Charlotte Mason called narration an art, something that is inherent in every person that needs not to be taught. But how can we help our child develop and hone their abilities to tell? We’ll be discussing this in today’s podcast as we look at composition in Form 1, grades 1 through 3.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

ADE on YouTube

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
Well, last week we talked about Charlotte Mason’s unique idea about Composition, that she didn’t believe in the formal teaching of Composition until the last few years of high school.

But that doesn’t mean that the children don’t learn Composition or have any growth or development in their abilities. In fact, the essential groundwork of Composition begins in Form 1. So Nicole, will you remind us what that looks like? 

Nicole
Yeah. So the central tool is narration, like you said, after hearing a reading, whether from Bible, History, Literature, Geography, the child tells back in their own words. And these narrations are oral in the early years and they are the first exercise in Composition. They are gathering ideas, they’re ordering the things in their mind, and then they’re choosing words to express it clearly. So there’s a lot going on there.

Children in 3rd grade who have the ability to do so can even start making a single narration each week or narrating part of the narration and then– 

Liz
Do you mean the writing? 

Nicole
I’m sorry. Yes. So maybe they would start out and mom would give them just a few minutes to write and then she could say, okay, now tell me the rest. 

Liz
Right. 

Nicole
Yes. At the same time, several other subjects are building the skills they’re going to need later for this written work. So they have the Handwriting lesson to establish control and confidence with forming letters and then words. Then dictation begins very simply with first single letters and then whole words and that’s laying the foundation for accurate spelling.

And Grammar lessons aren’t formal at this stage, but children are unconsciously absorbing sentence structure and vocabulary and style from the beautiful language in their books. I’d say Recitation also plays an important role at this stage. Here the child studies a short passage and if they’re not readers yet, it might be just be that mom is reading it to them, a poem, a psalm, Bible story. And then when they speak it, they’re speaking with clear enunciation and expressions. They’re really getting to the heart of that author who wrote that beautiful language and, you know, taking that in. So they’re also with that developing an ear for the cadence of poetry, which is going to take something they’re going to need to know later. And they’re internalizing vocabulary through that syntax. So all of that is very important. 

And then remember that Charlotte Mason, we keep saying she did not have any instruction, but she would warn against composition drills at this stage, forced exercises and sentence making or artificial story prompts. That would not be on the schedule.

So they really have the power of oral composition by the time they graduate and they may be starting into that written a little bit. 

Emily
By the time they graduate the form. 

Nicole
The form, yeah. Just that form, not the whole thing. 

Emily
Hopefully they’ll be further along by the time they get to graduation.

Well, as far as the lesson format, narration, which is Form 1 Composition, as you’re saying, it’s not its own subject. So we don’t have a narration lesson. Some people think that, you know? But it is a part of whatever lesson requires a narration. 

Nicole
Maybe because there are like notes of lessons where narration is the goal or something. 

Emily
But you can clearly see it. It’ll even, like below that look at the subject and it tells you what subject that was in it.

So it’s not it’s own subject on the timetable, rather it is a part of virtually every other lesson. Charlotte Mason says, all their work lends itself to oral composition and the power of such composition is innate in children and is not the result of instruction. But children do need the right material in order to narrate and they need time, Charlotte Mason tells us. So we ought to, just in order to perfect the art of narrating. 

So in Form 1B, those first year beginner students, B for beginner, Charlotte Mason tells us that we ought to read a short passage about a paragraph or so and stop and ask them to tell and then read another paragraph. And then they narrate that part. So they’re taking narration in smaller chunks. As they become accustomed to narration we’re going to extend the length of that passage even to a whole chapter by the time they’re in form 1A before we stop and have them narrate. 

So we also have some important instruction from Charlotte Mason about our part in this. We do not make corrections to grammar or otherwise if they start with um and but and and then and then and then… Yeah, can you see we’ve had lots of small children? We don’t allow any interruptions. We don’t allow them to interrupt themselves and ask questions. We don’t allow other children to jump in and interrupt their narration. And likely those children who do have ideas, they know they will have a chance to tell. 

Next, they could make a correction before they begin their narration. Or else I should say, we never allow a child to narrate what has already been narrated. But they could say, well, he said it was the queen and actually it was the king and then jump ahead to wherever they were picking up the narration. And then we can also, as teachers, if there’s not another child to correct or whatever, they made a grave error. No one has sinned, you know, and we can correct that in the discussion time after the narration is complete, but we don’t interrupt during the narration. We don’t stop readings to explain words, vocabulary, or really anything. And we instead are allowing the child to grapple with their understanding of the text and only answer questions that they ask, right? We have a lot of things that we might want to make sure they understand, but we’re only going to answer the questions that they ask us.

The recap that we’ve talked about in all these other subjects that we’ve discussed so far this season at the very beginning of the lesson before we even read the new material for the day, that’s like a little bit of a narration too. And it’s requiring them to go into longer term memory, usually a whole week basically is how the structure of lessons happens. And so they’re having to really recall and bring forward and just summarize in a very concise few words or sentences what we learned about last time.

And that’s another valuable skill in composition that they will put to use later. And when we ask for a narration at this stage, we don’t need carefully crafted prompts. But we are to ask them to tell about the character or the event that they just read about and then we leave it open for them to tell what they know and think important about the reading. Instead of asking a question like, tell me how such and such or okay, tell me how King Arthur was able to pull the sword out of the stone, right? Instead of saying something like that be like, tell me what you learned about King Arthur, right? It’s more open-ended. They can tell us any part of that that they knew.

Liz
Sometimes to help them put it in their own words. I just like to say now you tell this your way, you know, so that they realize they’re recreating it themselves 

Emily
Yep, sometimes training does need to happen at this age of getting them to tell back from the beginning. And I know a lot of children struggle with this, they always want to tell you the last thing, but we do want to work on that consecutive– 

Liz
Start at the beginning… 

Emily
Start at the beginning. And so you have a thing that you often tell people… 

Liz
Well, if a child persists in that problem I often, right before I read the next portion, will just say, now, listen carefully to what I’m going to say next, because this is where you will start your narration. You know, that just to help them for a little bit till they get the idea. 

Emily
And of course, this is why we have the single reading, right? So that they pay full attention, because it takes all of our attention to learn how to narrate at this age. 

Liz
And did you say that every lesson with a book must be narrated?

