What made Charlotte Mason craft her curriculum around the subject of history? Why is the subject important for today’s students? Join us on the podcast for our discussion today as we begin our series on Charlotte Mason history lessons.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

History Rotation Diagrams

Video Explaining History Rotations

Episode 11: Why Study History

Episode 12: The Chronology of History

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 said, “next in order to religious knowledge, history is the pivot upon which our curriculum turns.” And so we turn from Bible lessons to the subject of history, which informs so much of the rest of the curriculum. 

Nicole
Absolutely. 

Emily
So, Nicole, would you start by telling us why Charlotte Mason thought that history was so important, this mainstay pivot of the curriculum? And that’s a very striking claim.

Nicole
It is. You know, next to religious knowledge. But once you understand how she approached it, I think it really makes sense. History in a Charlotte Mason education isn’t about memorizing names and dates. It’s about knowing people. It’s about understanding ideas. It’s about helping a child find their place in the world. I think it’s so cool. It’s not in an abstract way or a theoretical way, but seeing themselves as part of a long and living story. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
Through history, our children are introduced to the full scope of human experience. They come to see the choices people have made, their courage, their failures, their faithfulness. And over time, they develop principles they can apply to their own lives. That’s the beauty of history. It quietly shapes the way we think and the kind of people we are becoming. 

Our children also live in a global world now, but that doesn’t guarantee understanding. And Miss Mason believed that every child should be given the opportunity to form relationships with people, she said, of all sorts and conditions, of all countries and climes, of all times past and present. This kind of history study doesn’t create pride. It creates humility, compassion, reverence, and a deeper sense of the duties and the joys of a full human life.

Charlotte Mason did call it the pageant of history. It’s a rich, colorful backdrop filled with the drama of real lives lived. A pageant isn’t a dry timeline. It’s just not. It’s color, it’s story. It captures the imagination. And when our children are given the right kind of books, rich with story and truth, they begin to picture themselves in those scenes. They connect to the characters and they grow in empathy. And this widens their understanding of the world. And as they grow, the scope of history grows with them, beginning with simple stories and expanding to layered global narratives, and that develops their understanding over time. As a pivot, history provides a natural rhythm for the rest of the curriculum. The literature, geography, art, and music can all be informed by the time period that the child is studying.

And that doesn’t mean that we’re building unit studies, just to note, or trying to force connections. We don’t have to do that. It simply reflects what Miss Mason called the natural and inevitable coordination of certain subjects. When a child reads a poem written during the same era they’re studying in history, they start to hear the voices that time more clearly.

We do have some hints in this section we’ve been reading in volume six about when things came in. But you have done so much research in this area and really had many things come to light. 

Emily
Yes, I still remember when I was poring over all the programs. I mean, it’s been 10, 11, 12 years ago now, and literally feeling like I audibly heard the Hallelujah Chorus. I could see her big picture.

Here, especially, I think we see the lack of details in volume six. I remember struggling for years and it wasn’t until we had the digital collection that we had that whole scope of programs of her curriculum, what she did, that we could really put it all together. We were all kind of fumbling in the dark trying to make sense of these little clues and hints. And we had a couple of programs here and there, but we didn’t see that whole big progression of a child’s education. So once we did, that just helped narrow it down. Yeah, we got all of those details and then we’re like she’s not told us anything wrong, it just was lacking the whole picture. 

Nicole
Right exactly. 

Emily
So as we began our podcast, actually it was right at the same time, we set out to answer what does Charlotte Mason history look like? We kept hearing conflicting things and people have very strong opinions because we know this is such an important subject. We had just those little glimpses but we were still left with how is this applied? What do we do?, especially as Americans or any other context other than her British children. What do we do? 

So in order to develop an understanding of one’s own place in history and to begin having an informed patriotism, which she talks about, Charlotte Mason students continually study the history of their own country. That may seem odd, like what? We don’t want to have this narrow scope. But that helps put our country into perspective. And when we have a deeper view, we don’t just get the glorified simple stories, right? Of the heroic times. We get the good, the bad and the ugly. And we can really see the trajectory of men’s thoughts. I’m using men in the human term here, men and women. 

So Form 1B, that is the first year of school. We call it first grade here in America. They start with the earliest history of their country. Mason called this the heroic age because she said it was best suited to the children because the story moves on broad, simple lines. This is the time before we have a continuous chronological written record of everything that’s going on in our country. We have maybe some isolated stories, there’s periods of darkness, we don’t know what’s happening everywhere in the country at the same time. 

But this is the thing I think is most misunderstood. This is not just a collection of hero stories, right? Charlotte Mason was adamant that this is a consecutive chronological study. We’re not jumping around here and there. We are talking about the earliest history of our nation and that it is read in a consecutive way.

So she called the heroic age the time before “authentic history” began. So we have the Heroic Age and we have Authentic History. And so these stories include maybe some more mythical or legendary details. We have those in our own country, even though those are a lot nearer the present time than the ones that they were telling in Britain for her students. But it is that time before the continuous written record. 

So what this looks like in America is the time as Europeans were making contact. We have anthropological studies of the people who lived here before Europeans made contact but we didn’t have any written record from them, so we can only make anthropological assumptions about what was happening in the country. And we have a little bit. So we include those as we can, but really the records that we have that are going to give us that consecutive chronological narrative are from the contact with Europeans who came to explore and then settle. So that’s the first year of school.

And then form 1A, which students were in for two years, second to third grade. They’re continuing a chronological study and that goes up to the present time. So, it’s Charlotte Mason, that was the same book. We don’t have a great option for that. I’ll talk more about that in subsequent episodes. But in her school, that was just the first part of the same, we would call it a history spine, or the same book that looked at the whole history of the nation. So it’s not isolated tales.

Okay, so that’s form one. Then as they move into form two, so this is the upper elementary years, they’re in form two for three years. The first of those years, they’re going to have a deeper look at their country’s history starting again from the earliest recorded history through the present. They’re going to cycle through that in four years. And they’re going to add a second stream of history. Now we’ve come up with the same stream because it’s just something we see that’s descriptive of what Charlotte Mason did. She had multiple…

Liz
It’s the flow.

Emily
Yeah, it is. And that there’s three streams ultimately moving side by side. So they’re going to start their second stream and that is to add the history of a neighboring country. And this, she said, should be contemporary, be the same time period as what they’re studying in their own country so that they get a bigger perspective. We have a very different perspective of the events leading up to the Revolutionary War than British people do, right? Particularly those living at that time. 

And so we’re going to talk later in our form two episode about how to choose that neighboring country. But in a nutshell, it is a country that has strong cultural and political significance. So in England, that was France, even though there were much closer countries, even on the same island, there were some distinct countries at the time. And I would argue that for us in America, despite where we live, because of our, not only the founding documents, our governmental structure, and who controlled us when we gained our independence, but also because of our shared language and a lot of cultural things and continuing alliances…and those all match up with what England and France have. 

Liz
It just has the most influence on our lives. 

Emily
Yes, so I would argue that is England for us. It’s not our closest neighbor like Canada or Mexico. They have a very similar history of exploration and exploitation by people coming here. But all of those things go into making our Neighboring Country. 

And they can start that first year with the earliest history of that country and that’s the only departure from studying those things hand in hand at the same time. So that’s an option, you don’t have to, but it’s a good option. 

So then in Form 2a, which is fifth and sixth grade (the upper two years of that form) through Form 3, they’re continuing that four-year cycle through their own country’s history, and then they’re definitely lockstep, contemporary chronological history of their close neighbor’s country. But they add in a third stream, and that is the study of ancient history, which of course cannot be contemporary with our modern stream. And it’s a cultural look. So she would look at different cultures in the ancient Near East and then the culture of Greece and then the culture of Rome, for example, instead of trying to cut a sliver of time across all of those cultures. So we get a bigger picture of their scope. 

And then as they move into Form 3, they’re even adding current events. So not only are they getting their modern time, which could be as long ago as a thousand years, and their ancient time, they’re also getting the very current present-day history that is being made right now. 

So then as they move into high school, as we call it in America, Forms 4 through 6, they’re going through their last rotation of history. And Form 4 is what we would say 9th grade, Form 5 is 10th and 11th, Form 6 is 12th grade. They advance onto more stiffer books, which with Charlotte Mason, we look at the easier books that she used and think they’re pretty stiff. But for her students, they were even stiffer, a look at their own country. So now we’re getting into motives and ideas and really wrestling through those things that make the events happen.

The neighboring country instead of just one country, it’s going to expand to all of Western civilization. If you’re in the West, I guess that would be different if you’re in a different context. And then they go through another look at ancient history. And she said there was actually less time for that, so they just got a broader overview of it. And then they continue their current events. So really, it’s four streams of history going hand in hand.

