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Paper Sloyd: A Handbook for Primary Grades
The Teacher’s Handbook of Sloyd
Mathematics: An Instrument For Living Teaching
Books Charlotte Mason used for teaching Sloyd:
For a year and a half, A Delectable Education has been offering weekly podcasts to help equip and educate parents and teachers interested in the Charlotte Mason Method of education. These podcasts have had the goal of sharing Mason’s ideas, principles and practices in the wide variety of subjects offered in her curriculum. This past winter, three webinars were offered to provide more in depth consideration of some areas of study, to show visually what is difficult to display in words only on a podcast. We promised that we would do our best to make these available to the public for purchase this spring, and, the time has come! Keeping Time: History Charts and Tools, presented by Emily Kiser; Nature Study: Object Lessons and Special studies, presented by Nicole Williams; and Lesson Planning for a Living Education presented by Liz Cottrill are all available under the “Teacher Tools” tab.
A Delectable Education is pleased to announce the launch of our new website with expanded opportunities for you to further your education in the Charlotte Mason method. In addition to our recorded webinars, we are delighted to offer other additional teacher training videos now also available for download. These are all presentations that we and our friends have presented at Charlotte Mason education conferences that you may now have the opportunity to enjoy and learn from in the convenience of your own home. This is only the beginning of teacher training instruction resources ADE will continue to offer:
The Twenty Principles by Art Middlekauff
Mathematics, a Mountain Perspective by Richele Baburina
Science: a Vast and Joyous Realm by Nicole Williams
Charlotte Mason History for the Twenty-First Century by Emily Kiser
Vision for Children: Cultivating Moral Imagination through Living Books by Liz Cottrill
Now through the end of the month of May we are offering a special price on the purchase of all 8 Teacher Training Videos. This bundle includes each of the 3 webinars we broadcast this winter/spring and the additional 5 videos available now. Please visit adelectableeducation.com to see this offer and all the new material on the site!
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“The work of the Parents’ Union School led up naturally, and without any real break, to the larger life of the public school, for which the children by their early training were well fitted, as it seemed merely the stepping from one classroom to another, so comprehensive and intelligent had been the previous preparation.” (In Memoriam, p. 45)
“The history studies of Forms V and VI (ages 15-18) are more advanced and more copious and depend for illustration upon readings in the literature of the period…But any sketch of the history teaching in a given period depends upon the ‘literature’ set; for plays, novels, essays, ‘lives,’ poems, are all pressed into service and where it is possible, the architecture, painting, etc., which the period produced.” (Vol. 6, pp. 176-78)
“I feel one of the joys of the Sixth Form is that there the girls can go on with the subjects they are most keenly interested in–subjects they have been longing to have time for–and freedom of choice is one of its characteristics…[they] learn how little they know–what fields of knowledge there are of which they know.” (A P.U.S. Headmistress, writing in the Parents’ Review)
“But the people themselves begin to understand and to clamour for an education which shall qualify their children for life rather than for earning a living. As a matter of fact, it is the man who has read and thought on many subjects who is, with the necessary training, the most capable whether in handling tools, drawing plans, or keeping books. The more of a person we succeed in making a child, the better will he both fulfil his own life and serve society.” (Vol. 6, p. 3)
“All callings have one thing in common––they are of use; and, therefore, a person may prepare for his calling years before he knows what it is. What sort of person is of use in the world?” (Vol. 4, Book I, p. 205)
“The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (Vol. 3, pp. 170-71)
You Can Teach Your Child Successfully, Ruth Beechick
(Contains affiliate links)
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“Supposing we have got them, what is to be done with these golden hours, so that every one shall be delightful? They must be spent with some method, or the mother will be taxed and the children bored.” (Vol. 1, p. 44)
“In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part out in the fresh air.” (Vol. 1, p. 43)
“‘Except ye become as little children ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.’ ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ ‘And He called a little child, and set him in the midst.’ Here is the Divine estimate of the child’s estate. It is worth while for parents to ponder every utterance in the Gospels about these children, divesting themselves of the notion that these sayings belong, in the first place, to the grown up people who have become as little children.” (Vol. 1, p. 12)
