Are you lacking confidence in choosing your Charlotte Mason curriculum? In today’s podcast we are talking about what a Charlotte Mason curriculum isn’t by examining the principles Miss Mason gave us, so we can spread the feast of a living education with confidence.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Episodes on the curriculum:

• Episode 193: The Interdependence of a CM Curriculum
• Episode 266: The Utility of the Charlotte Mason Method
• Episode 280: The Simplicity of the Charlotte Mason Method

Episode 168: Habit Training

Episode 264: The Time-Table

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
And all season, we are considering a Charlotte Mason curriculum. And we invite you to read along with us from chapter 10 of volume 6. You’ll find a link to the reading schedule in the show notes.

Last week we discussed the five principles that are the foundation, in Charlotte Mason’s own opinion, of a true Charlotte Mason curriculum. And from these, Charlotte Mason believed that there is an inherent principle, or “natural law”, she calls it, that should govern the choice of our students. So we must give them the knowledge that is due to them.

And that knowledge must be various because they are born persons with desires to know about all kinds of things and ideas, and education is really their building of relationships in as many directions as possible…and that each person is capable of getting this sort of knowledge especially when it is taken in in a literary form and learned through narration.

But Charlotte Mason had some further cautions for us about what a curriculum is not or should not be. And first, she says it is not utilitarian. 

Nicole
She really begins this section by turning many of our educational assumptions on their heads. So one of the things she points out here is that an education that’s built on preparing for exams leaves the child, she said, “less intelligent and less informed, except perhaps” – she gave a caveat – “in Latin and math.” So that’s what all of us came from, right? That was our education. And she’s saying that actually is a problem.  And it really flies in the face of our modern instinct to evaluate education based on test scores. But she really warned that that impoverished the children. So we can’t do that. 

But then, yes, she takes aim then at a deeply rooted idea of educating children for their future prospects, like their future job. And in particular, she talked about educating the boys to gentlemanly pursuits or towards the traits, one or the other. But you know, we do a very similar thing because in schools today, children are required in the ninth grade to choose what career they intend to go in so that their coursework can be aligned around that. And she just said, the education we offer is too utilitarian, like you said. 

So when we- 

Emily
Utilitarian meaning useful, right? 

Nicole
Right, right. So when we reduce a child’s education to what is useful, it doesn’t serve, like maybe it’s serving, we think it’s serving a practical end, but it’s not honoring the whole personhood of that child. 

Emily
I think about the end of volume six, it’s actually in the second book that has a whole, well, letter – I think it was originally published in the Times of London – about the scope of continuation schools. And she was advocating that we need to give these trades people something to think about. So that while they’re doing their factory job, so that they’re going to have a mental stimulation they can think about, oh, the novel that I was reading last night, or the new thing that I’m learning. 

Liz
Otherwise, what is the purpose of Latin or Shakespeare? We think, well, they’re never going to use that. That is a utilitarian way of thinking. 

Emily
Yeah. And I do really see this every single year with Charlotte Mason educators.  We may be convinced that children are born persons and we need to spread this wide feast, but I think at the root, and it’s probably because of our own education and just really our society at large, we still have so much fear that they’re going to actually be able to get into college. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
Because if they don’t get into college, they’re not going to get a good job. And so it really, really is so saturated into us, isn’t it? 

Nicole
It is. I was thinking the same thing. Fear. It’s fear. And it’s that we are looking at these young people and we are thinking, how are you going to support yourself? We’re not having faith that we got there, but we can give them something so much better than we had and they will get there too. 

Emily
Well, next Charlotte Mason said a curriculum is not or should not be selectively chosen.  And this also steps on a lot of our toes, think. She said that it doesn’t cater to utilitarian subjects, just as you were talking about, Nicole, so that they can get good jobs when they grow up, right? But it also doesn’t cater to our children’s likes and dislikes. These are the emails… 

Liz
Or our dislikes. Yes, yes. Or even their whims. You know, like they have an absolute interest in this.  Our natural desire is to want to feed that, especially home educators. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
We think this is one of the positives about this. But Charlotte Mason said, “spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programs and each small guest assimilates what he can. All sit down to the same feast and each one gets according to his needs and powers.” So our children, they don’t know what they’re going to love. 