Yeah, so overall I’ve hinted at it, but there were three four-year rotations overall, but it’s a total of an eight-year history cycle. And I think this is something that’s not recognized broadly. We get questions about this all the time, but that ancient stream is four years and it’s stacked on top of the four years for the modern stream. And they have to go in lockstep because when you get to the end of your modern stream, you’re at the beginning of where your modern stream picks up. And so you’re ready to cycle back and they all it’s a seamless chronological flow over eight years, but we covered every four. So the ancient ends up where the modern begins the following year. 

So again, Charlotte Mason lays this huge emphasis on chronologically progressive work. That is the underlying fundamental principle of history studies. So we aren’t picking and choosing what time period our kids are most interested in. If we’re jumping into this, we might want to start at the beginning, but if we have just studied maybe the 19th century we need to move forward. We need to continue the 20th century into the present because that chronology, until we get to the end of the current time and then we cycle back, that helps give them that vibrant understanding of the pageant of history. If we’re jumping all around you’re gonna be like me when I started organizing the library and going did that happen in the 1800s? When was the Middle Ages? You know, we just don’t have those things. 

So I know this is probably as clear as mud from this very general thing that I have and we have diagrams on our website that we’ve had for the last 10 years. But I have just recently made a video showing how your one child and then subsequent children move through the forms and that will be linked in the show notes. So from this wide feast of history, Charlotte Mason says, “we may not be able to recall this or that circumstance, but the imagination is warmed. We know that there is a great deal to be said on both sides of every question and we are saved from crudities in opinion and rashness in action. The present becomes enriched for us with the wealth of all that has gone before….we may not delay to offer such a liberal and generous diet of History to every child in the country as shall give weight to his decisions, consideration to his actions and stability to his conduct.” (6/178)

Liz
Wow, that’s so wonderful. 

Nicole
It is. 

Liz
You know, and it’s really common for us to not have ourselves had a chronological approach to history in our own education. It was often really piecemeal at best and inconsistent and scanty which is why Emily got lost. You know we just also had very superficial you know knowledge about anything.

So in our desire to improve this understanding for our own children and give them a better sense of the sequence of the centuries, we naturally think we should always start at the very beginning, right? And that is fine if you only have one child to consider, but suppose you’re starting with older and younger children altogether. Charlotte Mason said it was okay to start, as Emily’s pointed out, at any time as long as you’re always moving forward and when you arrive at the present, you return to the beginning. So it’s kind of like a merry-go-round. It doesn’t matter where you hop on, you’re going around full circle, right? So each child joins in where the older students are, all ages are kept together and they’ll arrive at the beginning, maybe at a different age, but they will receive the whole picture. In Charlotte Mason’s day, her whole school moved together every year forward. 

Emily
And by whole school, we’re talking 40,000 children across the British Empire. 

Liz
You know, another thing that sometimes concerns us is if your country of origin was a different one from where your children are growing up. And this focus in history should be of the child’s own, the country where he lives. But other nations’ histories can be studied a bit as they come into the geography lesson or they’re going to be encountered when that country has events that involve the country that was being studied in school. 

So it can also be studied, another country’s stream of history perhaps…as a family you could do it outside of regular lessons if you want to or when a student is older and has a lot more interest in the parents’ country of origin, they could study it. But Charlotte Mason really thought that a superficial glimpse, and I think you touched on this, of everything left us to make unfair judgments when a better grasp of the history of our own culture can give us more appreciation of the scope and the complexity of other cultures. So to learn one thing well now prepares us to want to know other things well and not be satisfied with little tidbits. And when we value our own rich history, we can comprehend how much other people groups in the world, other cultures, value their own struggles and accomplishments and heroes. 

Emily
Yeah, and I think that and that is another benefit of these streams. It’s not just even the one neighboring country that expands to Western civilization. We get the ancients, which are generally living very differently than we are today. And I think that helps expand our purview.

Liz
Full picture.

Emily

Thank you for joining our discussion today. You may like to go back and listen to our earlier episodes on history, particularly episodes 11 and 12. You can find links to those as well as all of our resources for the Charlotte Mason history rotation in the show notes. As we continue to discuss Charlotte Mason curriculum this season, we invite you to read along with us in chapter 10 of volume six. We have created a reading schedule so you can keep up with us.

Next week, we will be looking at the specifics of history lessons in Form 1, Grades 1 through 3, or early Elementary School. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to spread the feast with the Charlotte Mason Method.

If you’ve been following along with our series on Charlotte Mason Bible lessons, you likely have some lingering questions. Where should I place my students in the progression if they’ve not been doing Charlotte Mason from the beginning? Or where can I, and where ought I not, combine my children? What about specific translations or how to assess my child’s progress? We’ll do our best to answer these and more in today’s podcast.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Episode 224: Combining Multiple Students

Episode 290: Bringing Older Children into the Charlotte Mason Method

Episode 17: Bible 2.0

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 today we are concluding our series on Bible lessons in a Charlotte Mason curriculum. This subject, Charlotte Mason believed, was the most important of a child’s education. In fact, she said a child might, in fact, receive a liberal education from the Bible alone, for the book contains within itself a great literature.

There are still some common questions and concerns that we often hear about Bible lessons and we’re going to be addressing those today. So Nicole, why don’t you start us off? 

Nicole
Yeah. So one of the big questions is can I combine my children for Bible lessons? And this is a question we often hear, and with some subjects there’s some flexibility in that. But in this one, I hope that you’ve seen with the big picture that it’s not really possible. It’s not advisable. Forms one and two are already combined, so that is a blessing to you and those students where you’re going to need to read aloud, you have everybody together. So that is good. But once the student moves to form three and beyond, the Bible lessons shift. They begin reading independently at that time and the readings increase in complexity and depth, both spiritually and intellectually. And at that point, it’s important that that student work at their own level.

Over the course of 12 years, the Bible curriculum offers a truly sweeping and comprehensive exposure to scripture, covering the overarching story of both the Old Testament and the New Testament and the exhortation to Christian living. All of the New Testament is read and all but three and maybe four ones touched on of the Old Testament are read.

That kind of depth and progression won’t be accomplished if you hold back your older students so that they can be working with you. And it’s not appropriate, developmentally if nothing else, for those younger students to be pulled ahead for you to go on and do that with the older kids so that you’re keeping everybody together. The beauty of this curriculum lies in its gradual unfolding designed for the student to grow in maturity and understanding as they go year by year through this course of study. 

So no, the Bible lessons aren’t a subject to combine any more than she has already done there with form one and two and three and four together. It’s really essential. 

Emily
And anywhere from three through six can be combined for Saviour of the World.

Nicole
Right. So we’ve got a little bit of that built in, but other than that, you need to stick to where your child is form-wise. 

Emily
We do have an episode on combining multiple students that might be of interest to people who are asking this question, number 224, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. 

Well, placement is another question. Like well I am bringing in a high schooler so shouldn’t we go back to form one and two? They don’t have that foundation. And I think we have a whole episode on the topic of bringing older students in that might also help, so that’s Episode 290. But this is a question of like, what level should they be at? How much is necessary? What is a prerequisite for coming in? And we’ve seen that unfolding. We’ve seen the robustness. 

But there was a note on Charlotte Mason’s programs that answers it for us. It asked members to remember that an average pupil should cover the whole program suitable for their age. So that means if you have a high schooler they should be covering the high school program right, forms five and six.  Other than math or grammar, which were always spelled out, the student is given the work of their age appropriate form. Yes, they might have missed some of that foundation, but they can still do the work. And I think using the commentaries, that is developmentally, as you were saying, the kind of questions that they’re going to be wrestling with and will prepare them. So it would maybe be insulting to them to keep them in just the “read and narrate”, even to go through the earlier books of the Old Testament. 

Nicole
That makes a lot of sense. Like even quantity-wise if they’re reading the amount that you know like a lower form student was and not reading that commentary…yeah I think you make a really good point there.

Emily
And they of course will have the same wonderful foundation in the gospels because they always have that going through. 

Liz
I was gonna say, yeah that’s kind of the root and they’re still getting that. 

Emily
And so but note in the program note it said “the average pupil,” so I think the exception would be severe learning challenges. We would make accommodations for that. But again, that is a per child decision and not just a sweeping, I have an older child, they’ve missed this and they have to go back. 