“So education does not start without much to go upon; the child is a person, a whole person, with all the powers latent that he will ever have. Therefore, education must advance altogether if it advance at all. One-sided development will leave other sides maimed. ‘Wisdom is justified of all her children,’ and varied knowledge in many directions is as necessary for the growth of the mind as varied food for the body.” (Kitching, Children Up to School Age and Beyond, p. 9)
“The consideration of out-of-door life, in developing a method of education, comes second in order; because my object is to show that the chief function of the child––his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life––is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses; that he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge got in this way; and that, therefore, the endeavour of his parents should be to put him in the way of making acquaintance freely with Nature and natural objects; that, in fact, the intellectual education of the young child should lie in the free exercise of perceptive power, because the first stages of mental effort are marked by the extreme activity of this power; and the wisdom of the educator is to follow the lead of Nature in the evolution of the complete human being.” (Vol. 1, pp. 96-97)
“The flowers, it is true, are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every new flower they come upon is not to them a Picciola, a mystery of beauty to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight.” (Vol. 1, p. 53)
“There is one thing the mother will allow herself to do as interpreter between Nature and the child, but that not oftener than once a week or once a month, and with look and gesture of delight rather than with flow of improving words––she will point out to the child some touch of especial loveliness in colouring or grouping in the landscape or the heavens. One other thing she will do, but very rarely, and with tender filial reverence (most likely she will say her prayers, and speak out of her prayer, for to touch on this ground with hard words is to wound the soul of the child): she will point to some lovely flower or gracious tree, not only as a beautiful, but a beautiful thought of God, in which we may believe He finds continual pleasure, and which He is pleased to see his human children rejoice in.” (Vol. 1, pp. 79-80)
“We have now started on the noblest work that can engage the mind of man, the guiding of the growth of our own child. Notice I say, the guiding of the growth, not the systematic training of a child in the ways that were good enough for his father and ought to be good enough for him.” (Roscoe, The PNEU in the Home, p. 2)
“Guard the nursery; let nothing in that has not the true literary flavour; let the children grow up on a few books read over and over, and let them have none, the reading of which does not cost an appreciable mental effort.” (Vol. 5, p. 215)
“They must grow up upon the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle or reading-made-easy. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told.” (Vol. 2, p. 263)
“The children should have the joy of living in far-lands, in other persons, in other times–a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their story-books.” (Vol. 1, p. 153)
[If there is nothing better to think about,] “the children who are persons endowed with minds, clamour to be taught to read and write. We can do it with our children if we like, but it must be at the like cost, the exclusion of the intellectual and imaginative interests and joys proper to children, the devotion of dreary hours every day to these dead pursuits. No, let us be content to be the handmaids of Nature for the first five or six years, remembering that enormous as are the tasks she sets the children, she guides them into the performance of each so that it is done with unfailing delight; for gaiety, delight, mirth belong to her method. If a child chooses to read and write before he is six, let him, but do not make him; and when he does begin, there is no occasion to hurry; let him have a couple of years for the task.” (Mason, Three Educational Idylls, 811)
If you would like to study along with us, here are some passages from The Home Education Series and other Parent’s Review articles that would be helpful for this episode’s topic. You may also read the series online here, or get the free Kindle version from Fisher Academy.
Home Education (Volume 1), Part II, Chapter I; Part V, Chapters 1-3
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Outline for Out-of-Door Life for Children
PNEU Pamphlet: Children Up to School Age and Beyond, Elsie Kitching
PNEU Pamphlet: The PNEU in the Home, Mrs. Roscoe
Three Educational Idylls, Charlotte Mason
Excellent blog post, relevant for these early years by a former head of a CM School
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“Two or three points are important. Children in lB require a quantity of matter to be read to them, graduated, not according to their powers which are always present, but they require a little time to employ their power of fixed attention and that other power which they possess of fluent narration. So probably young children should be allowed to narrate paragraph by paragraph, while children of seven or eight will ‘tell’ chapter by chapter. Corrections must not be made during the act of narration, nor must any interruption be allowed.” (Vol. 6, p. 191)