere from three through six can be combined for Saviour of the World.
Nicole
Right. So we’ve got a little bit of that built in, but other than that, you need to stick to where your child is form-wise.
Emily
We do have an episode on combining multiple students that might be of interest to people who are asking this question, number 224, and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
Well, placement is another question. Like well I am bringing in a high schooler so shouldn’t we go back to form one and two? They don’t have that foundation. And I think we have a whole episode on the topic of bringing older students in that might also help, so that’s Episode 290. But this is a question of like, what level should they be at? How much is necessary? What is a prerequisite for coming in? And we’ve seen that unfolding. We’ve seen the robustness.
But there was a note on Charlotte Mason’s programs that answers it for us. It asked members to remember that an average pupil should cover the whole program suitable for their age. So that means if you have a high schooler they should be covering the high school program right, forms five and six. Other than math or grammar, which were always spelled out, the student is given the work of their age appropriate form. Yes, they might have missed some of that foundation, but they can still do the work. And I think using the commentaries, that is developmentally, as you were saying, the kind of questions that they’re going to be wrestling with and will prepare them. So it would maybe be insulting to them to keep them in just the “read and narrate”, even to go through the earlier books of the Old Testament.
Nicole
That makes a lot of sense. Like even quantity-wise if they’re reading the amount that you know like a lower form student was and not reading that commentary…yeah I think you make a really good point there.
Emily
And they of course will have the same wonderful foundation in the gospels because they always have that going through.
Liz
I was gonna say, yeah that’s kind of the root and they’re still getting that.
Emily
And so but note in the program note it said “the average pupil,” so I think the exception would be severe learning challenges. We would make accommodations for that. But again, that is a per child decision and not just a sweeping, I have an older child, they’ve missed this and they have to go back.
So of course, the caliber of work that we will expect from them will be different. If we’re bringing older students in and they haven’t had that groundwork, they haven’t been narrating for six, eight years, they’re going to give less robust narrations and that is okay, right? But they’re going to still be attempting the material that would be appropriate for their age. We need to make sure that they have an opportunity to do more oral narration than probably we would expect a student who’d been in Charlotte Mason for that whole time because they’re learning that skill of narration. So as always in Charlotte Mason, we’re looking at the child in front of us and then we just want to help him or her make steady progress from wherever they are at.
But Bible, this isn’t a skill. Material isn’t a skill, right? It’s more their own mind and development that’s helping them, maturity, helping them tackle that material.
Liz
Another common question I think we get is which version of the Bible should we read? And I will say that she did not use children’s picture Bibles or, you know, various retellings of the Bible for the Bible lessons. So all I would say is to read whatever is the version that you already currently use or are happy with. Just make sure that it’s not a paraphrase because there’s a lot of those out there too. We’d like it to be a good English translation.
Emily
I did find a note when I was re-looking through the programs that for the New Testament epistles they were told to read them in the Revised Version, which is not the King James, they call that the Authorized Version.
Liz
It was new in her day.
Emily
It was very new in her day. I thought it was interesting. That’s the only other time I’ve seen an edition specified. The Costley-White commentaries they use in Forms 3 and 4 are the text of what we call the King James, what they call the Authorized Version. But so it was really interesting I think just because that was a good resource and that was the translation they used.
Liz
It was a new translation at the time. So many of the common ones that we have in use today, we have many good translations, but those weren’t available in her day. But we’ve seen over and over in every subject that she always used the best current book that was there that met the standards of what was needed for the subject. So yeah.
Another one I get a lot of times is moms that talk about children being confused by alternating from the Old Testament one day and the New Testament the next day. They say the kids request, you know, to not be going back and forth. Have you had that question before too?
Emily
I’ve heard it, but I’ve never had it from my children. I mean, we’ve always done it.
Liz
Yeah. Well, part of it for me that I think about is that they’re used to this in a Charlotte Mason education. They read multiple history books. They even sometimes have a couple of different geography books, and they’re used to every day being presented with different books. So that should not really be confusing, especially if you just say today we’re reading from Matthew. And if you do that moment or two, minute or two at the beginning of a lesson to review the last lesson, they should be able to pick up and carry that thread.
Another thing I think that a lot of moms find really interesting, and I probably should have brought this up when we were talking about form one and two, is that younger children tend to narrate the Old Testament better than the New Testament, which is always surprising to adults because I think we have greater familiarity with the New Testament as a whole, as a rule.
But children find the stories in the Old Testament to be just fascinating and maybe because it’s more familiar or maybe just because there’s a lot more didactic information in the New Testament. They aren’t as naturally attracted to that.
Emily
It’s more abstract than it is a narrative. Even the life of Jesus, there’s long passages in there of his teaching that does seem more abstract.