So of course, the caliber of work that we will expect from them will be different. If we’re bringing older students in and they haven’t had that groundwork, they haven’t been narrating for six, eight years, they’re going to give less robust narrations and that is okay, right? But they’re going to still be attempting the material that would be appropriate for their age. We need to make sure that they have an opportunity to do more oral narration than probably we would expect a student who’d been in Charlotte Mason for that whole time because they’re learning that skill of narration. So as always in Charlotte Mason, we’re looking at the child in front of us and then we just want to help him or her make steady progress from wherever they are at. 

But Bible, this isn’t a skill. Material isn’t a skill, right? It’s more their own mind and development that’s helping them, maturity, helping them tackle that material. 

Liz
Another common question I think we get is which version of the Bible should we read? And I will say that she did not use children’s picture Bibles or, you know, various retellings of the Bible for the Bible lessons. So all I would say is to read whatever is the version that you already currently use or are happy with. Just make sure that it’s not a paraphrase because there’s a lot of those out there too. We’d like it to be a good English translation. 

Emily
I did find a note when I was re-looking through the programs that for the New Testament epistles they were told to read them in the Revised Version, which is not the King James, they call that the Authorized Version. 

Liz
It was new in her day. 

Emily
It was very new in her day. I thought it was interesting. That’s the only other time I’ve seen an edition specified. The Costley-White commentaries they use in Forms 3 and 4 are the text of what we call the King James, what they call the Authorized Version. But so it was really interesting I think just because that was a good resource and that was the translation they used.

Liz
It was a new translation at the time. So many of the common ones that we have in use today, we have many good translations, but those weren’t available in her day. But we’ve seen over and over in every subject that she always used the best current book that was there that met the standards of what was needed for the subject. So yeah.

Another one I get a lot of times is moms that talk about children being confused by alternating from the Old Testament one day and the New Testament the next day. They say the kids request, you know, to not be going back and forth. Have you had that question before too? 

Emily
I’ve heard it, but I’ve never had it from my children. I mean, we’ve always done it. 

Liz
Yeah. Well, part of it for me that I think about is that they’re used to this in a Charlotte Mason education. They read multiple history books. They even sometimes have a couple of different geography books, and they’re used to every day being presented with different books. So that should not really be confusing, especially if you just say today we’re reading from Matthew. And if you do that moment or two, minute or two at the beginning of a lesson to review the last lesson, they should be able to pick up and carry that thread. 

Another thing I think that a lot of moms find really interesting, and I probably should have brought this up when we were talking about form one and two, is that younger children tend to narrate the Old Testament better than the New Testament, which is always surprising to adults because I think we have greater familiarity with the New Testament as a whole, as a rule.

But children find the stories in the Old Testament to be just fascinating and maybe because it’s more familiar or maybe just because there’s a lot more didactic information in the New Testament. They aren’t as naturally attracted to that. 

Emily
It’s more abstract than it is a narrative. Even the life of Jesus, there’s long passages in there of his teaching that does seem more abstract. 

Liz
It’s very difficult, which is another reason they only do those synoptic gospels because the gospel of John is far more abstract and a six-year-old has a rough time narrating “I am the vine and you are the branches.” 

Emily
I do want to say before we move on from the alternating that I think the strength of it is that they make connections… 

Liz
I was just gonna say that. 

Emily
I’m sorry to preempt you! 

Liz
No, go for it!

Emily
I just have seen it over and over with my kids. They say “that reminds me of…” and it’s whatever Bible Old Testament we’re reading when they read it in the New and then they see and make those connections between the whole story of scripture and I think that as an adult is one of the most amazing things about the Bible is how unified it is after being compiled and written over such a long period of time. 

Liz
Yes and I remember first graders also having amazing connections between the Old Testament and other subjects that they were studying, and it’s just exciting. You know, that they would see a connection between a greedy king in the Old Testament and one of the kings in ancient Greece or something like that.

And then I do find that a lot of moms are a little bit nervous about teaching the Bible because they know it is an authoritative book and it’s a very in-depth book. I just want to remind us all that it was given to people of every level of life and that is what is so amazing about the Bible is that it speaks to scholars and it speaks to the unlearned person equally.

But many mothers I think, are intimidated a little bit too because what if I don’t know the Bible very well myself? Moms have told me, you know, I’ve never read it through myself. I don’t know a lot about it. And I just want to encourage you because especially with your Form 1 and 2 students, lessons are really short and you’re just taking it one little bite at a time. And if a six-year-old can handle it, you can handle learning along with them. And that is actually one of the joyful things about this lesson. I think a lot of us feel that we are much more informed from having taught this lesson, do you not? 

Emily
Absolutely. 

Liz
And you know…were you going to say something? 

Nicole
I was going to say, especially with the use of the commentary that we have to work with, it’s really a help. 

Liz
That Paterson Smyth, yeah. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
And there is nothing wrong if your children ask. I think this is the other fear that goes alongside of that is my children are going to ask me things I don’t know and that’s okay. It is perfectly fine to say I don’t know.

But like Nicole said, the Paterson Smyth often answers some of those most basic questions. But I think it’s wonderful even in nature study or any other subject. If we don’t know, our children realize adults don’t know everything. I can keep learning even when I’m an adult. And we are leading the way, so to speak, and showing them how to do that. And I just would encourage you to use the Bible passage right in front of you that has just been read and has just been narrated and discussed to the best of your ability. It may answer some of their questions, just point them back to it. This is why we’re teaching our children, because knowledge is delectable, right? 

And I think that we all just need to realize this is one book that contains many books, but they are all tied together in some way. And that over 12 full years of school, how many days is that? I didn’t do the math, but it’s just a slow cumulative building of understanding of this one amazing book that is actually there to be studied for a lifetime. 

Emily
We also want to consider how to assess our students. I think this is a common question that we have. How do we know they’re doing okay in this subject? And maybe this one particularly? So I would just encourage you to go back to the lesson objectives for each form level that we laid out in these last three episodes and ask yourself at the end of the term or the end of the year, has my child grown in his knowledge of the Bible? Has he gained new thoughts of God? Has my child grown in his or her ability to narrate the Bible? And I think that is the baseline for assessing their progress. 

It also can help to look back at their exam questions from term to term or year to year. Remember, they don’t need to include everything that we felt was important from the Bible text or specific lesson. But do the answers show that they have built relationships with the ideas and stories in their Bible lessons? And I think that will give you a good idea if they’ve made progress or not. 

Liz
Just yesterday, a mom told me that at the beginning of the school year her six-year-old could hardly say anything at all about every Bible lesson and after two or three weeks of this she began to be quite nervous about it. But she said I just kept encouraging him to listen and say what he could and we had little conversations in the last you know five to ten minutes of the lesson. She said yesterday was his exam and she said “I could not even write down all the things he could remember” and she said he still knew whole sections almost verbatim.

Emily
Well, do you have any closing thoughts to share with us? 

Liz
I think that story kind of sums up a lot, doesn’t it?

And I think with all of our subjects, we have no idea the true value of what is happening here. We are serving the feast, presenting the subjects, and the students deal with it in whatever way they need. And who knows at what point in their life they will reach back and draw from these lessons in the future.

Emily

Thank you for joining the conversation today. Please check the show notes for links to the resources that we mentioned in this episode and to explore these discussions further. You might enjoy listening to our previous episode, Bible 2.0 is our last name because we’ve already redone it one time. 

But next time we will be turning our attention to the pivotal subject of history. And we think you’ll find Charlotte Mason’s method to be a brilliant design. We’d love it if you would read along with us. And so we have a reading schedule for Chapter 10 of Volume 6 linked in the show notes. We hope you’ll tune in as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

In today’s podcast we are taking a close look at Charlotte Mason Bible lessons for high school students. Which portions of the scripture did Miss Mason reserve for our oldest students? How are they equipped to continue reading the Bible on their own after the full feast of Bible lessons from their whole education? And where do they go from here? Listen as we discuss!

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Scripture Journals (ESV and CSB options) on Amazon or here

The One Volume Bible Commentary JR Dummelow*

The Saviour of the World by Charlotte Mason (Amazon for Vol 1-3 or Riverbend Press for all 5 volumes)

The Gospel History of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by C.C. James

ADE Bible rotation

ADE Schedule Cards

Episode 128: Form 1 Bible Immersion Lesson

ADE on YouTube

*For OOP (out of print) or hard to find texts, 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
As we continue exploring a Charlotte Mason curriculum, we have made it to Forms 5 and 6, which is Grades 10 through 12, and their Bible lessons. So, Nicole, will you remind us what portions of the Bible these students study in their last years of high school? 

Nicole
Yeah, things change a little bit now. Their Bible lessons expand again. By this point, students have moved through nearly the entire Bible narrative, and now they’re ready to engage with more challenging books and kind of finish off some of the things that they haven’t got to yet. 