I think about myself. You know, I went to a liberal arts college and had to take multiple classes I never would have signed up for otherwise and found some abiding interests to this day that I love. So we don’t, they don’t know what they want really, especially putting the reins in your six year old’s hands, who likes to study all about, I don’t even know what, you know, nothing that’s good for him, right? 

But also rooted in this is she admonished us that we don’t know what God is preparing them for, right? We can’t see into the future, how each person is going to find their use in the world, like she says. And so we are instead giving them this wide and broad feast that is not selected to each child. It’s the same feast for all the children as she said, right? And that is enabling them to build relationships in as many directions as physically and humanly possible for each of them, right? And then that also helps them expand their horizon and relate to others who don’t necessarily have the same ideas and interests and vision of life. Charlotte Mason says, “it is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man. Wide, but we may not say it is impossible, nor may we pick and choose and educate him in this direction, but not in that. Our part, it seems to me, is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” 

So a Charlotte Mason curriculum is going to be a vital cohesive whole, right? Every single practice or how to do each kind of lesson, every single lesson flows out of these fundamental principles that she has laid out for us. We can’t just choose isolated subject curriculum. How I’m using “curriculum” is how we normally think about it, but subject material, right? Like we can’t say, I’m going to do this for math and this for grammar and this…and if it’s not coming from a Charlotte Mason philosophy, the philosophy is an applied philosophy, the principles have to flow out into the practices. She says “there is no part of a child’s work at home or at school without an informing principle underlying it”. 

And so we have to realize that really every resource, every material out there already has some kind of educational philosophy. You can’t help having an educational philosophy. And we have already seen how deeply rooted the one we’ve been brought up in is, and still even affects us even after we’ve been convinced to go a different direction. Charlotte Mason’s curriculum programs are integrated in deep ways. I think we even do a disservice when we pick and choose from different Charlotte Mason “curriculum”. Right? Because each curriculum out there is a whole subject of study and it’s trying to accomplish these things that she laid out for us, right? Did you have something you wanted to add? 

Liz
Well, I’m just thinking about our online classes and co-ops that often clash too. 

Emily
I have known even, you know, different local schools…and students really pick up on it, especially if they’ve been educated in a Charlotte Mason way. They know that the curriculum itself is respecting them as persons. And when they are forced to do maybe a more textbook approach for some subjects, they feel it and can resent it, right? So just keep that in mind as you’re jumping around, even from year to year, you’re missing that whole feast, because it’s not just within a year of a child’s education that’s cohesive. It’s the whole scope of their 12 years or however many they’re being educated at our homes.

As Miss Kitching, who was Charlotte Mason’s, well, she was her right hand woman, actually. And then she became her successor for the Parents Union School. She wrote, “every book and every subject has a niche to fill. It cannot stand alone, nor can it be omitted from the program without weakening the whole organism.” She’s not even talking about omitting a whole subject like Swedish Drill, which I did for a year, guys. She’s talking about even every single book in the curriculum, that program that was sent out, was so vital to the work of the whole. 

So that is daunting. It seems like, OK, I don’t have as much leeway as I thought I had. I’m wondering also, I look at those curriculum programs and there’s like 20 some subjects on there. How in the world are we supposed to accomplish all of this?

Liz
This is why we call it a feast. And we’ve already warned you that we say the food terminology a lot because it’s a great analogy with Charlotte Mason. But you just think of a big banquet table that has all kinds of delicious things, and some things maybe don’t look so great, but then when you eat them, you’re like, I want some more of that. So the wide curriculum might be 20 or more subjects. And that does seem daunting to us because we can only wrap our mind around maybe three or four things at a time.

But it is all possible because it’s taken in in small doses. It’s because of the short hours that they have, limited time every morning. And there’s no homework afterwards. But she said that the short lessons and especially the use of narration multiply time, right? In fact, she says in one place, it quadruples the time the teacher has to cover a subject with a student or present it. And a lot of it is based on the fact that narration means the child is building the habit of attention. So full attention, no time to dawdle, no time to dilly-dally causes a lot more learning. They’re always listening to the reading or reading with the expectation that at the end of the reading, they must narrate or tell back what they understand. 