Emily
And actually I would say that there is narration of other kinds of lessons too, with oral lessons… 

Liz
I think my point is that they don’t learn to narrate by doing it now and then, you know, every time I read to them they have to narrate.  That’s how they learn. 

Emily
And even Charlotte Mason is famous for quoting this and she didn’t know where she got it, but she’s quoting somebody and so we know the citation, but “the mind can know nothing except the answer to a question put by itself.” So the mind has to ask a question and usually the question in narration is what’s next?

But so that means you know when we have a math thing and they’re having to explain the process that they…or how did you come up with that answer? So that is a kind of narration as well. So virtually every lesson in Form 1 is a narration lesson. 

Nicole
I even have quotes from Nature Study where they said every Nature Study walk should be narrated. 

Emily
Yes, yes, exactly, and that’s part of the Nature Notebook, right? We’re narrating our walks that we took. 

So the objective for Composition or narration at this level are to give a child a chance to tell what they know, to increase their powers of attention and imagination. Because they have to pay full attention to the passage that’s being read and that visualizing of the scene is fueling their imagination, it’s helping their imagination expand. And then they have to recall what they saw in their mind’s eye in order to narrate and tell back, right? 

So through narration, children are absorbing vocabulary and syntax, and they’re effortlessly integrating this into their narrations. It’s quite delightful to hear huge words thrown in there or just like that little turn of phrase that you know, they just delighted to hear it because it’s coming back. They’re not merely parroting, but it’s more of a it’s more like being a connoisseur, right? They’re sampling, they’re tasting and they’re adopting what gives them pleasure and answers the needs that they have to tell.

So our teacher prep in narration is, other than selecting excellent books for their lessons, we don’t really have any specific prep. We don’t have to come up with narration prompts. Our part is to hold our tongues and to allow the kids to narrate and do the work of their own education. 

Liz
And I think narration is valuable to the teacher, not because they’re going to tell you all the things that you think they should know or have gotten out of the passage, but you are definitely going to find out straight from their own lips what is on their mind and the ideas that they received in that passage that was read. It is a big mistake to hurry a child in this process. I mean, it takes most young children at least a year to become adept at narrating. Once they are, they love it. And some of them love it from day one. 

Emily
And you don’t mean like to learn to do it at all? 

Liz
No, they’re learning the whole time, but it’s going to just continue to improve and improve. At first they may say one little thing and just let them, you know, they’re, they’re putting their toe in the water, so to speak, but give them an opportunity to tell and they’re going to tell. 

It’s also a mistake to read too small of a passage. Some people hear, just a short portion. But if you only read them one sentence, what option do they have other than to repeat it back and be a little parrot? On the other hand, if you read two or three or five pages or 20 minutes straight, it’s way too much and it overwhelms them. It’s kind of like feeding a nine month old a 20 ounce steak. It’s going to be disappointing. 

There is no set length for the way you should break down books either. Different books have different difficulty levels for narrating. Some are really easy to narrate. They go down like applesauce, I like to say. Others are full of dense materials, so it’s going to be a little more challenging and so some of those kind of books you’re always going to be stopping frequently during the lesson time for multiple narrations. 

Emily
We should also talk, have Nicole tell us, you hear a common objection about a certain kind of book that students are always assigned in form one for a nature lore and how they think their kids aren’t understanding it or it’s irrelevant or they don’t like it because they can’t narrate it.

Nicole
Just that science in general is harder to know for one thing because there are lots of facts and details in there and sometimes the order is not helpful with that. But another thing that I’ve noticed with the children who in these early science nature lore books is that there’s so much in their head and they haven’t really gotten it out yet. They can’t…I think it has more to do with the fact that they get stuck on something, like because they’re excited about that thing, not that that’s the only thing they can remember. It’s just that this is what’s piquing their interest at the time. And then later you hear them talking about it and here and there, little bits coming out later. 

Emily
And you always say it’s okay if they don’t tell chronologically through the passage that you read, right? Because especially if it doesn’t have a narrative. 

Nicole
Exactly. So just throwing out little facts and details sometimes is the thing they need to do with regards to…And those early nature and lore books are science .

Liz
And I think that’s the value of taking those couple minutes at the end of the lesson. I always call it the “tell me more” part, you know, So you did a wonderful job of describing that butterfly. Tell me more about where he went, what he ate…and you know, whatever it is that they didn’t put in because they usually know all about that too. They just couldn’t get it out like you said, right?

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in Charlotte Mason’s hands off. Like Emily said, don’t talk. This is their time to talk. And I think every writer knows that the hardest part of writing is thinking about what to say and ordering things appropriately for the reader. And the children are just beginning to learn that whole process. They’re being given a lot of good fertilizing ideas through their reading, and narration is giving them the skills that they need that they’re going to need later when they’re writing for themselves. 

And I think that words strengthen a child to have confidence in taking in intellectual material, like you said, things they’ve never been presented with before. And really it’s kind that she waits until their handwriting skills have caught up to their verbal skills before they’re asked to literally write an essay or something. 

Emily
It is in the earliest forms that we see how Miss Mason did not underestimate the intelligence of children. Rather, she gave them the opportunity to use their powers of narration on material perfectly suited for them. Next week, we’re turning our attention to upper elementary Composition lessons and see how the child’s skills progress. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

Did you know Charlotte Mason believed that composition didn’t need to be taught? In fact, she thought we would diminish children’s natural gifts by too much instruction in this subject. Join us on today’s podcast to learn more.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Episode 8: Narration 2.0, the Act of Knowing

Episode 9: Narration Q&A 2.0

Episode 159: Composition Instruction

Episode 237: Writing Grammar and Composition

ADE on YouTube

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
Well, Charlotte Mason had a very unique approach to Composition. She didn’t think we actually needed to teach children how to organize their thoughts or give any formal instruction in Composition until the very highest form level, so upper high school.

But that does not mean that children don’t do any writing or really learn the skills needed, right? Quite the opposite.

So first of all, Composition, I thought we’d just start with what is it? What do we mean when we say Composition? It’s the art of communicating one’s thoughts to another person, and it’s primarily through the written word. So writing our thoughts down to communicate ideas to other people. Charlotte Mason declared Composition is not an adjunct, but an integral part of their education in every subject.