So in these upper years, students no longer follow a chronological storyline. Instead, the focus shifts to the prophetic and the poetic books. So they’ll read Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, along with the minor prophets like Hosea, Amos, and Zechariah. And they complete the entire book of Psalms over the course of three years. So there’s some mashing up going on here. And the final term adds in the book of Job, even. 

And then just note there that I feel like this demands more of the child. Again, we’re looking at a child who has had all this foundation and is ready to deal with some of these deeper books. In the New Testament, the student reads from the epistles and the revelations. Paul’s letters to the early church, the pastoral letters and the general epistles from Peter, James, John, and Jude, and then Revelation, and that completes the entire New Testament. They will have read all of it at that point. These texts help students explore not only the doctrine, but the theology and the Christian living. I really think it pulls in all of that, how faith is worked out in community and suffering in the face of cultural pressures. So really a greater maturity is required to read these books. 

Alongside their New Testament readings, students continue the Saviour of the World, which we’ve talked about in previous episodes. These again are Charlotte Mason’s retelling in verse of individual episodes in the synoptic gospels that are read alongside a harmonized account of the Gospels. And one thing I didn’t note in the last episode is that all the students who would be in any level to be reading this Saviour of the World would all be in the same place. So as they rotate through, as new children come up into this, they’re going to be at the same place as their older brothers and sisters, or the older kids in the class. So…

Emily
Yeah, it is robust, isn’t it? 

Nicole
It is. It’s beautiful when you think about what they will have accomplished and just really the deliberateness of it. You know, how many people do we know that have never finished reading the Bible? And with this scope and sequence, there are just four books that aren’t included. One is 1&2 Chronicles, but that really dovetails with 1&2 Kings. So they have covered that and…I think I did write it down somewhere. 

Emily
Did they leave out Daniel? 

Nicole
No, Daniel’s read. I think Leviticus. And Song of Solomon.

Emily
Leviticus is covered slightly in the tiny bit, but it is in there a little bit. Okay. 

Well, not a lot changes as far as the frequency of their lessons. They still do four Bible lessons a week at this level, but they do get longer. So they’re 30 minutes instead of 15 or 20 as the younger kids. So they have a bit more time to deal with these meaty books. Again, it’s the same format for Old Testament to New Testament, and we alternate Old Testament, New Testament, Old Testament, New Testament throughout the week. And they still have Bible as the first lesson of the day, just like all the other forms. So that format is going to stick with them after 12 years. Like “this is the first lesson that we do”.

And then again, just as in form three and four where they had a lot more other theological books assigned, church history or whatever they may be, those were viewed or intended to be read as Sunday reading. Because you’ll notice there’s no Sunday reading portion on their programs. It’s just all that extra stuff. 

Which, Sunday reading, I don’t think I even said last time, but that was just special reading that was set aside for Sundays to, you know, when everyone kept the Sabbath or whatever you would have specific occupations to do on that day of the week that you didn’t do other days. 

Okay, so looking at the individual lessons, just as in forms three and four, these can mostly be independently done by the students themselves. Students will use the same methods as the lower forms, the reverent, expressive reading, even if it’s to themselves. They’re going to recall the last lesson at the very beginning to form the links in the chains, you know, bring forward what they’ve done before. And then they’re going to narrate in the words of scripture. 

But the addition is that they use a one volume Bible commentary, which I think it’s still in print. There’s hundreds of copies available used. It’s just been in print for a really long time. And I’ll show you that in a minute. But before beginning a book of the Bible, they would read the introduction from the commentary. So if they were going to study Isaiah, they would read the introductory essay article in the commentary on Isaiah before they began reading Isaiah. And then after reading the passage for the day, they would narrate and then they would read the corresponding notes for those verses or those chapters, whatever they read from scripture, they’re going to read the commentary after they’ve read and narrated from scripture. And that is similar to in forms three and four as well. 

So this is for the Old Testament, the New Testament, and then basically it is for Saviour of the World, except instead of a commentary, that’s where they would read the poem. So they’re going to start the day by recalling the last lesson. They’re going to read from the gospel history, that harmonized account of all of the gospels, the passage that will be covered in the poem or poem set to be read that day, and they would narrate the Bible from the gospel history. And then they would read the poem. And then you would probably have subsequent narration and discussion as well.

In addition to the introductory articles, there are some in the beginning of the commentary, there’s some just general Bible context articles and those were assigned as well in turn over those three years. So they would read a significant portion of this Bible commentary. 

So the lesson objectives for forms five and six, Charlotte Mason said, “thus they leave school with a fairly enlightened knowledge of the books of the Bible”. And I think we’ve seen that with this scope and sequence from not just forms five and six, but all along. And she said it was aided by biblical scholarship, having the commentary again, like we talked in form three and four to introduce those ideas or to have the commentary to work through some of those troubling or seemingly contradictory parts of the Bible. And Charlotte Mason believed that would give him such a confidence in the authority of scripture. 

She also said that “they would have an increased reverence for and delight in the ways of God with men”. So they will have read much of what we have recorded for the ways God has personally interacted with humankind. 

And then thirdly, “that the person of our Lord as revealed in his words and works becomes real and dear to them.” So they know God and they know specifically their savior. 

And lastly, she says, and all of this is just one extended quote. I just thought I’d pull out like four separate objectives here. But lastly, she says, “loyalty to a divine master is likely to become the guiding principle of their lives”. So that’s our aim in all of these Bible lessons. 

As far as teacher prep goes for lessons, again, just as I said before, even though our students are becoming more independent and they’re really wrestling with these texts themselves in their lesson time, I think Charlotte Mason would tell us we need to have an understanding sympathy with our students. And we can do that by preparing to discuss with them, especially at this age and as they deal with some of these…yeah, there’s a lot of sorrow and hard things in the books that they’re going to be encountering. I’m thinking of the prophets, but I’m also thinking of Paul and his letters and what people in these early churches we’re going through that is going to be things that they’re probably going to come up against. And so this is a rich environment to have conversations with our children before they leave our home, you know, about these very real things. 

But again, Charlotte Mason advised us to avoid preaching at our children. She said that there was a danger in provoking them to form a counter opinion, and if we were to do that, if we were to come down too heavy handed about this is what this means or no, that’s wrong and I think this, or even just to apply it to their lives ourselves bluntly, that we are actually putting them in a greater danger to doing opposite of what we would like to see them do with their life. Instead, Charlotte Mason encouraged us to let scripture point the moral out to them directly. So we’re again, not the showman of the universe here, just like in other subjects.  We are letting the text, the biblical authors and God himself, interact and speak directly to them through the books that they read. 

As far as resources, again, I love using scripture journals and this is the one for Psalms and I just brought it you can see. They still make scripture journals with just one book in it when it’s a huge thing. Some of the epistles are teeny tiny and they put three or four of them all together. So those are still an option.  And what a nice library that they will have, especially if they do take notes, like to have lots of space as they rustle through these texts. 

And then this is the Bible commentary that Charlotte Mason assigned. It’s by J.R. Dummelow. He’s the editor. It’s a one volume Bible commentary. If you’ve been reading along with us in Chapter 10, you read an extended quote that the author or the editor himself writes about it. And Charlotte Mason says we can’t add on to it, and just how parents are maybe skeptical about using a resource that’s not from their specific denomination or tradition. Just know this is one commentary on the entire Bible. It does not have time to get into partisan denominational quibbles. This is very general and I think that is the benefit to using one. And again, you used this a lot. 

Liz
It’s very succinct. It’s just the main ideas in each book of the Bible. It doesn’t have time to go into a lot of side trails. 

Emily
Yes. Charlotte Mason said it was a very practical value, in that it just covers the principal difficulties of the passage that the child is going to encounter and hopefully will have questions about. But it doesn’t take one or other of the extremes that she says, no, this is where she’s quoting what Dummelow says, that his aim, which was “to find the spiritual value and authority of the Bible have been enhanced rather than diminished” in the discussions. 

Okay, so that’s that. And then just like in Form 3, Saviour of the World, again, this is the edition from River Bend Press, but there are some paperback editions. It’s also available online if you prefer to read online. So there are six finished volumes, and so they read one a year for all six of the years that they’re in Forms 3 to 6. And just like you said, whoever is reading Saviour of the World is reading the same volume together. And then the Gospel History of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by C.C. James is the harmonization that Charlotte Mason used as the inspiration for the poems in Saviour of the World. 

And then we have created a few resources. The first is the Bible rotation. So we have everything that they cover by term for forms five and six, and then also the sections of Saviour of the World that they would cover in a term. So that is a free resource that we will link in the show notes. And then I will just mention briefly our schedule cards. We have these for all of the forms so you know how long and how frequently, many times a week to do each lesson. 