And we accomplish this with a time-table, right? Because there’s no way to get through 10 or 12 subjects in two and a half or three hours every day without having a guide. I think of it as the curbs on the road or the traffic signs that help keep pointing you in the right direction. This is where you turn. I actually just said to a mom yesterday, the time-table is kind of like our GPS for school.

Emily
Yeah, it is for sure. And Charlotte Mason said in her first volume, when she’s literally talking about the habit of attention, that the time-table is the very first principle of education upon which a well-ordered school room is built. And so, like we mentioned, the principles that Charlotte Mason talks about are not confined to her short synopsis. There are principles throughout her volumes. 

Another teacher, actually, Charlotte Mason wrote a paper called “Education Theory” and that was the first part and then Miss Drury wrote “Practice” and in that paper she said “a time-table punctually adhered to is one secret of the carrying out of the program in its great variety, partly explains its efficacy.” She’s talking about the variety of the time-table. Not only is it keeping us to those short lessons “Yep. Oh Bible’s done. We move on to the next thing in it.” You do feel like that all day long but that is giving the child’s brain a break, right? To attend to something that is like a listening lesson is a different kind of mental faculty or mental process than to attend to their math lesson. And so just by switching frequently to various subjects, various mental skills, it gives their brain breaks and it doesn’t over fatigue them. And that enables them to, for two and a half to four hours, depending on their age, really focus on the thing, the lesson at hand.

Liz
And no one, not even an adult can focus for even as long as 30 minutes straight. So this is just being respectful of a child’s young mind. Attention is developed over time. They don’t have long attention, but we can make powerful use of the short amount that they do have if it is full of really good things. And basically, she said, every lesson with a living book must be narrated and a lesson without a narration is wasted. So they have that expectation and that helps them pay attention and then the narration helps them absorb what they’ve just taken in. 

Emily
So when we’re talking about short lessons, some of them are as short as about 10 minutes and some of them are as long as 40 in the highest forms. So that’s still a shorter lesson than any of our high school classes, right? And those 40 minute lessons for high schoolers, they still have some short lessons in between there to help vary their time. So when we think about what a Charl Mason curriculum is not, it’s not going to be sitting at your math lesson until it gets done, regardless of what the time-table says. 

Liz
We’re moving with the clock and the clock marches on whether we like it or not. 

Emily
And it’s going to have various, every day is going look different.  It’s going to have these short lessons and we’re going to require narration, not fill in the blank worksheets, right? So those are some markers to look at.

Emily
Thanks for joining the conversation today. If you’d like to go deeper on any of the topics that we touched on today, we have some episodes that you might like. Numbers 193, 266, and 280 talk about the cohesiveness of a Charlotte Mason curriculum. We have an episode on habit training, episode number 168, and specifically on the time-table, if you’re wanting to develop the habit of attention. The time-table episode is 264.

And next week, we are going to begin our series on Charlotte Mason Bible lessons as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

Have you ever wondered what makes a curriculum Charlotte Mason or not? Charlotte Mason herself gave us principles based on her idea that children are born persons. This season of the podcast, we are going to be working our way through chapter 10 of volume six and answering that question: What is a Charlotte Mason curriculum? Join us in this episode as we start to answer that question by exploring points 11-15 of her educational principles.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

ADE’s Short Synopsis Episodes

Episode 204: Short Synopsis Points 9-12

Episode 206: Short Synopsis Points 13-15

Episode 5: The Science of Relations

Episode 8: Narration

ADE on YouTube

Emily

This season we are reading through chapter 10 of volume six and we invite you to read along with us. You can find a link in the show notes to the reading schedule that we have created to go along with this entire season.

We’re talking all season long about a Charlotte Mason curriculum. And today we’re going to look at really, what is a curriculum? Should we define that before we get going? What is a curriculum, mom?

Liz

It’s just the subjects that are contained in a program of study. 

Emily

Yeah, a lot of people think about the curriculum as the specific resources or books or materials that we use, and those go into the curriculum. But basically, the curriculum is that big structure of what subjects we’re going to be studying, right? 

So today we’re starting out right where Charlotte Mason did.  And that is the principles that make her method unique and effective. 