So thus, she didn’t separate it out as a separate lesson until we get to Form 3, so middle school. She tells us that for the youngest students, Composition is narration. And we’ve already talked about that on the podcast this season, a lot about narration, because it comes into every subject. This is an art she believed that was inherent in every person. Every person knows how to tell what they know. They know how to tell stories. What did you do yesterday? What did you have for dinner? Those are all narrations. It’s something that we have in us as people. And she expects children to simply tell what they know. 

So this is the first step to clear and beautiful communication. We cannot, in fact, she says, we must not impose our corrections about their style of telling or our corrections about their misuse of grammar until they’ve learned to notice and desire critique for themselves. Rather, she tells us that our business is to provide children with material in their lessons and leave the handling of such material to themselves. And this is why Charlotte Mason insisted on only the best books because students absorb and assimilate the style of the authors that they read. It also is important that we give them a variety of authors to read in their lesson books because in this way they get ample practice in Composition as they narrate different styles. Different vocabulary, different sentence structure.

She says, having been brought up so far upon stylists, the pupils are almost certain to have formed a good style because they have been thrown into the society of many great minds. They will not make a servile copy of any one, but will shape an individual style out of the wealth of material they possess. So through exposure to so many different authors, they are not copying any one particular, not becoming a mimic of Francis Bacon or JK Rowling or whatever it is that they’re reading, they’re instead developing their unique voice. And as any Composition teacher will tell you, that is the one thing you can never teach a person to develop their unique voice. 

So when we interfere with instruction and Composition, Charlotte Mason says we stultify. 

Liz
Good word. 

Emily
Yes, it is. We hamper, handicap, diminish a child’s ability to compose. In fact, she says our efforts are in vain and when we get out of the way they rely on their own intellectual powers and they do the work of their own education. Therefore, we see that narration is not simply the power to learn, which we often refer to, to take things and put them in our long-term memory to absorb facts and ideas, but is simultaneously the process by which people learn to express themselves, their ideas and opinions with clarity in their own individual voice. Simply put, narration, the very heart of Charlotte Mason’s method, is the royal road to Composition. 

Liz
Yes, indeed. 

Emily
So Nicole, would you share what this looks like then in the practical outworking of the curriculum?

Nicole
So one of the things I think is interesting is that the Form 1 student Charlotte Mason tells us that they are totally adept at narrating, but what they mostly do before they start school is narrate what they want to tell, their own little stories, what happened here and there. And now in Form 1, we’re asking them to pay attention and narrate Bible and History, Nature Lore, Literature, everything. And so there is a whole level of skill going on there and we are actually teaching them what it means to narrate in those early ages. They’re absorbing rhythms of poetry and good writing from books they hear and like you said with no explicit Composition instruction at this time. But they can still express themselves with their own particular…I mean if we have multiple students we see it. They’re particular. There was only one – Bible – that she really wanted them to speak it in the language of that…

Emily
Bible lesson, right.

Nicole
But they’re still picking up, like you said, they’re still picking up all those stylists like Charlotte Mason called it.

So in Form 2, that’s grades 4 through 6, that is when written narration begins in earnest. I say in earnest because it’s hopeful that towards the very end of Form 1, they may be able to start doing one written narration a week. 

Emily
Or write part and tell the rest. 

Nicole
We never want that real hard transition. 

Emily
You’ve written nothing, now you’re writing everything. 

Nicole
Exactly. And even in Form 2, we do see a transition between we’re going to write one thing a week and now we’re going to write two things a week and now…and we’re going to get all the way to the other side of Form 2 and we’re going to write two every day. So there’s a transition that happens across those three years. 

But there’s other things that are going on too because the act of setting words on paper calls for care with handwriting, spelling, and grammar, even though those mechanics are taught in a separate lesson completely. So here too, the variety of readings feeds the writing. And now instead of simply retelling maybe a scene from Shakespeare or just retelling, the student might be asked to tell about one of the characters, or they might be asked to compose a letter or write a verse in the meter of the poem they’ve read. So there’s a little bit more being asked of them here. 

Then in Form 3 and 4, so that’s grades seven through nine, Composition time is devoted to writing in many forms. We have essays, letters, ballads, dialogues, scenes for play, again, still drawing on the term’s reading and current events at that point. But here is where we see our first bit of instruction, and it is that they can learn scansion. That is a practice of analyzing the rhythm and meter of verse, which strengthens both their understanding and their own attempts at poetry. They’ve got to understand the poems they’re reading to be able to write in that style if they’re asked to…which they will be asked to. 

By now they’ve had years of habit producing the thought, the orderly narration, so they can tackle more of these kind of creative letter writing and things like that or analytical assignments.

Okay, then in form five and six. So this is grade 10 and 11

Emily
And 12. 

Nicole
And 12. I don’t know why I left that one off. This student is ready for a small measure of direct instruction in Composition. Here Charlotte Mason says a point or two of guidance on a single paper. Never so much the student’s natural style is stilted like you said, so we have to be very careful here. Older students might write editorials, pressings, or speeches. They might engage in debates. 

Emily
Saw that. 

Nicole
Rarely, but it was there some. Take on more abstract topics because their education has kept them really in constant contact. We’ve just finishing up Citizenship and Literature and looking at the type of things they were reading at that point, the quality of that material. They have a storehouse of ideas and vocabulary that they can really just put into place at that time. 

So really the aim across the years is not simply just to produce children who can write. You know, it’s not like that. Though it does happen, that happens. But the true goal is cultivate thinkers who can really write living words just the way we want them to read living books, now they’re even able to write in that way. So there’s hope for future writers. 

Emily
So what big objections do people have to Charlotte Mason’s method of teaching Composition? 

Liz
Well, I maybe say this in every subject, but I think the idea of teaching someone else how to write original compositions is pretty daunting, don’t you think, to most teachers? And it’s not because the act of writing is difficult, but you cannot teach someone how to think, let alone what to say about what they think. And Charlotte Mason said there was no course she doubted for any author of note who had ever been instructed in the art of writing. It came naturally to them. And that’s why she said, as you alluded to, no snakes in Ireland. That was her famous quote about writing. 

Emily
It’s so interesting because I think for those of us who aren’t confident in our writing ability, the thought of teaching another, it’s terrifying, right? Like we don’t know what we’re doing. 

Liz
Because we don’t know how to do it ourselves. 

Emily
And for people who are good writers, it’s probably equally…because they’re probably looking back and going, well, I don’t know how I learned to write because…

Liz
I always loved to write but when it came to my own children’s papers that they would show me I would be just absolutely clueless as to how to help them out. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Liz
And I think this is when we tend to panic and go out and try to find some program that’s gonna help where we can’t. And I think we need to forget about any curriculum that trains them in a robotical (is that a word?) method of writing, that in which they’re just basically mimicking a certain pattern or style. 