Liz
And if you have children that are of different ages, sometimes moms are concerned how they can do all these separate Bible lessons. So again, just to remind you that these students of this age are independently reading all of this and it’s wonderful if you can keep up with them and be reading that yourself in case they do want to discuss something and the Savior of the World lesson could be done with Children in the last six years of school so they would still at least have that one New Testament day together. And just as I said with forms three and four, when you have younger children sometimes because the older students have a longer day, at this point in high school they have four hours of lessons, so perhaps they would start before the younger children begin their day so you might have two sessions of bible but some of you have many sessions of math lessons every day too. Right?

I find so many questions, various concerns come up about the Bible lessons. But I think we’re going to get to that next week. And I think as far as the upper grades, you guys have pretty much answered everything right?

Emily
Can you think of anything else somebody would want to know? Why don’t they read the Song of Songs? 

Nicole
Hahahaha.  

Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s…probably just pretty, I mean, I just find it very exciting to watch your older kids grapple with the Bible in such a robust way when we know that it can be hard even for adults to do that and the habits that we’re setting with them through this are just hopefully going to serve them for a lifetime. They will know how to work with the Bible, how to use a commentary, how to use articles.

Liz
It occurs to me too that they find, you know, there’s whole sections of the Bible that are neglected in being read by most adults. And when they have had to read them for school, they’re not going to be as intimidated about entering back into Hosea or Micah or other prophets. 

Emily
Maybe they’ll even be curious about it. 

Liz
It’s just like every other subject we’re planting seeds for their future knowledge quests that they go on. There was something you said earlier too about them having a confidence and I find this across the board with my home school graduates who’ve done Charlotte Mason, just a general confidence. But if you are faced with questions about the Bible and the validity of it and that you have truly read all of it, you’re not thinking, did I omit? Did I not read that part? Is that in there somewhere? And I don’t know what’s in there. But no, they know what’s in there. And they’ve taken it slowly over these years. They do know what’s in the Bible. 

Emily
That is such a good point. Yes, I think I have heard many people who talk about college students going off and losing their faith because somebody challenges something that they were taught, opposite of what they were taught and says, but this is what the Bible says, or it’s in there. I just saw one in a TV show the other day, just all these things. And I’m like, you’re just missing the whole point, right? And having that bigger picture in context. Yeah, it does lend such a confidence. 

Liz
Yeah. And Charlotte Mason said they are going to have more doubts and questions if they have not read it than if they have.

Emily
So we hope that you can see how robust and thorough their Bible education really is.

Thank you for joining the conversation today. You can find links to all of the resources that we’ve mentioned today in the show notes, including a demonstration lesson that the three of us did with a Saviour of the World scholar. And you can hear how a whole lesson plays out with the commentary as well in that episode. 

So we invite you to read along with us this whole season. The reading schedule link is also in the show notes. So next time we will conclude our series on Bible lessons as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

How do Charlotte Mason Bible lessons change as students get older? Join us for today’s discussion on the podcast as we turn to middle school students and answer some common questions like, why can’t we continue Bible lessons with the whole family? And how can I help facilitate separate Bible lessons for my older students? Tune in to hear some insight to help navigate these issues, and more!

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

The Old Testament History by Costley-White and Hardwich (online version or hard copy at Living Library Press)

Commentary on the New Testment: The Four Gospels by W. Walsham How*

Scripture Journals (ESV and CSB options) on Amazon or here

Acts of the Apostles by Ellen M. Knox

The Gospel History of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by C.C. James

The Saviour of the World by Charlotte Mason (Amazon for Vol 1-3 or Riverbend Press for all 5 volumes)

ADE Bible rotation

Bible: Forms 3-4 Lesson Breakdown

ADE Schedule Cards

Episode 128: Form 1 Bible Immersion Lesson

ADE on YouTube

*For OOP (out of print) or hard to find texts, 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
All season long, we are exploring a Charlotte Mason curriculum and we are in the middle of our series on what Charlotte Mason thought was the most important subject and supreme knowledge due to a child, Bible lessons. Today, we are looking at the next group of forms, Forms 3 and 4, or grades 7 through 9. Students in these forms basically do the same work as one another, right? 

Nicole
Well, three and four, yes. Yes, in form three and four, the students continue reading the Old Testament, but now they’re reading it for themselves. And so you’re going to talk later about what they would use to facilitate that so that the omissions are made. But they’re still following a clear chronological path in using these resources. 

One important note is that I’m going to describe the full rotation that the students in Form 3 and 4 move through chronologically, but you don’t necessarily have to start at the beginning. You know, Genesis is the beginning of the rotation, but if you just finished Genesis, or that student just finished Genesis in Forms 1 and 2, they could pick up an Exodus or whatever that actually looks like. 

Emily
And subsequent children will jump into where older children are in that rotation. 

NIcole
Yes. So again, as long as we’re moving forward, we’re doing fine there.

Like in Forms 1 and 2, the students read from Genesis to Kings, but while the content covers much of the same narrative, students in Forms 3 and 4 encounter a broader scope and greater depth with the readings. The readings are longer, for one thing, and they are more layered because the rotation weaves in the prophetic books alongside the historical ones, allowing the students to connect not just with the historical events but also the prophets who wrote about them and interpreted them.

Some of those books that they read were Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Nahum. And then they also read some of the books from the post-exile. So that was kind of a new thing. Daniel, Ezekiel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Malachi, Esther, and Jonah. This rotation is just shy of four years. So three and two terms, I think, is what we have. Again, students will just, you know, rotate back through when they get done. And maybe they will miss a little portion of something possibly, but that’s not to worry because we still have Forms 5 and 6 to go and they’ll get covered. 

Emily
And you’re saying that because they’re only in Forms 3 and 4 for three years. 

Nicole
Yes. 

Emily
And so if this rotation is longer, they’re not going to make it through the whole time. 

Nicole
Exactly. Right. So now in the New Testament, students begin a deeper engagement there also, and they read for themselves the entire book of Acts and the gospel of John. Acts takes two years and John takes one year, so they are taking it slowly and really dealing with that.

But don’t worry, they’re not leaving the synoptic gospels. They are reading them and they are using Charlotte Mason’s own poetry to do that now, very slowly reading them alongside a harmonized version of the synoptic gospels that you will share more about in a minute. 

It is very fitting, I think, that after they have studied for six years those synoptic gospels, really learning those stories, that they are now primed and developmentally ready to deal with them in a little bit of a different way, a deeper way. So really lingering on each episode. 

Emily
Yeah that’s true. 

Well I’m gonna cover the lesson format and just as I have said in previous episodes remember volume six is not a comprehensive teacher’s manual. It was absolutely necessary for the readers back when Charlotte Mason released it as well as us now to study the programs and see it, because she’ll leave out whole parts. Actually if you are looking for forms three and four in this section of volume six chapter 10, you’re going to not even pick up until the very last paragraph after you’ve talked about Forms 5 and 6 that they’re doing Saviour of the World, right? So just know that we’re drawing from those programs to give you a fuller picture of how things are. 

Forms 3 and 4 have Bible lessons four times a week, just like Forms 1 and 2 did. And it’s the same two Old Testament and two New Testament and alternating. So you do Old Testament, New Testament, Old Testament, New Testament through the week.

Their lessons get a little bit longer, so instead of 15 minutes they have 20. And it’s still the first lesson of the day.  Now in the programs we see a whole lot of other books assigned than the ones I’m going to talk about lessons for, and those Charlotte Mason mentions are good for Sunday reading. So these are books on church history and other theological books that they were assigned, so those are not fitting into their typical morning lessons. So we’re just sticking with those as I talk about the format. 

So for an individual lesson, I think the biggest change, and you’ve mentioned this, is students are going to be reading for themselves. They were each to own a copy of the Old Testament history, which I’ll show you in a minute. They had to have their own copy of Saviour of the World, the poems, and also the commentary for their New Testament reading. I think she’s assuming everyone has a Bible to read from as well.

So the note from the programs at the top of all of form 3/4 Bible lessons says “in all cases the Bible text as given in the books used Must be read in the narrative first” so when they did Acts they were not assigned…she didn’t say read these chapters of Acts for this time. She gave page numbers out of the commentary for Acts that was assigned but that note tells us no, they were to be reading the section from Acts in the Bible that that portion of the commentary was going to be covering. 

Students could work independently or a teacher may set up a lesson or even listen to them read aloud. Just because a child is reading for themselves doesn’t mean they’re reading for themselves in isolation necessarily, right? And if you have a group of students, they’re absolutely working together, taking turns reading, but they have their own copies to follow along in. Of course, we want to have trained them by this time to recall the previous lessons, so they’re making the hooks in the chain or the links in the chain that Charlotte Mason talks about. It should be a habit that they just know after six years of doing it that that’s what we do. 