So volume six is her final volume. She actually wrote this in completion before she died, but it wasn’t published until after her death. So she had finished writing it. And the first – it’s made of two books – and the very first book walks through what we colloquially call her 20 Principles, but what she referred to as her Short Synopsis. This was the first new volume that she wrote in 17 years. As far as her homeschooling, her home education series, where her educational philosophy goes, she wrote other books during that time, but this is the last and it had been quite a while. So this is maybe the end of her life looking back at how her method had been implemented, particularly in England and in English speaking homes around the world throughout the empire.

So Charlotte Mason wanted to include the application of her method since it had been so long, because between writing her fifth volume and the sixth, there was what she called the Liberal Education for All movement. And that was putting her method into the state-run elementary schools, mostly in the North of England. And so she had a lot more, we would say, data about how her method worked for children of a diverse social cultural background.

So as I said, volume six is comprised of two books and the first is going to go point by point through her short synopsis. Some people refer to it as the 20 principles. There are 20 points and they’re all interrelated. These are not the only principles Charlotte Mason talks about though, just to clear that up. We are going to be discussing chapter 10 all season long. And so in that chapter, she lists five principles, principles 11 through 15, at the heading. And so that’s what we’re going to discuss today. We do have episodes on all of the points of her synopsis if you’d like to dig more deeply into the others. 

But let’s start out today as we look at what makes the Charlotte Mason curriculum. I think it’s important to note that volume six is a summary of her philosophy and practice. And so our conversation this season will be guided by chapter 10.  But we’re going to be referring to other volumes and other resources that Charlotte Mason and her fellow teachers and educators wrote and things that she describes in her other volumes of the Home Education Series because we get in very condensed nuggets in half of this book, right? It’s not even the whole book. It’s very condensed things that she talks about at much greater length in other places.

Nicole

I often share the idea that she was at 47 pages of Nature Study in Home Education, the first volume, and like two pages in volume six. So it is assuming that you have a little bit of background knowledge. 

Emily

Yes, and she did not consider it a standalone volume, but just wanted to frame her philosophy in the context of the synopsis and also to bring forward that experience that she and other teachers had had as it went out into a broader audience than originally were practicing her method. 

Okay, so I just want to note that in the other volumes of Home Education and especially in this chapter and the rest of the book, she specifically refers people, if you want to see how this looks, to go look at the programmes of the Parents Union School. 

So when we say programmes, that’s what we’re meaning. We do have, I think is it 39 consecutive programmes plus some other outliers there that we have studied ourselves as we’ve learned how to implement this method. We’ll be bringing all of that knowledge forward for you all since those are not being sent to you term by term like they were for teachers in the PUS. Okay, so just keep that in mind that her comments in this section give you a big picture of what her curriculum, what her method, does, but it is not comprehensive. It is not the one stop shop that probably all of us wish it were. 

Liz

Yeah, if only.

Emily

It would be a lot easier to figure this out. Well, let’s go through each of these points briefly. And I’m just going to summarize what the crux of them are. And maybe you guys can help flesh out a little bit for our non Victorian ears. You know, what do these mean? What is she talking about? 

So point number 11, this is the first principle undergirding a Charlotte Mason curriculum and she says that a curriculum should be “a full and generous curriculum, taking care only that all knowledge offered to him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas.” So why do you guys think that is important or you know help explain a little bit more about what that means to us today? 

Nicole

Well she said in volume three that it’s not lawful that we pick and choose subjects. So this is a very serious thing, but she also points out, just like these words, as many as possible of the interests proper to him. So this was broad, not because we’re just trying to see what sticks, but because she felt like this was very important that they have all of these subjects that were proper for them. And then she points out, and this is in that same quote in volume three, that “we’re providing what will become the great field before him, which in all his life he will not be able to explore.” So we are just starting this child on a life, like just setting before them all these interests that might take hold and maybe not, but a lot of things…this is growing a person, you know, not just…

Emily

And it really is because we view him as a person that we see that he demands all of knowledge in all of these different directions, right? Mom, what do you think she means by vital knowledge? Or can you help explain that a little more? 

Liz

I think vital means alive. You know, we don’t want just a lot of dead facts that lead nowhere. We want things that actually trigger their thinking and inspire their imagination and cause them to ask questions about what’s next and what does that mean and that sort of thing. Don’t you think? 

Emily

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We often quote or misquote or sum up her thing that the dried bones of fact must be clothed or enfleshed with living ideas.  And that is such a core tenant of her philosophy. Facts alone are not enough to inspire our imagination. 