Emily
We had an editor friend who lamented. She got a lot of submissions from homeschooled students and she could always tell, you know, which program they had been trained to write in and just…they’re gonna be not good. 

Liz
Yeah, and you guys have both brought up that it comes down to the books, to the reading. And Charlotte Mason said, people who do not read, do not think. It’s pretty blunt, don’t you think? And she said, you cannot write what you think without thoughts. And children acquire this ability gradually over the school years. And she was always kind, I think, and helpful to children to present them with literature to think about. And then when they start those written narrations, she’s asking them to put their own ideas of what they just read into words. In other words, they have something to write about. They aren’t having to concoct something out of their brain, out of nowhere. 

And they do this orally in Form 1. They continue to do it orally. But this is where they’re really learning this skill. They are learning to speak in a coherent way. I think the biggest challenge for teachers is to have the patience that you need to allow them to acquire this skill very slowly, day after day, year after year. And the beauty of narration is that it’s the person’s own personality, like you said. Everybody’s oral narrations are different. Because every person has his own way of shaping his thoughts into words and expressing them. And that is what composing is in writing or composition of any kind. You have to know what you’re going to write about, but then figuring out how you’re going to say it is the big challenge. 

Emily
Yeah, it’s just like in, I think, about Nature Study or Grammar, which is Composition adjacent. And we’ll be discussing that later on. Charlotte Mason was adamant we don’t tell children all the botanical names or give them all the scientific terminology of what they’re seeing in Nature Study because they need exposure and familiarity with the thing itself. And the same with Grammar. She didn’t believe in starting that until fourth grade for a very sound reason because they needed a lot of experience with words and reading words and noticing punctuation. 

And I just think of my two sons who love Grammar because they weren’t forced to do it, they’re not dissecting things. And it’s the same, like we’re not expecting them to compose without first filling them with things to compose them out.

Liz
So they don’t know when they narrate that they are actually forming compositions, just like when they’re reading, they don’t realize they’re reading grammar. 

Emily
That’s true. 

Nicole
I would say too, that we as moms have to kind of check our fear because we’re not comparing our children to other students so we’re not having a teacher send home, your child got an A or a B and you know where you’re at. One time years ago, there was a homeschool article that this person was a professor and they put several college students, like a paragraph from each one. And they were making a totally separate point, but I remember thinking, my kids are okay. We just think that well, that’s not perfect, but they are growing. They are growing in their ability. 

Emily
I have several friends who are college professors and they just cannot…the incoherent things that high school graduates who got into college cannot write to save their life. And they’re just like, I don’t even know. 

Nicole
So maybe we don’t compare ourselves in that way and let our kids continue to grow and trust method. 

Emily
Yeah.

If you want to know how Composition develops from simple narrations, join us for the next few weeks as we explore each level of a student’s lessons. You might also like to listen to our older episodes on Narration and Composition. We have numbers 8, 9, 159, and 237. You can find links to those episodes and other resources that we mentioned today in the show notes. Thank you for listening as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

As we close our series on citizenship, we hope you’ll join us on today’s podcast for a discussion of practical questions we often hear.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

ADE on YouTube

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
This is our last episode in our series on Citizenship. We take these closing episodes as a chance to answer any practical questions about implementing the subject of the feast that may be still hanging out there. 

So we know the top one is usually about how do I combine kids? If I’m homeschooling mom, and I’ve got multiple students, what and where can I combine?

Nicole
Well, Citizenship is one of those subjects where we can combine in some places, but we shouldn’t in other places. So in the middle years, it works beautifully to combine Plutarch. I mean, we have from grade five to nine that we can be doing this with all of our kids at the same time. And, you know, our older kids are going to have more…presumably, because what I found in the past, sometimes my younger kids narrate this better than my older kids did. But maybe they’re going to have more insight than maybe a younger child would. But everybody working together on that is really a beautiful picture of Citizenship in a lot of ways. 

But once the students move to Form 5 and Plutarch is no longer part of the work, we really need to let those kids go on to their studies and not just continue Plutarch as a default. We need to let them do what they need to do. But we also can’t bring younger kids up to that. So it’s just…at that point there needs to be some separation, some independence for those older kids. So yeah, so combine where it’s natural and then don’t… 

Emily
…and we mentioned in our last episode or our Form 3 to 4, and maybe I should have mentioned in our 5 to 6 episode, about not combining Ourselves, that that book should be read sequentially so each individual coming in is going to start from the beginning instead of jumping into where their older siblings are.

Nicole
And that Citizenship…the citizen reader I think that those students that are all reading that, they could jump in and combine as long as they’re in that form level that’s going to read that. 

Emily
Yep, I agree.

Well, another one that we often hear is, what about students who have not been doing this? I mean, we talk about Plutarch and we’re like well, this isn’t the first hard thing that they’ve had to read. They’ve been doing Bible lessons from our original translation. We’re doing Shakespeare a year before we start Plutarch. And they’ve had other literature that’s a super high caliber.

But we have also discussed that there’s a note on the programs that students are expected to do the whole program that is appropriate for their age, whether they came in or not. And so we know from Charlotte Mason’s own testimony about the Liberal Education for All movement that there were children of uneducated classes who had never had the exposure to the literature that a lot of our kids have had that jumped right into Plutarch and did great. 

So I would just say you don’t need to worry about adjusting down and like going back and reading, we need to do a year of Shakespeare or we need to read Pilgrim’s Progress before we can approach Plutarch. If it’s on their schedule because that’s the year they are, just start. 

There are five years of Plutarch in Charlotte Mason and this is something we have made adjustment for because it is so foundational these ideas of Citizenship that Charlotte Mason wanted our students to have. If you have a child who’s coming in in high school and they wouldn’t have Plutarch on their schedule, we have made accommodations to have them do at least a year or two of Plutarch to get those lives. Do you agree that that’s a reasonable expectation? 

Liz
You would like them to at least have a year of exposure to it. 

Nicole
Right, that as a student who’s coming all the way through will have had 15 lives. 

Emily
Right. 

Liz
Yeah, so three is good…. 

Emily
But that does mean that you have to drop one or so of their other Citizenship books that would have been assigned about that age, so that’s a trade off. You can’t just add it in willy-nilly or their days are going to be way too long. 