And then they were to read the Bible passage as set by those lesson books. So if it’s Old Testament, it’s coming actually out of the book that also contains the commentary. I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But if it’s Acts or John, they’re reading the portion out of the Bible text for the day, and then they narrate that first. And they’re again supposed to use as close of language as possible. Charlotte Mason actually talks about that in this section, believe, of chapter 10, that that becomes just a second nature for them to do that. And it’s wonderful that that language has gotten into them. 

So basically, she says the big process of our method of lessons doesn’t change. The children are reading reverently, but now they’re reading reverently to themselves or aloud to one another instead of, you know, relying on the teacher to do that. And we still only do a single reading before narration. So then after that Bible was read and narrated, then they would read the commentary for that section. And then they might have some more narration or discussion that they want to do. So again, these lessons can happen with a teacher present, but the main work of the reading should be done by the students. 

Now that is for their Old Testament lessons and it’s for their New Testament Acts and John. I’m going to describe The Saviour of the World lesson because that one is just a little different. It has a lot more parts to it I think. So The Saviour of the World is Charlotte Mason’s narrative poems on, really reflections on, Bible passages and she doesn’t just go through each gospel. She used a harmonization called The Gospel History written by C.C. James. And so that portion is all text of scripture, but it’s harmonized from all four gospels. And it will literally tell you which part is from which one and which verse. So it’s just a harmonization. And that is what she uses as her source material for writing her poems. 

And so she wanted students to read and narrate the portion of The Gospel History, which is the Bible words, before they were to read that and narrate it, before they read the poems. And you can find tables in the back of Saviour of the World that tell what portions of The Gospel History correlate. There’s also tables online that you can find as well. I think we have them linked in our Bible episode. We’ll throw links in the show notes here. 

So they would read and narrate the passage for the day that came from the poems, from the Gospel history, then they would read the poem from The Saviour of the World, and then they would narrate and discuss the whole lesson. Because they’re going to hopefully get new ideas about that passage from the poem. She said that they were, the poetic nature of the language helped give them those new ideas, and she thought they were specifically well-fitted to deal with things in poetry that they wouldn’t necessarily from prose alone. 

We do have notes of lessons for a Bible lesson at this age that seems to be an introduction very heavily directed by the teacher to the life of Paul and the world at his time. And I think that would be an excellent thing to do before you dive into reading Acts or the portion of Acts that covers Paul’s journeys. So you could do a similar lesson in place of that from the straight reading of the text on occasion, but that’s not every time. Most of the lessons are going to be this reading and narrating from the scripture and then adding the knowledge from the commentaries. 

So our lesson objectives are very much the same as Form 1 and 2. We want to make sure our children are getting new thoughts of God. And they’re also hopefully having a deeper understanding of the Bible itself. And they also, and I think this is where Charlotte Mason is just brilliant. She knows they’re going to start having this critical debating, challenging, you know, the things that they’ve been taught. They’re trying to struggle and work things out for themselves. And she thought it was very important that we not shy away from difficulties in the Bible or perceived difficulties we might have, or even some of the criticism ideas that were very prevalent in her age, but are, you know, we have different ones, but they’re still very important. And those, if when our children leave, if they never encountered that and they just hear from us, the Bible is 100 % reliable, which we believe it is, but you know, it’s no error, all this stuff. And then they come up against some of these ideas that question things that really can undermine the faith foundation that we’ve been trying to instill in them. So she thought that into the books that she was using are bringing out some of those ideas, just again, in a very general way, not getting into super…different denominational quibbles but kind of broad issues with the Bible as a whole and she thought that if they dealt with these in the context of their Bible lessons that that would give them confidence in the reliability of scripture rather than undermine it, right? 

Liz
So basically you’re saying what one of the differences besides that they’re being more independent, right, is that the two New Testament days have different content.

Emily
Yes, which is always very hard to explain and I hope you can follow along here. 

So as far as teacher prep, even if your students are going to be working independently or more independently, I really do think it is important, and I get this idea from Charlotte Mason, that the teacher have an understanding sympathy with their students and also we know they’re going to be wrestling with some more heavy passages and ideas about the Bible as a whole. So I think it rests on us to be familiar with what they’re going to be reading so we can have discussion with them. And really even keeping up with that on a weekly basis. 

I have maintained the same process that I’ve done for all of my elementary years and prepped like the week’s Bible lessons together for myself before teaching them. And so I think that’s a really helpful practice. Sometimes it has to be just the day before, but you just need to carve out some time to make sure you’re up on that. And then that might give you an idea of, hey, you know, today instead of you reading this passage, I think we’re going to talk about what is going on in the world at this time. 

So let me show you briefly the resources that we have. This is a reprint of The Old Testament History by Costley-White and Hardwich. This is not just the commentary; it also contains the text and Charlotte Mason talks about this book extensively here as well as…I think she talked about it in volume three, but it’s mostly here. And these you can find online, but since this is the text students are actually reading I know most of us prefer to read from real books, physical copies, Living Library Press has begun reprinting these and has the first three volumes available. 

I do also think since students are getting their own, or they’re reading for themselves, giving them a scripture journal for their Bible lessons would be excellent. You can even use it to mark, you know, where they’re supposed to read to or whatever if you’re forecasting out their lessons for them. And again, Charlotte Mason talks about that in volume one, that that would be a good plan to give a child so that at the end of their education they have a whole library of the books of the Bible, not just in one.  But they may want to jot down notes. You know, this is kind of taking ownership of their lessons in a different way than before.

The Acts of the Apostles, this is what was assigned. And again, this does not contain the Acts scripture at all. It’s just commentary on it. So you would read the scripture first and then read the commentary portion of it. This has been reprinted by Yesterday’s Classics, but is also available online. 

I have not found a reprint of the commentary that she used for John. It’s the Four Gospels or Commentary on the New Testament: The Four Gospels by Walsham How. And we will put a link to that in the show notes because it is available online. 

And then Saviour of the World. This edition is published by Riverbend Press and each volume is a beautiful sewn binding. It’s going to last forever. And it does have some pictures of art in it as well. So that’s The Saviour of the World.  There are other editions, I think the first three are in a very inexpensive paperback edition on Amazon. And those are very nice as well. And then this is The Gospel History of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by C.C. James, that harmonization of the gospel. So you would read this, narrate the passage, and then read the poem or poems that correspond to that passage in The Saviour of the World and narrate the whole thing.

Liz
And that poem is kind of like her narration, but they will be asked more as they get older to sometimes do their narrations or themes in verse. And so it’s a little bit of help along that road for them.

Emily
Yes, and you see some poetical narrations included in this portion of volume 6. 

Liz
And she said, I believe here in chapter 10, that poetry can sometimes give us even more potent ideas than writing in prose.

Emily
To help you remember all of this, we also have a free Bible rotation that just shows you at a glance all of the parts that they’re doing. So Old Testament, New Testament, extra books that were assigned. You might want to find a comparable resource from your own denomination as you do that for Sunday reading. And then also it includes The Saviour of the World Breakdown by term.

And if you want even more help than that, we do have Bible breakdowns for Form 3 and 4 Bible lessons for all three of these streams: the Old Testament, The Saviour of the World, and the other New Testament lesson a day. And those forecasts I should say also include exam questions for each term, so that’s another thing that you do not have to prepare for. And we do have our ADE schedule cards that tell you how long and how frequently, not just Bible lessons, but all lessons can be at this stage. 

Liz
And speaking of scheduling, I think this is one of the perplexities for a lot of moms. You’ve had your little ones and you’ve gotten used to those form one and two lessons with your younger kids. And then all of a sudden the oldest one has gotta move on. And this is kind of sad for moms. Well, let me tell you that never stops. You’re always a little sad when your children grow up and become independent and begin to do things on their own, but of course it’s a critical thing as the Bible is the most important lesson. It’s especially important for a 12 or 13 year old who’s moving into seventh grade, or Form 3, to begin to take ownership of this Bible lesson. But how do you do it when the younger kids still need their lessons? And there is more than one way to accomplish this, but one common way that seems to work for a lot of families is that the older student who actually at this point has three and a half hours of school every day and not just three, that they actually begin school before the younger children do. So if your start time is nine, they might start at 8.30 or just whatever it is in your family. And that way, if you do sit down with them and accompany them with their lesson, even though they’re reading on their own, but want to have some conversation with them, that works pretty well for most moms. And then the younger children can just begin at the normal time, while the older one goes on to do something independently. 