Liz

Because the mind lives on ideas, not information. 

Emily

Yes, that’s how it grows. The idea has to take root. 

Nicole

Right. She even says it requires nourishment to function. And these ideas are the nourishment, the same way the food is the nourishment for our bodies to run and play and do all the things. 

Emily

So you will hear us use lots of food analogies. 

Liz

They work real well. 

Emily

Okay, so moving on to principle or point number 12. She says “education is the science of relations.” That phrase will come up a lot, but it’s simply that a child has natural relationships with all kinds of ideas and things. 

Nicole

And very specifically, like you said, a child has those relationships.  This is really where the work of their education comes in because these ideas are coming in but then they have to grapple with them. They have to work with them and then they become a part of them and what that looks like in one child isn’t the same as what it would look like in another child.

Emily

It is his duty. So when she says education is the science of relations, the science of relations is the act or art of building those relationships, right? And that alone is what education is in Charlotte Mason’s mind. 

Nicole

Absolutely. 

Liz

It’s between the child and what he’s learning. It isn’t between you and the child. 

Emily

Right, right. And it’s not as is maybe commonly interpreted that all knowledge is in some way connected, but it’s all connected inside of him because he is making those relationships. And just the way that you’re talking to someone and they say, “that reminds me of…” it’s because they’ve taken in and have already built a relationship with another idea that then they see another thing. It can be completely unrelated in your mind, but this happens with my kids all the time. They’re like, “it’s just like ____”, and I’m like, “how…?” And they’re making that and building that relationship.

Okay. So point number 13, she says a curriculum must do three things. The first is it must give the student much knowledge. Second, it should give the student various knowledge. And third, it should give the student knowledge in literary form.

So again, this kind of goes back to 11 like the feast must be broad, right? But it’s not just the volume of ideas that we give them, right? We need to give them ideas in all different directions, all different subjects, right?

Nicole

Miss Wicks had a comment. She said “when we remember that knowledge is truth, we know at once that no part of truth can be omitted without wrecking the whole.” And I think this is something that we’ve got to keep in mind with the whole “much knowledge” thing because…and maybe I always get those two – much and various – they seem to overlap, but there is some uniqueness to the two. 

Emily

Much is like quantity.

Nicole

Yeah. 

Emily

And various is the kind. 

Nicole

Right. So, you know, we’re going to have science, but we’re going to have multiple kinds of science threads in there. So I think that kind of helps me to understand that a little bit. But if we pick and choose here and there, we don’t get that interconnection. The child doesn’t get the interconnection of the science to relations without this.

Emily

And what about knowledge and literary form? Why did she say that was essential for a curriculum? And what does she mean? What is literary form? 

Liz

Words. And she specifically meant in a narrative style of writing, not just independent little sentences put on a page. But we are word people. We were made to respond to words. And she believed that knowledge was taken in most normally and readily through the literary format.

Emily

Mmhm.  And often when she uses the word literary, she’s also talking about the caliber of writing. Like you said, mom, it’s not just words strung together, but they are so fitly spoken. She talks about poetry in that way. But even she talks about the French science writer Jean-Henri Fabre, who was writing about science in a way that was very poetic. And she was lamenting the fact that we didn’t have that in our English language. 

Nicole

She even goes so far to say that our minds just reject anything that’s not put in that form. And we know it’s true. We’ve all read things that are just dry and we get done and we’re like, wait, I missed it. I was thinking about something else, but something that’s literary captures us. 

Emily

Yes. And I do think there’s an exception to that. And I think moms might be hearing you say that and go, “but my kid loves to pour over those like factoid and blurby books.”  I would argue that they’ve already built a relationship with the thing, right? They’re just adding to their store of knowledge on that topic and they have gotten some idea in some way that is more fit. 

Liz

They’re collecting at that point. It’s not what’s inspiring. 

Emily

Yes. It didn’t initiate the relationship. It’s just adding to it. 

Well, point number 14 is something that we’re going to talk about a lot this year and that is narration.  It is the primary means by which children take in the knowledge. So instead of just having these, you know, we’re presenting this wide feast, it goes in one ear and comes out the other…to stop that from happening, the child needs to take it in and digest it. And so narration is like mental digestion for these ideas, right? 

