learning and growing, naturally.
Charlotte Mason advocated for children to receive a broad and generous education. While we, as educators, see the importance of setting aside planned, structured time to give our children a ‘feast’ of ideas, it can be more challenging to partake as a mot ...
From the last two principles, we see that we have a will, a capacity to make choices about the ideas we accept or reject, and that we also have reason, which justifies the ideas we accept. This brings us to Charlotte Mason’s nineteenth principle: The mai ...
From the last post in the Mother Culture Roadmap, we learned that the will is our means of choosing to do what is right, and that it is easily fatigued. We often try to reason with ourselves in order to work up our will to do the right thing, but this pr ...
In Charlotte Mason’s fourth volume, Ourselves, she describes a country called Mansoul. This country is full of potential - there are fields, natural resources, cities with libraries and art museums. But bounty is not guaranteed. The success of the countr ...
Mother culture is about the pursuit of education for ourselves. We recognize that ‘education’ is not something we finished years ago. It’s not something our kids need to go through before they hit adulthood. If education is about the formation of our cha ...
Does reading broadly, from several living books, on a frequent basis, sound overwhelming? Or to put in another way, does the goal of educating yourself seem so distant that you are reluctant to begin? If we still think of learning as cramming for an e ...
Once we have brought together a collection of living books that widen our interests, and have carved out a bit of time to read them, what do we do next? How can we engage with our reading in such a way that we are changed people when we put the book down ...
In the last post in this series, I discussed education as the science of relations. It is right to develop an interest in a wide variety of knowledge and hence to have many ways of knowing and loving God and His creation. But how are we to obtain that kn ...
When my eldest son started his first ‘formal’ year of homeschooling in January, we made some changes to our morning time together. While we already had the habit of reading lovely stories and enjoying music together, I began to ask my son to narrate our ...
I recently had the chance to speak at the online Learn Free conference about one of my favorite topics: Charlotte Mason for the Early Years. I focused my talk on three questions that Charlotte Mason believed would help parents direct their child’s educat ...