But we are working toward independence. I mean, that is our goal, right? That our children, when they finish school are able to cope with their own life themselves. I just thought I should bring that issue up because that’s a common question. 

Emily
Can you think of any other concerns or questions at this age? 

Liz
I think you should not worry that it’s going to be super overwhelming for them because even though there’s more reading it isn’t beyond their ability at that age.

Emily
It might be a good push. 

Liz
Yeah. And you know, some children are reluctant to leave the safety of mom being more in charge and they resent even sometimes they want independence and they don’t want independence. 

Emily
I did find a note, there’s several notes at the end of every program, and one common one at this level is that forms three and four can work together in all history lessons, which is including scripture. Charlotte Mason considered this a history because it is, we’re reading the history of God’s people. So just to know if you have a ninth grader and a seventh grader, even though mostly they reserve John for ninth grade, they would jump into that. 

Liz
Oh yes, so if you have a seventh and a ninth grader, the seventh grader might actually begin with John. Because as Nicole keeps pointing out in these episodes, we always move forward. But it doesn’t matter where you get on the merry-go-round because it is a cycle. So you’re going to come around to these things again.
Emily
Thanks for joining us today. Next week, we’re going to continue the conversation as we look at high school Bible lessons in Forms 5 and 6. You can find links to all of the resources we discussed today, including a demonstration lesson episode on The Saviour of the World. Now, we did that for high school, so there’s an added component. But if you’re really floundering at this age and going, how did these lessons actually look, we have that for you. So we invite you to read along with us Chapter 10 of Volume 6 as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

This episode of the podcast focuses on what Bible lessons look like in elementary school. You’ll learn how often and for how long Charlotte Mason Bible lessons last at this age, how to teach the lessons, and we will share some of our favorite resources with you.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Paterson Smyth commentaries

Scripture Journals (ESV and CSB options) on Amazon or here

Bible Art Resources:

• Bible Picture Portfolios
• Bible in Art: New Testament, Richard Muhlberger*
• Bible in Art: Old Testament, Richard Muhllberger*

Bible Atlas Favorites:

• Holman Bible Atlas 
• Golden Bible Atlas*

ADE Bible rotation

Bible: Forms 1-2 Lesson Breakdown

Episode 128: Form 1 Bible Immersion Lesson

ADE on YouTube

*For OOP (out of print) or hard to find texts, 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
We are working our way slowly through Chapter 10 of Charlotte Mason’s Volume 6 all season long and we invite you to read along with us. The link to our reading schedule is in the show notes. 

So last week we started our series on Bible lessons in a Charlotte Mason curriculum and today we’re going to focus in on what those lessons look like in forms one and two, or grades one through six.  Elementary school. So Nicole, would you share what portions of the Bible children cover at these ages?

Nicole
Yeah, so in the Old Testament this journey begins in Genesis and it moves forward with selected stories from Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy…Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. And in this chronological sweep of the Old Testament narrative, children then learn about the patriarchs, the exodus, the wilderness, the conquests of Canaan, judges, and the early kings. So they’re really getting a lot of it. The PNEU programs, while they have just very small changes to them, like they stopped at this verse rather than this verse, it really was a set rotation. But we do have a rotation of this that you can access. We’ll link to it in this episode. 

Also to note that forms one and two, so that’s six years, families would have to cycle back through again. So this is a three-year rotation for these students and they would go back through again.

Emily
Well, and Old Testament is actually even four, right? And they cycle through.

Liz
So it’s a little different. Four for the old, three for the new.

Nicole
Yeah.

Emily
And with that, not every student is going to begin with Genesis, right? They’re just going to jump into the –

Nicole
Yeah, you have a younger, you know, now your child is in third grade and you have a first grader coming up, they’re just going to jump in where you’re at as long as everybody’s moving forward. 

So in the New Testament, these students, Forms 1 and 2, would cover the Synoptic Gospels. So they would have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, along with the first eight chapters of Acts. So it usually was about a year for each one of these – Matthew, and then Mark actually got combined with Acts; it’s short. And then Luke was the next year and then the cycle begins again, so you’re going back through. Nothing is rushed here in these lessons, but the stories are chosen kind of deliberately so not everything is included. There are omissions made which I’m sure you’ll talk about.

So this is from the creation to the early church that the children are using to start their Bible education, getting very familiar with.

Emily
And she specifically said narrative portion. Like, you when we get to those genealogies, we’re not reading those.

Nicole
Right.

Emily
And some of the more very scandalous stories that are included in the Bible are not covered in their Bible lessons for school because the children are narrating them.

Nicole
Right. Right. 

Emily
OK, so just before we go on, I just want to remind our listeners, we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but volume six is not a comprehensive how-to teaching manual that we wish it was, right? And so we are also, as Nicole’s just pulled from, like you’ve been going back looking through the programmes, that’s how we developed our Bible rotation that we put on the website. And so it’s a summary.  It’s just not comprehensive. And so there are some details that she doesn’t talk about at all that we’re going to see in the programme. So we need to remember that she is referring her readers of volume six to the programmes. And so that’s what we have done for you.

So I’m going to cover the lesson format. You just gave us the big picture of all of the Bible that they’re going to read in these ages at these form levels. But what do lessons actually look like? Well, Bible lessons are weekly four times a week.  She did not do Bible every day. They did two Old Testament and two New Testament lessons each week and they rotate. So we do four out of five days. Charlotte Mason’s students did six days of school and she did Bible on four days but we’ve cut that. And at this age, Bible lessons are 15 minutes long and that includes every part of the lesson that I’m about to share with you.

Also, Bible lessons we see on every timetable that we have, they are the first lesson of the day and that was very intentional on Charlotte Mason’s part. All other parts of the time table would move around. She did math at beginning, math at the end, whatever, but Bible was always first because she thought that that gave the children the idea that the Bible was their most important lesson of the day.

So moving now, so that kind of gives you the framework for the week, but each individual lesson, every lesson, a short passage is read – about 10 to maybe up to 20 verses, but that would be really long. Charlotte Mason in volume one tells us that the passage that we read should cover a whole episode if possible. I know just with my own children reading about Balaam that was a many, many days lesson because we could not get through the whole passage in a single time.

And so each lesson covering that short passage begins with asking the students to recall what the previous lesson was. This is very important. Charlotte Mason talks about it linking the chain to the previous knowledge. We’re pulling that back to our mind and then continuing on. So they really are getting this consecutive knowledge of whatever subject they’re doing at school. So that is the same in Bible.

And then the method really can vary a bit. There is not a system. You don’t have to check every little part off because the passage is going to somewhat dictate what we have to do with it, right?  So, Charlotte Mason actually in this part of volume six mentions beginning reading from the commentary where the passage is pictorially treated. If we take that as “always begin every lesson with the commentary”, we’re gonna go, why did she want us to do this? It seems counter to…he’s writing the commentaries that she used, which I’ll share more about in a minute, to the teacher of Sunday schools, right? And this is not even in complete sentences, but I think the key is in that where the passage is pictorially treated. So he is really good at, he’ll say, “close your eyes and picture this” and he’ll give a description of what the setting was or some cultural custom that we would be unfamiliar with. So we’re not reading the whole of the lesson in the commentary, but just those vivid descriptions of setting. And Charlotte Mason in Volume one affirms what I’m interpreting here. She says that occasionally it might be a good idea to read a portion of the lesson. So for some, we just want to have some kind of setup of a lesson to get our children in the framework. Sometimes that could be a map or a picture and it’s not even part of the commentary.

So then the teacher reads the Bible passage, always reading the Old Testament. Sometimes they could read the New Testament for themselves because they’re not skipping verses or whole sections that they might be. But she said it was very important, and this is a habit that we’re going to start with them in these years and they’re going to continue it for themselves for the rest of their education, is the reverent expressive reading of the text because we want to engage them. And so that’s why she would read part of the commentary and set the scene for them so that they’re already imagining what the passage is going to be talking about.

And then the students narrate. And this is the unique thing about Bible lessons. She said in language as close to the Bible text as possible. So we’re training them to deal with the Bible a little differently than their other books they’re going to be doing. Charlotte Mason says, and this is a note from the programmes, it’s on every programme, “in all cases, the Bible text must be read and narrated without interruptions”. So don’t add explanation, don’t do your little sidebars, mom and dad. Don’t ask them questions or anything like that. Don’t let their questions come between the reading and the narration. That has to happen together at this age.

And then at the wrap of the lesson, there’s going to be some discussion. And we want to give the children some new thought of God. So we want to do this…that’s the overall objective, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But we’re not preaching at them. We’re not trying to apply this lesson that is so clear in the text to a child who might really need to learn that lesson, right? We want to give them some new thought of God.  And those often come from the commentary. And I would say that is the strength he will often bring out. “This is the point to be born in mind” or “impress upon the children this”. And I have been shocked and sometimes I think, that’s dumb, you know? And then that is what gets my child’s attention. And they continually bring that up from there on out. So I think that he truly was gifted and Charlotte Mason did as well.