Liz

Yes. And she said that knowledge that wasn’t reproduced in some way was a waste. And it’s to me kind of like, pouring water into a cup that has a hole in the bottom. It’s just going to be lost. 

So narration literally means to tell. And so the children take in some of the literary knowledge that they have in their book and they tell back what they understand or what they can explain from what they’ve just received. It’s usually oral. Sometimes it’s written too as they get older, especially.  And they do this after one reading. So we don’t go over and over the same material. They hear it once, and that guarantees their attention to the material. 

Emily

Yes, and in fact, that is her point number 15, which is the end of these five principles that she reiterates for us to consider as we think about a curriculum. And she says, “only allow a single reading.” And there should be no teacher questioning or drilling or summarizing for the student, right? So they hear the reading as you’re saying once and then they’re asked to narrate. Now, as they get older and more adept at that, there is some time that can lapse in between, but this is the primary at the beginning of their education. 

Nicole

Right. There’s a couple of things with the single reading that are really important. First of all, if they know that they will have to reread it, or that they can reread it, one or the other, they’re either being forced to by studying or they can just go back, they won’t pay attention that first time. And that is prime. This is work. 

In fact, I have this quote here, Ms. Farrell says, “think of the time you saved.” But Charlotte Mason then goes back and says, yes, but that’s actually not the primary value with this. She specifies “for that child he makes use of the authority which is in him to attend that way in its highest function as a self-commanding, self-compelling power.” She says “to make yourself attend, to make yourself know this is indeed to become a king.” So this is like a power but it takes work. It does. And if any of us try it we know it’s hard it’s hard to do so but this is really the crux of them being able to remember. 

Emily

And all of this should sound very different than traditional methods of education, right? Allowing our child to narrate not what we think is important, but what the textbook curriculum company says is important, but what they have taken in. So it’s giving us a glimpse into the relations that they’re building, but it’s also, science has proven their studies on this, that that’s how we transfer things to long-term memory. But Charlotte Mason said that the only way we can encourage that to happen is if they know and they absolutely attend. Because if they’re just, you know, la-di-da, gazing out the window, totally distracted, they’re not going to be able to do it. And they should feel that lack, right? 

Nicole

Right.

Liz

Right, so as you were saying about the textbook, they decide ahead of time what the child needs to get out of the chapter. And we have those little comprehension questions. And it’s also not what you as the parent thinks the child should be getting. Narration literally tells you what they did get out of the reading. 

Emily

Yeah. So after she lists these five points, and if you’re reading along you can see how she does this, she actually has a summary of this section of the synopsis in there. It’s not a separate point to it. But she just needed to impress upon her audience then, and we need to know today, that all children have it in them to learn. And she says she believes and she demands us to believe that they have greater potential than we realize. Every single student. It’s not due to their heredity or their circumstances in which they were brought up. Not just clever children can learn in this way or be educated. And it’s not just for children of educated classes. I think that is what I love about this volume when she opens it in the preface, which we don’t have on your reading schedule. But she talks about the soul of the mining children being awakened to knowledge and it’s beautiful. 

Liz

Yeah. 

Nicole

Also in a separate Parents Review article, she makes the comment, “thought breeds thought, and that the children familiar with the great thoughts, which is what we’re providing them through this kind of education, take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body to growing.” And she goes on to say that “we must bear in mind that growth, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the soul end of education.” So all of this work that they’re doing, again, this is for the person that is being grown, not just that child check education is done. This is for growing a person.

Emily

Do you have any thoughts, Liz? 

Liz

Yeah, I mean, it’s just what you’re saying is making me think that we’re giving them the fuel that is going to keep them burning to know more. 

Emily

For their whole life. 

Liz

For their whole life. So it’s not about what they got out of this specific lesson today. This is a seed that is being planted that will sprout at some point in the future.

Emily

And we never know when those are. We may think that they were seeds that fell on the stony path, right? And only to come find out that they somehow have germinated and become a flourishing plant in their life. 

So I hope you can see that this curriculum, these foundational principles of a curriculum that makes a Charlotte Mason curriculum was absolutely revolutionary in her day. She saw herself as creating something new, or she got ideas from various places, but how it was all synthesized and put together in her method was revolutionary. And her proof of that is in these hundreds of children that previously were thought to be uneducatable, right? But they proved them wrong. They’re taking in Plutarch and Shakespeare, and their teachers are going, “what in the world? How is this even possible?” 