Nicole
Right. I think sometimes we forget that our children are still thinking beings. They may not have the mechanics to do some of the things like read Plutarch for themselves. But those complex characters are very interesting to them. And it respects the child to be like, let’s grapple with this. And they will rise to the occasion.

Emily
Yes. So true. What other questions do you hear, Mom?

Liz
Oh goodness. So many, you know. A lot of times families postpone this from year to year and then they realize, our time is up. And I just encourage people to dive in. And if you don’t make it all the way through the life in one term, just start a new one in the next term. If they’re curious about whatever ended up with that showdown that was going on at the end of the last term, they’ll pick it up and read it themselves if they’re that curious.

One of the things about the whole topic of Citizenship that’s important to remember is that a lot of us, not everybody, but many people begin homeschooling to expose their children to better morals in general and to acquire, you know, some independent thinking. And I think the study of Citizenship is a very important thread in accomplishing that goal.

We desire them to go out into the world and be equipped to understand and cope with the world and with the people in it and live a productive and fruitful life. And they’re always going to have to live under other people’s different ideas and be under authority. And even in college, you know, that’s like a whole community and they’re figuring out how things work and run in this place, especially depending on if you’re at a big university or a small private school. They’re always going to be involved in their community and we want them to be. We want them to be responsible and to care about the welfare of others. So I really think Citizenship along with all their other subjects is really a practical application for them to understand themselves and other people and how we get along and love our neighbor as ourselves. And I think it really spurs them on and gives them really inspirational ideas for how to be personally responsible. Just to bear responsibility and carry your weight. 

Emily
So what I hear you saying is Citizenship is not optional. It’s a key subject. 

Liz
It’s integral to their personhood. And really I think it inspires them to maturity basically. 

Emily
Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about how we assess our child’s progress. We’ve done this with every subject so far, but it’s really important to keep in mind those objectives for our Citizenship lessons. 

Are they engaging with these big ideas that are in their books? Do they show compassion for characters who have to make difficult decisions and realize that people are complex, that there’s really no wholly good or wholly bad person, right? My young kids always are like, is that the bad guy? Is he a bad guy? And you’re like, you know, I hope that you’re moving out of that and gaining maturity and realizing that everybody, as Charlotte Mason’s second principle says, has potential for both good and evil, right? And that we’re not wholly one or the other.

Do they narrate coherently and make applications to their own lives of the ideas that they’re reading in their books? Are their exam answers relevant to the books that they read? Do they discuss ideas from Citizenship with you and seem to be forming their own opinions? Their own opinions. I hope you caught that because that is what Charlotte Mason said is the duty of every person, to form their own ideas and opinions and not blindly take on our opinions or social media. 

Do you guys have anything else you’d add? We hope that we have spread a feast of Citizenship ideas for you to chew on.

Charlotte Mason reminds us that in unlikely ways and from unlikely sources do children gather that little code of principles which will guide their lives. This is the goal of Citizenship and ultimately the entire curriculum. As we close this series on Citizenship, we hope you’re better equipped to share and spread the feast for your students. 

Next time, we will be turning our attention to Composition, a subject that instills fear in many parents’ hearts. But Charlotte Mason’s method is natural to every child and gently allows them to grow in their writing abilities. So please join us next time as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

What do high school Citizenship lessons look like in the Charlotte Mason method? How do these lessons prepare children for the rest of their lives? On today’s podcast, we’re discussing these questions and more, so stay tuned.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason (Riverbend Press softcover or Amazon – Vol. 1 and Vol. 2)

ADE on YouTube
*Video for this particular episode was lost, so on YouTube it is an audio recording only. Thank you for understanding; we will be back on video next week!

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
In Forms 5 and 6, so that’s high school, 10th, 11th and 12th grades, the subject of Citizenship changes titles, thankfully, because I won’t have to say it anymore, and it was called on the programs Everyday Morals and Economics.

Liz
I was impressed with how you said magnanimity, and I was really glad that you had to say that.

Emily
So Nicole, will you tell us what the subject now is going to cover at this level?

Nicole
Yeah, the shift in title actually reflects the shift in focus a little bit from…well, we’ll just talk about that. So in Form 5, so this is grades 10 and 11…had to think about that for a minute. Students read the second book of Ourselves now, and they’re going to read that over the course of those two years. And here, Miss Mason takes the discussion of the personal character and responsibility to a more mature territory in a lot of cases, exploring the moral life, exercises of will and the individual’s place in the common good. 

But alongside of Ourselves, students read works on political theory, economics and social responsibility, and I’m going to list a few of them for you, just as examples. Things that she assigned were The Crown of Wild Olive by Ruskin, The Rights and Duties of a Citizen by Maldon, The Economic World by Burns, The Duties of Man by Mazzini, or The Dawn of World Order by Smith and Garnett. Some years a third book was added, such as Bacon’s New Atlantis or Pope’s Essays on Man, Carlyle’s essays. We saw the essays also in our literature episodes. 

Now in Form 6 students moved on to even more advanced work. Have y’all noticed that Plutarch is not in this list mentioned here? And they often read from two or three categories each term. In one group, they may encounter Plato’s Trial and Death of Socrates. There’s one called Education of the Young, Socratic Dialogs. And then another group, they studied works like the State and the Nation by Jenks, and Economics for the General Reader by Clay Everybody’s Business by Withers. And then occasionally you had a third book that included things like Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy and Howard’s The Proper Study of Mankind, or Murray’s The Ordeal of this Generation. I love that title. 

Liz
You mean, other generations have had ordeals?

Nicole
It’s worth noting that Miss Mason sometimes indicated that a certain upper form title should be borrowed from a library. I loved this point because it kind of acknowledged that not everything was available to her, either. 

Emily
Or maybe because, you know, her goal was that they would leave their education with a library, and maybe it’s a worthy book to read, but it’s not something you’re going to want to have on your library shelf.

Nicole
Yeah. And she would say, Well, this one’s out of print, but go find it at the library. I loved that because it was like, No, this is a good book to read, go find it, you know. So that was good. So the lessons focused a lot on the discussion or reflection, rather than just narration alone. We’ll see in Composition you’ve got some tie-in there too.

Emily
Yes, yeah, yeah. We really see that in their exams, or the exam questions that were set there. She is drawing a lot more in their composition from this subject than previously. 