Liz
It’s very difficult, which is another reason they only do those synoptic gospels because the gospel of John is far more abstract and a six-year-old has a rough time narrating “I am the vine and you are the branches.”
Emily
I do want to say before we move on from the alternating that I think the strength of it is that they make connections…
Liz
I was just gonna say that.
Emily
I’m sorry to preempt you!
Liz
No, go for it!
Emily
I just have seen it over and over with my kids. They say “that reminds me of…” and it’s whatever Bible Old Testament we’re reading when they read it in the New and then they see and make those connections between the whole story of scripture and I think that as an adult is one of the most amazing things about the Bible is how unified it is after being compiled and written over such a long period of time.
Liz
Yes and I remember first graders also having amazing connections between the Old Testament and other subjects that they were studying, and it’s just exciting. You know, that they would see a connection between a greedy king in the Old Testament and one of the kings in ancient Greece or something like that.
And then I do find that a lot of moms are a little bit nervous about teaching the Bible because they know it is an authoritative book and it’s a very in-depth book. I just want to remind us all that it was given to people of every level of life and that is what is so amazing about the Bible is that it speaks to scholars and it speaks to the unlearned person equally.
But many mothers I think, are intimidated a little bit too because what if I don’t know the Bible very well myself? Moms have told me, you know, I’ve never read it through myself. I don’t know a lot about it. And I just want to encourage you because especially with your Form 1 and 2 students, lessons are really short and you’re just taking it one little bite at a time. And if a six-year-old can handle it, you can handle learning along with them. And that is actually one of the joyful things about this lesson. I think a lot of us feel that we are much more informed from having taught this lesson, do you not?
Emily
Absolutely.
Liz
And you know…were you going to say something?
Nicole
I was going to say, especially with the use of the commentary that we have to work with, it’s really a help.
Liz
That Paterson Smyth, yeah.
Nicole
Yeah.
Liz
And there is nothing wrong if your children ask. I think this is the other fear that goes alongside of that is my children are going to ask me things I don’t know and that’s okay. It is perfectly fine to say I don’t know.
But like Nicole said, the Paterson Smyth often answers some of those most basic questions. But I think it’s wonderful even in nature study or any other subject. If we don’t know, our children realize adults don’t know everything. I can keep learning even when I’m an adult. And we are leading the way, so to speak, and showing them how to do that. And I just would encourage you to use the Bible passage right in front of you that has just been read and has just been narrated and discussed to the best of your ability. It may answer some of their questions, just point them back to it. This is why we’re teaching our children, because knowledge is delectable, right?
And I think that we all just need to realize this is one book that contains many books, but they are all tied together in some way. And that over 12 full years of school, how many days is that? I didn’t do the math, but it’s just a slow cumulative building of understanding of this one amazing book that is actually there to be studied for a lifetime.
Emily
We also want to consider how to assess our students. I think this is a common question that we have. How do we know they’re doing okay in this subject? And maybe this one particularly? So I would just encourage you to go back to the lesson objectives for each form level that we laid out in these last three episodes and ask yourself at the end of the term or the end of the year, has my child grown in his knowledge of the Bible? Has he gained new thoughts of God? Has my child grown in his or her ability to narrate the Bible? And I think that is the baseline for assessing their progress.
It also can help to look back at their exam questions from term to term or year to year. Remember, they don’t need to include everything that we felt was important from the Bible text or specific lesson. But do the answers show that they have built relationships with the ideas and stories in their Bible lessons? And I think that will give you a good idea if they’ve made progress or not.
Liz
Just yesterday, a mom told me that at the beginning of the school year her six-year-old could hardly say anything at all about every Bible lesson and after two or three weeks of this she began to be quite nervous about it. But she said I just kept encouraging him to listen and say what he could and we had little conversations in the last you know five to ten minutes of the lesson. She said yesterday was his exam and she said “I could not even write down all the things he could remember” and she said he still knew whole sections almost verbatim.
Emily
Well, do you have any closing thoughts to share with us?
Liz
I think that story kind of sums up a lot, doesn’t it?
And I think with all of our subjects, we have no idea the true value of what is happening here. We are serving the feast, presenting the subjects, and the students deal with it in whatever way they need. And who knows at what point in their life they will reach back and draw from these lessons in the future.
Emily
Thank you for joining the conversation today. Please check the show notes for links to the resources that we mentioned in this episode and to explore these discussions further. You might enjoy listening to our previous episode, Bible 2.0 is our last name because we’ve already redone it one time.
But next time we will be turning our attention to the pivotal subject of history. And we think you’ll find Charlotte Mason’s method to be a brilliant design. We’d love it if you would read along with us. And so we have a reading schedule for Chapter 10 of Volume 6 linked in the show notes. We hope you’ll tune in as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.