And I think it’s just as transformative today. We have heard from mothers over the last 10 to 15 years who have children with extreme special needs who show up, you know, and when we are feeding them and allowing them to build relationships in all directions, they just astound us.

So just in conclusion today, as we wrap up this episode, though Miss Mason developed her curriculum and method of education 150 years ago in a different context and really a different world than we find ourselves in, we and thousands of other educators believe her philosophy to be as relevant today and universal because it is based on what is true about all persons.

Thanks for joining us for our conversation today. We will be continuing this conversation about what makes a Charlotte Mason curriculum next week, looking especially at what it is not as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. If you’d like to learn more, we have episodes that go deeper into Charlotte Mason’s synopsis, as I mentioned at the beginning.

Those are episodes 204 and 206 covering this section, but again, we have them for all of the synopsis. We also have episode number eight on narration and episode number five on the science of relations, if you’d like to dig a little deeper into those topics before joining us for our conversation next time.

We’re back for season 11 of the podcast! Listen to hear about everything that is new at A Delectable Education along with a unique opportunity to read Charlotte Mason along with us.

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!

Teacher Helps

Teacher Training Videos

• High School Algebra demonstration lesson
• Form 1-2 Bible demonstration lesson
• A Method for the Madness: Organizing Home and School workshop
• Imagination, The Missing Ingredient workshop
• Conducting a Special Study workshop
• A Point or Two of Correction and Critique: Assessing Your Students’ Compositions workshop
• The Habit of Remembering workshop
• School Planning, One Bite at a Time workshop

ADE’s Patreon Community

ADE at HOME {Virtual} Conference (First weekend in February, access for 3 months following)

Theo of Golden, Allen Levi

Every Moment Holy, Vol. 3, Douglas Kaine McKelvey

Emily
Today, after 10 years of podcasting, we’re going back to the basics and covering a Charlotte Mason curriculum. We will be following Charlotte Mason’s words and writings in Chapter 10 of Volume 6. Chapter 10 is called The Curriculum. So we have created a reading schedule that you can study along with us. So you’ll see the dates and the topic and the page numbers. And it’s usually very few pages per week. 

So along with that, as I just said, each week, we are going back to a weekly podcast release schedule, which is a lot of work for us. But we’re getting excited about all of the things that we’re going to cover this week. We will also be doing our best to keep each episode short and to the point, very succinct.

So each subject or part of the curriculum is going to be a series of episodes. And we also have a new format. For the first time ever, you can watch us as we record these episodes. And you can watch along at A Delectable Education on YouTube. So we have a lot of new things out this summer. Nicole, would you share with us some of those?

Nicole
Well, I know how much everybody loves Jono’s scansion exercises and he has a second one coming out. So that is really big. And then Melissa Peterman is going to have year three of Swedish drill and also a new resource that is for scouting that is the tassels that the students in Charlotte Mason School would have used. And it gives us just a lot of really good direction and is updated for modern students. And gives some good direction for our scouting. We, Emily, mostly, has done forecasting for The Citizen Reader, Ourselves Book One, English Literature for Boys and Girls, and Age of Fable, which is gonna be really helpful to people. And she’s written map questions for the US, which I think are… 

Emily
So those are for the 10-minute map exercises that people email me on the regular: “What do we do for the year?” 

Nicole
We also have some new teacher training videos that I think are going to be really helpful for you. Two of them are demo lessons. There is a high school algebra demo lesson, which is excellent. I strongly encourage you to watch that. Even though it’s done with a class, but even if you’re doing it with your family, it’s super good. And then there is, Emily did a combined form one and two Bible lessons. So that’s really helpful. There’s also several workshops. We have Emily’s “A Method for the Madness: Organizing Home and School”. Nobody needs that. Yeah, we’re all together. Liz’s “Imagination, The Missing Ingredient”. So good. I have one called “Conducting a Special Study”. And then we have one by Morgan Connor, “School Planning, One Bite at a Time”. And I know this is coming out right when you’re probably like trying to get that together. That is super excellent.

“The Habit of Remembering” by Jessica Becker. Again, Jono has “A Point or Two of Correction and Critique: Assessing Your Students’ Compositions”, which I think will be just very helpful to people. Check all those out. 