Well, the lesson format at this level is just twice a week for 30 minutes both times. So instead of having a shorter lesson for all these things, both of these take precedent, and Plutarch is gone, right? 

The individual lessons are really structured like other book lessons, but there’s going to be more independence at this level. They’re going to be working a lot, reading and thinking and writing a lot more independently, and it should be a habit by now for them to start every lesson by recalling what they did. My husband is a wonderful example of this. He does it every time he picks up a read aloud, even if it’s been months. Let’s remember what’s been happening, you know. And so that can become a habit, and should be by this time. 

And then they’re going to be doing reading and narrating. And most often it’s going to be written narration at this level, right? There are about three to four maximum books per day, book lessons per day, and they were to do at least…

Liz
In all subjects.

Emily
In all subjects, at least two, at least two narrations that were to be written each day. So really, the majority of their lessons are going to be written at this time.

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
So the thing that you need to do as a teacher is to keep abreast of what they’re reading, because most of this work is going to be independent, right? 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
We should have understanding sympathy, we should have ongoing discussion with them. I really like, not just maybe reading like, Oh, this is what they’re reading this week, but to have read and digested and thought about the book myself so that I can have formed thoughts already to have discussions with them. 

Our objectives for these lessons, again, as we have been saying all along, is that Charlotte Mason’s quote, children gather that little code of principles which should guide their lives from these lessons. Everyday morals. That is what all of us, walking out every single day of our lives, right? Our moral code informs every decision that we make, every encounter that we have with people. So we’re giving them knowledge to fit them to live for the good of their neighbors in the world. Knowledge of themselves again, Ourselves is going even deeper than it did previously, knowledge of others and knowledge of government and living together. 

And I really like the scope that you laid out for us. You’ll notice like, yes, there’s some ancient philosophy about government, the Socratic dialogs are all about, you know, what’s the good of the state for the state? How do people live together? And, you know, Socrates shooting down everything that gets brought before him. But then what it was, the one that you said, like this moment, the problem, or deal, the ordeal of this generation, ordeal of this generation, something like, things that are very…We should be balancing not just old, ancient things, but what’s in our cultural zeitgeist, what problems and ethical dilemmas are we grappling with as a society today? We should be spanning that both together. 

So our teacher prep is to determine the amount of work to be accomplished in each lesson. So that’s going to be based on the material that we’re assigned, right? So we want to forecast so that they’re not reading too quickly or too slowly, maybe. Pre-read as possible, you know, as much as possible for ourselves to be able to enter into those discussions and then engage our students. We want to read their narrations, if they’re mostly writing them down and then have discussion. It doesn’t have to be in the moment right after the lesson at this age, right? They’re holding these thoughts, and that helps them, you know, apply things that they’ve read in their books to actual everyday life, right? 

So for resources, just like Charlotte Mason assigned a bunch of different things, we assign a bunch of different things. So I don’t have a whole lot to show you today, but again, Riverbend press’ edition of Ourselves. This is book two, and so I like to present students with their own copy that they can keep, you know, and it’s a book…I think that’s probably the volume I’ve read the most of hers, and every time I come through, I get struck to the heart by some problem that I have that I need to

Liz
It wasn’t really just written for kids. 

Emily
Right.  And yes, to have that as a reference, we do like to assign economics texts, government now, like more inner workings of our federal government, primary sources. We get asked a lot about do they read the Constitution or the Magna Carta or the Federalist Papers, and this is a great place to put those kinds of things. And then one book that I really like, kind of fitting with Our Generation’s Dilemma, because it hits very close–

Nicole
Our Generation’s Ordeal. 

Emily
Sorry…interesting that those two words are synonymous in my head. But Tim Keller’s Generous Justice, I think is very challenging, and I think it will challenge you, regardless of where you fall on the perspective of how we use our resources for community. But again, that is a huge part of how we live out and live in the world and in society, and primarily for Christian families, because he is taking his principles from scripture, but I love to assign that for 12th graders, just to really think practically and maybe question some of their assumptions. And, you know, get them thinking about these things that are really going to be front and center for the rest of their lives.

Nicole
Yeah, you can’t really consider that any of these books that I listed are just like, go along books.  They are books to challenge.

Liz
Yeah, and they’re not necessarily all appropriate for today.

Nicole
Yeah right. 

Emily
Yeah right, yes. And I do think like with just the problems facing our generation, to think about them through a biblical lens, and then what that looks like, because it’s often not what we’ve grown up assuming.

Liz
And we have found many good resources for economics, too. 

Emily
Yeah. So would you like to tell us any challenges or questions that you get… 

Liz
I think just some things to think about. You know, sometimes at this age, some students are prone to push back. Why do I have to do this? On the other hand, I would have to say – especially boys, but girls too, no stereotype types here – just really, actually take a great interest in a lot of these things. They’ve heard people talking about all these big ideas, and now they’re starting to grapple with it themselves and in the book Ourselves. What I really like is all those moral dilemmas they’ve been faced with in Plutarch and in their novels and everything else. She brings it home to them and gets them thinking about what it really means to lie or to obfuscate or to shirk your responsibilities. And she talks a lot about their will and their conscience, and I think it’s excellent for them to understand their own motivations and what they need to be. 

But I think especially in these last couple of forms of school, their high school years is where we start to see the fruit from all the previous forms come together. They have been evaluating characters and history and literature, weighing those against their own values all this time and that they’ve been exposed to all this rich literature, and so now their challenge is to bring their own ideas to bear. What are they going to do in their own lives? And I think this comes out a lot in their essays and compositions. We can be encouraging them to some of the ideas they’ve gotten from Citizenship, to include those in some of the topics that they’re given to write.

Nicole
And don’t you think that at this level, you know, you really try to impress the point that if we could read these books, we would be a huge blessing to our children, because these are really philosophical books and challenging, not just challenging in, Can I read this?, but challenging in I’ve got to chew through this and think about it. And I was just thinking that maybe this would be a really good area to have a group of kids who are also the same age, and to once a month or once a term, meet and be able to discuss some of these wonderful ideas.

Liz
Yeah, that’d be wonderful.

Emily
We are so glad you joined us for the discussion today. Next week, we will conclude our Citizenship series as we answer the most common practical questions that we hear about this subject. Thanks for joining us as we continue to spread the Feast of the Charlotte Mason method.