So the Bible itself should be applying the lesson, the moral lesson to our children, right? We’re not going to be doing that. And if they bring it up and want to discuss it, great. So some discussion at the end. And then in volume one, Charlotte Mason talks about maybe looking at a painter by some masterful artist who is going to give them a reverent idea or just a different picture of it. So that could happen occasionally.

So that’s kind of your pieces, you can see it follows a basic structure, but it’s not something rigid that every single one of those has to happen every time. You do not need a picture every single lesson or whatever.

So as far as our lesson objectives, this kind of goes for the whole subject as well as each lesson. But like I said, new thoughts of God, that is the idea that we want to convey to them. We also want them to gain familiarity with the Bible text and its language. And again, that’s why we require them to narrate in language as close to scripture as possible. We also want to interest our children in the geography, the history, and the customs of the Bible, because that really helps us get a good framework for understanding the context of it. And so this is just a slow, methodical 10 verses, you know, about at a time, a slow chewing on the passage. But again, just like you said, Nicole, it’s not here and there and slip shot and, you know, pick and choose. It is a consecutive, she called it the gradually unfolding picture of scripture, right? The whole narrative.

So as far as teacher prep, my advice to you is be ready for this lesson. First of the day, it’s usually easy to like, okay, it’ll get us off on a good footing. But I find it helpful to read the passage and the commentary ahead of time. And the commentary is for the teacher, but there are times we might read a portion of it to the kids. And so from there, I will know, hey, you know what would really get my child’s attention is to find a map of this. You know, we’re talking forces coming from this side of the valley and from this, they’re meeting and having a battle. Like, let’s get an actual map of what this area is. We’re somewhere on a journey. Let’s show how far it is from Canaan down to Egypt or something like that.

But I think most importantly, we need to be in tune with the divine teacher. And I may need to discuss what my kids have brought up instead of what I had planned for the day. And that often happens, you know, and because we are encouraging them to dig into the Bible and relate to it themselves. 

So just to wrap up my portion of this, I wanted to share the resources. So these commentaries are by John Paterson Smyth.  Charlotte Mason extols them extensively in I believe all of the volumes that she talks about Bible lessons, one, three and six. And it was from these commentaries that she chose which passages to assign. So when we have on our Bible rotation, the passages from the commentary and then we tell you what passage, or what books of the Bible are covered or chapters, it’s not the whole of those chapters. And it’s in the order that Paterson Smyth, which when you get to the Kings is very different than how we would read the book of the kings in First and Second Samuel. 

And so this was what was assigned on the program. And you would have to go through the commentary to figure out which passages you were to read. And that was with the omissions that would be made so that we are not dwelling on the things that they’re age appropriately not able to dwell on or cannot narrate, like genealogies. Yeah, just keep that in mind. So go by this. And so, you have to read this as a teacher ahead of time to know our Bible…well, I’ll talk about that in a minute. 

OK, this is something that Charlotte Mason talks about having that would be good for children to own individual books of the Bible bound. She talks about that in volume one. I find it really helpful for me to do my lessons using a scripture journal. So this is just the Gospel of Matthew. And I can mark in here. I can highlight. I can write my notes of what I want to bring out or like remember here’s the map…that is how I prep. I actually write it in here but we just are reading this and it’s nice to keep on my school cart just by itself. 

We do have or I have created some Bible picture portfolios that coordinate with Charlotte Mason’s Bible rotation for Forms 1 & 2 and do curate some pictures that go along with the stories that you’ll be reading in a term but you could also use a good, well, here’s a two set or a double set. The Bible in Art, here’s the New Testament and the Old Testament. These are by Richard Muhlberger, I believe. Yes, Richard Muhlberger. But there’s lots of other books like that. And so I will often pull a picture and I make a note of that. 

So here is our Bible rotation that we have on our website. You can access this for free and we’ll have a link in the show notes. And that just shows you how much was covered in the term, but again, that was assigned from the Paterson Smyth commentary. And then if you really want some help with your lessons, we have gone through and made Bible lesson breakdowns, which coordinate the passages from the Bible. We break them down. So here’s exactly which verses you’ll read each lesson. And we took those from the commentary and also linked to the chapter. So you can prepare that portion. 

And finally, we do, this was, think, our very first product.  Schedule cards. We have these for each form level and if you want to know how I know Bible is four times a week for 15 minutes. We have these scaled schedule cards. You just cut them apart and they have a timeline so you know, okay, I haven’t gone over my maximum amount of lesson time for this day and helps you build your own schedule.  I encourage people to if you have multiple children print those off in different colored paper for each form just to help you not lose your mind. 

Liz
Which we definitely need. 

Emily
Yeah, mom you’re gonna talk about some common questions people have. 

Liz
Yeah because I can hear them even, you know, through the cyberspace here, you know, and I definitely talk to hundreds of moms every year. So I know some of the common hiccups, trepidations, stumbling blocks that we encounter. And one of them, I think, always with Charlotte Mason, is adding to what she says or taking away from what she says to do. 

So I have found over 30 years of doing Charlotte Mason, she was pretty trustworthy. And after all her years of teaching, she knew what could be done in the lesson. But one of the common things I think probably the worst thing we do is just to come to this lesson unprepared. And it does not take very much time to read those 10 or so verses and the little short notes that are in the Paterson Smyth commentary. And it makes all the difference with the children. They know when you’re ready and when you’re not. 

And another thing I find is just leaving out that whole discussion that Emily is talking about. It is such a rich time with our children and, you know, to read and narrate is a three or four minute process. You have a good 10 or 12 minutes to have conversations that are going to go into their heart and mind for the rest of their life. So skipping that conversation…I think one of the main reasons people often feel they need to besides being unprepared is simply that “all my children are too young to have any theological questions”. Well, I find that the younger they are, the more theological their questions are. Anyway, I just would encourage you never to skip the discussion time at all. 

And another common problem I find is that many times a mom feels that, or even the dad, that the dad should do the Bible lesson, you know, for the school because in the family they generally do the Bible teaching or sometimes they’re even pastors. I think it’s wonderful for dads to teach the lesson, but they should kind of understand what her point for this lesson was. It may be very different from the way you normally would teach a Bible lesson with your children. 

And I think one of the biggest issues is reading too much, not following the guidelines of the passages she actually offers. So we ignore the things that she omits and we read way too much content to them. 

I don’t know. Can you think of anything else that is just a really common stumbling block here? 

Emily
One we brought up last week that I just want to reiterate here that these are Bible lessons for school and it is not replaced by devotional time.

Liz
It’s very different likely from what you do in your family. 

Emily
I think the other thing is, if you go to a church with expository preaching and you want to align, well, at home, we’re going to study this because we’re doing this in church and it falls outside of the scope that you laid out, Nicole, of what your children would be covering. I think you’re really messing with the whole picture. And we’ve talked about that in the past few episodes, too. And since that may be wonderful to do for your family reading, please go ahead and do that to prepare yourselves. 

Liz
Supplemental to school. 

Emily
Yes, I think we wouldn’t deviate from the lessons. 

Liz
Another thing that just occurred to me is that we have a tendency to say, you know, this commentary was written by someone of a faith persuasion that isn’t mine. And I just want to encourage you, you know, this is not to give all the commentary information that you would get as an adult. And that his purpose really was to help the teacher to bring some vital things out from the passage that’s under study. 

Emily
And that’s what you will see. It is very, he was an Anglican pastor, but Anglicans are known for the middle way. Like they are really kind of middle of the road. But he is not deviating into very doctrinal, denominational issues. It is the big teaching, the big idea of Matthew, the big idea of Luke. Well, he doesn’t do one on Luke, but Mark or whatever it is. And remember, you’re not reading it all to your children. So if there’s something in there you disagree with, great. Don’t talk about that. 

Liz
That’s why you read it ahead of time so you don’t get stuck. 

Emily
But his little descriptive passages in which he says “the point to bear in mind” or “bring this home to the children,” those are the parts to not miss.

Thank you for joining the conversation today. Next time, we are going to look at Bible lessons for forms three and four, which is grades seven through nine, as students go deeper into the Bible as they mature as persons. We have included links to all of the resources that we mentioned today, along with a podcast episode demonstrating the three of us doing a form one Bible lesson. And for the rest of the season we’re inviting you to read along with us. So that reading schedule I mentioned before is also in the show notes. We hope you do as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.