Emily
Liz, do you want to tell us about the upcoming conference? 

Liz
Just looking ahead and it’s really just around the corner. Our sixth annual ADE at Home conference begins February 6th and runs all the content for you through May for your convenience so you can listen to any or all of it whenever you like. And our theme this year is going to be “Generous Hearts, Minds, and Souls”. So early registration begins November 28th and runs through January 15th. I’d also like to announce that at the book club, we will again have, I mean, at the conference, we will again have our book club. And I’m going to announce the selection for this year, not an ancient classic, but a relatively brand new book that is a treasure that we have discovered and love so thoroughly and just want everyone to join in with us. We will be reading Theo of Golden by Alan Levi. So get a copy and start reading so that you can join us then to discuss it and.

It’s always a really grand, enjoyable occasion. 

Emily
Yes, I love that part of the conference so much. Super good book. And we’re all looking forward to rereading it very much. 

Nicole
I’m trying to hold myself back until it’s a little closer to time.

If you are a Patreon member, or if you’re not and you want to know what we’ve got going on over there, we submit each one of us something every week, well, we take turns, one new thing a week for the most part. There are coupons, discounts, like early coupons for the conference. Liz writes articles that are just very encouraging, sharing book lists. You have a lot of strategy tips for both the home and the school room, how to get organized. I share a lot of nature study stuff over there. There is so much over there. You know, Patreon was…the idea behind it is it’s a way for you to support a podcast that is free. You know, we’re just giving you our content. But if you want to try to support us and encourage us in some way to sign up for that. But we really try to give back as much as we can. And it has just turned into a very robust community over there. So I would really encourage you to check it out. 

Emily
And all of those teacher helps that you just mentioned, Nicole, that we, the three of us create, we release those on Patreon before they’re released to the general public. And we so appreciate our Patreon supporters feedback on those. They’re kind of like our beta testers. And we just really love them and appreciate them very much. 

Emily
Thanks for joining us today. Next time, we will be diving right into Volume 6, chapter 10, and discussing the foundational principles that make a curriculum Charlotte Mason. 

So I want to conclude this very first episode of Season 11 by reading a prayer from Every Moment Holy, Volume 3. This is a liturgy before teaching. So feel free to listen to this again before your first day of school if you haven’t had it already.

God who in wisdom laid the world’s foundation, remind me it is no trivial task to teach, to inspect and wonder, to discipline and discern, to see the world through the eyes of those still fresh in learning it, to show them nature as you made it, and invite them to know it more fully.

Teaching often seems summed up in mere grades and emails and papers and raised hands and disruptions, but really it is a feast, a community, a gift, a discovery of the world and its inherent value.

We see in teaching a divine act that forms and shapes, it weaves in all of history and matter and truth and goodness and offers it to students in a way which may guide their thoughts and their decisions and may change them for good. Amen.

The end of the school year and the end of this podcast season is cause to pause and reflect. The ADE ladies review the past year and encourage you to not just slam the books closed, but pause to remember the good and give thanks. We also encourage you to take some time this summer to listen to old episodes as you plan for the upcoming school year. Finally, we have a big announcement to make about the coming season. We close this episode with a fitting devotional to help you gain perspective on the value of the past year and inspire you for what lies ahead.

Listen Now:

Episode 241: Seasonal Reflections

Seasonal Reflection Questions

Episodes by Topic

Numerical Listing of Episodes

ADE at HOME {Virtual} Conference (First weekend in February each year, access for 3 months following)

Teacher Training Videos

Teacher Helps

ADE’s Patreon Community

As Charlotte Mason Homeschoolers, we all know the challenge it is to find balance in all the other parts of life besides our school lessons. With so many priorities and responsibilities, it is imperative that we continue to evaluate and seek to find balance in our lives. In this podcast episode Emily, Liz, and Nicole discuss the challenges, mistakes, and tips they have for balancing relationships, home responsibilities, service, and ministry opportunities.

Listen Now:

CM Simple Languages

www.livingbookpress.com Use code “delectable” at check out to receive 10% off your order

Melissa Petermann’s Video: Mindset, Margin, and Tactics

ADE’s Teacher Training Videos

ADE’s Patreon Community