Is Plutarch all there is to Citizenship? Not at all. Middle school students in Forms 3-4 take up the definite study of their local, state, and national government, as well as turn their attention upon themselves to learn how they are capable of engaging the world and their neighbors. Tune in to the podcast today to hear more.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. by Thomas North (Heritage Press)*

Anne White’s Plutarch Project (Amazon or free on AmblesideOnline.com)

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason (Riverbend Press softcover or Amazon – Vol. 1 and Vol. 2)

Atlases (discussed in Episode 324):

• Ancient and Classical Geography*
• Rand McNally’s Atlas of the Ancient World, ed. by RR Palmer*
• Muir’s Historical Atlas of Ancient Medieval and Modern*
• Digital map resources at Grammaticus.co

Episode 27: Plutarch

Episode 178: Plutarch Immersion

ADE on YouTube

*for out of print – OOP – or difficult to find books, try BookFinder.com

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
Well, Charlotte Mason tells us that “children familiar with the great idea of a state in the sense not of a government, but of the people learn readily enough about the laws, customs and government of their country learn too with great interest something about themselves, mind and body, heart and soul, because they feel it is well to know what they have in them to give to their country.” 

Nicole, can you share with us what Charlotte Mason used to give children these ideas? 

Nicole
Yes. In Forms 3 and 4, they continue with Plutarch, which was begun just for two years before this. And most of the time, the same Life was assigned from Form 2A through Form 4. So fourth grade through ninth grade. Sorry, fifth grade through ninth grade.

Again, with those omissions. Only occasionally do we see a different Life substituted in Form 3 or 4. I’m just not sure that that’s really necessary. I think in my home school room, I think we’re good to just all stick together. 

Alongside Plutarch, students began reading the first book of Charlotte Mason’s book, Ourselves, that she wrote to the children. And then they read that book over the course of three years. So a small amount every week in that. This book maps out human nature and its noble possibilities and its weaknesses so that students can better understand their own character and the part it plays in the common life of their community. It’s something we recommend for moms too. 

Liz
Yeah, we all need that. 

Nicole
Charlotte Mason also assigned Form 3 students, so these are your seventh and eighth grade students, an additional book that explored the workings of society and the responsibilities of the individual within it. These included titles such as Social and Industrial Life, The Golden Fleece, Household and Citizen, Who’s My Neighbor? So while the exact book varied over the years, the goals remain the same with that. And we..I’ll tell you what we used in a minute. 

In Form 4, they continue this work with additional books, including such as The Citizen, Days to Remember, The English-Speaking Nations. I don’t know how you say…is it Helles the Forerunner? Or Sesame and Lilies. Again, this deepens their students’ sense of history, culture, civic identity. So instead of using those options, there’s a lot of things there I guess you could pull from. But in Forms 3 and 4, we suggest the Young Citizen Reader by Paul…

Emily
…Reinsch. I don’t know how you say it. 

Nicole
This has been updated by Lisa Ripperton.

Emily
Of Yesterday’s Classics. 

Nicole
Of Yesterday’s Classics, yes. 

Emily
And we make that change why, Nicole?

Nicole
Because Charlotte Mason originally scheduled a book similar to this in Form 1A…

Emily
2A

Nicole
2A. I keep doing that. In 2A, but in our five-day timetable we just did not have room for that second lesson in that grade level so we have pushed that book up to this level.

Anything you want to say about that? 

Liz
Also because this is geared more to Americans, right? 

Emily
Well, yes, we update because we, of course, need these are to give their ideas about their local community, state and federal government. 

Liz
That are different from the UK. 

Emily
Absolutely. So we do need a resource that is applicable. We, yes, instead of doing the variety that she did at this age, we’re giving that foundation that they did not get into a that they would have in her programs. Yeah.

Nicole
So also later in the programs, there was a new element that appeared in Form 3 and 4 called Life and Its Beginnings by Webb. And I just mention it because people often write me and ask about health class. I always tell them, I really think Ourselves covers everything that would be needed in health class, but I thought it was interesting that this was here.

Emily
That she saw that more in Citizenship. 

Nicole
Yeah. Yeah, so that was interesting. So yeah, that’s and it maybe is important to note that was way later, well after Charlotte Mason was gone. 

Emily
So yeah, I guess we think of health as more of a science adjacent subject. But she considered more of…yeah because we have duties to keep our body in good order to help the citizens around us.

Nicole
And really she talks about you know, the things that maybe are listed more crassly if you look at what are the health requirements for a high school or a young age. She really does cover them. But in a much more…

Emily
…holistic.

Nicole
Yes!

Liz
Sophisticated. 

Emily
Yes, exactly. 

Nicole
Purity and exercise…

Emily
It’s actually quite astonishing what…and the Victorian era we think of as so silent on this that I was impressed when I read it. I was like, she’s really getting into these issues. 

Well, OK, so that’s the big picture of what these three grades would be studying. And we discussed how we tweak what we assign. But the format is one 30-minute lesson, which we suggest using for Plutarch because that’s such a meaty lesson. And then one 20-minute lesson. But you’ll notice there’s, you know, a Citizenship reader and Ourselves. And so really those, since they’re read over three years, have such small amounts each term, you can alternate weeks with those in that 20-minute lesson. That works out really well. And we do, well, I’ll mention it later, but we do have a forecast that shows how very doable that is. 

So the individual lessons, again, are very similar to other book lessons. We recap the previous lesson at the beginning, we want to, as a teacher, arouse their interest in what they’re about to encounter. They read and narrate and discuss. And just a note, I’ve said this before, but Plutarch is always read allowed to the students so that we can make those suitable admissions. The only exception would be an edition that was already formatted with them. 

And then Miss Drury, who followed Charlotte Mason over the House of Education. She tells us that Ourselves is read “to herself by each girl in forms three to four without comment.” And it’s, I should make two notes here. The “girl” in Form 3-4, because at this age in England at the time, boys were going into university or trade school. And so her amazing programs were for girls. It’s just incredible that she valued their minds so much at that time. 

But “without comment”, because we don’t want to insist on the moral for the child, you know we don’t want to apply that to our own child. This book is dealing with the sacred inner workings of a person, and so we need to give the students space to wrestle with that on their own.

The objectives for Citizenship lessons at this time. Charlotte Mason tells us that children gather that little code of principles which shall guide their lives. So that’s what we’re after. We’re aiming to give them these principles that they will use for the rest of their lives to make their decisions. So our objectives should be to give knowledge that’s fit to fit them to live for the good of their neighbors and for the good of the world. That knowledge covers knowledge of themselves, Ourselves being the primary text for that, knowledge of others, Ourselves is very informative of that, but then we have, you know, far distant others like Plutarch and thinking about what challenges lie in when we think about society and that comes through the Citizenship reader, so they’re getting knowledge of the government and what it means to live together in society.

As far as teacher prep, again, I’m going to, well, if you need a longer discussion of this, you can go back and listen to our Form 2 episode if you haven’t. But you need to pre-read Plutarch. It is very challenging, I think, for us who have not grown up with this kind of education to jump right into that and read it cold in turkey or whatever we would want to say, you know, just first upon first opening the book. “Open and go” is not Plutarch. We should not have that desire for such a thing.

I think it’s helpful to forecast the lessons because otherwise we’re gonna like these books that are meant to be savored and really mulled over in small chunks if we just used how much time we had we would probably cover them way too quickly and so really looking at okay this book is spread out over three years, how much do I really need to read in a single lesson? And then I would say your other teacher prep is be ready for discussion because this is where the rubber meets the road and your kids are grappling with things that they never really had to grapple with before, you know, as they’re developing their opinions. 

Nicole
And at this form level, they’re having higher thinking. 

Emily
Yes, so true. 

Nicole
At this level, they’re really going to be seeing some things that they maybe wouldn’t have seen. 

Emily
Exactly. 

As far as resources, Ourselves…you can get any Charlotte Mason edition, but I really like these and because they are such a personal thing, this is something my family has done, is we’ve gifted volume one only to our Form 3 students and then when they get to Form 5, when they start reading, they can read book two. But Riverbend Press has published very…

Liz
Nice quality. 

Emily
These are going to endure time. There’s sewn bindings and in a nice hardcover edition and then having the books individually bound is such a nice thing. So this is something that I hope they will keep with them and take with them for their lives. 

Here is The Young Citizens Reader that we were mentioning for American students. Obviously if you live in another country, you’re going to have to find a Citizenship book, but it’s helpful to look at the table of contents and this really covers all the things that Charlotte Mason’s British citizen reader does, but for American students. And this is reprinted by Yesterday’s Classics. We have created Citizenship breakdowns, which do the forecasting for ourselves and the Citizenship reader for you if you want to save some time preparing. 

And then I mentioned a lot of our Plutarch resources in our previous episode, but very briefly Anne White’s guides are very helpful, especially for teacher prep. And then the Heritage Press edition of Plutarch’s Lives by Thomas North. Thomas North’s translation is the preferred translation of Charlotte Mason and many others. 

Nicole
Preferred by Charlotte Mason. 

Emily
Preferred by Charlotte Mason, thank you. And I also mentioned multiple historical atlases that really help with the study of Plutarch. So if you are interested in looking at those, you can check the show notes for links that we’ll just put in, but you can also go see examples by listening to our last episode on Form 2.

Liz
You know I think with that young citizens reader, I thought, my goodness, my kids are, this is going to be really dry and boring. I was always surprised at how interested they were in it, you know, because they…they’ve never thought about why do we have running water and electricity turning on in our house because those don’t talk about utilities and you know the mail systems and all those kind of things and just being aware of the difference between one town and another and how they decide to do things. Anyway I just thought I’d put that plug in there because honestly local government plays a much more intimate part of our lives. 

Emily
And we can actually do things to affect change for us and our neighbor.

Liz
And this is probably just reinforcing what you guys have already said but by seventh grade, children are beginning to be more introspective and aware of their body image and observe health and unhealthy people, you know, in their lives and wonder. They start having a lot of thoughts that they don’t necessarily share. And I just love how Charlotte Mason kind of steps in as their silent aunt who gives them little counsels, you know, about what to think about for their future and all potentials that they have as a person, because my goodness you know at that age a lot of children struggle with thinking how am I ever gonna cope with this stuff I don’t think I can do it and I just think it’s beautiful how she presents such an amazing picture of what they’re becoming as they grow up because that’s a hard stage you know to move from being a kid to being an adult. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Liz
Yeah sometimes I think I’m still in it. And I just like that she doesn’t serve it up to them as like lectures, you know, it just tells little stories and just gets the ideas across. 

I think the biggest stumbling point at first with kids is the unfamiliarity, she uses kind of this analogy of your body, your person as a country. And she calls it Mansoul, which I think she took from Bunyan’s book, The Holy War, which by the way, it really helped me to get more into Ourselves when I actually took the time to read The Holy War. 

But anyway. She just gives this perspective of your whole person – all the realms and spheres of your life like there are so many different aspects to a country. Definitely don’t try prying out. I think Emily, you pointed this out really good, but children like to have their independence and they like to have their own personal thoughts. And I think even their written narrations are maybe not necessarily any of your business, I guess. 

Emily
Yeah. I actually, with my son, his narration notebook has all of narrations from all different subjects, just one after the other, except Ourselves is a separate one. And I wanted it to be more like a journal for him to reflect on and I’m not even reading it yet. Like I feel like I need permission to read his grapplings. 

Liz
And I, you know, there’s so much value in writing self-reflection and yeah, I just, would tell my kids to write it as a diary entry and I promised them that I would not sneak, peek, poke or snoop, whatever. 

I think that this whole area of the book of Ourselves, it’s read really slowly over five years altogether, but in these forms they’re just getting through the first book, the first half. But I think it’s inspiring to them as a person in a way that social media will never be. She gives such an awareness of their being made in the image of God and their relationship to their creator. I think that is what it’s most valuable for.

Nicole
And in previous episodes, we’ve talked about literature and Charlotte Mason pulls a lot of those characters that they may have read into this book, too. 

Liz
Yeah, especially in book two. But she basically starts with their outer self and works her way inward. So by the time they get to the end, they’re talking about their heart and I mean, their conscience and their will and those kind of topics. 

Emily
Yeah. And one other practical question you might have if you’ve got, you know, a seventh and a ninth grader and your ninth grader, like most of the time we have a new student coming into a book we just have them jump right in, and I would say Ourselves is not that book. It should be read sequentially from the beginning through the end and because it is personal to really read on their own right. So don’t combine those lessons.

Thanks for tuning in today. We have links in the show notes for all the resources that we have discussed this week. We hope you’ll join us next time when we will finish our look at Citizenship lessons in high school as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.