About once a year, I have a panic about teaching my kids a foreign language. Last year, I panicked right before I left home to walk through the Lake District for three days. I came home to a massive pile of books that I’d forgotten I’d ordered. My panic comes from regretting that I don’t…
How is narration going in your homeschool? Personally, I have a 4.5 year old who likes his chance to tell back, a nearly-seven-year-old who is pretty enthusiastic (although will miss out major plot points from time to time), and an eight year old who is completely capable but who is a bit slow to start…
In less than six weeks, I will close the books on our homeschool lessons for the year and herald the beginning of our six week Christmas vacation. Six weeks may seem like a long break for a cold and dark time of year, but with a cluster of family birthdays mixed with the extra activity…
Too often in homeschooling, math feels like a subject tacked onto a literature-rich, Charlotte Mason based curriculum. Not only can it feel dry and rote, but it can also be a solitary subject, with our kids working on their own math problems at their own pace. But while individual work might be necessary, it doesn’t…
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 mother. There is a tension between the practical demands on our time and…
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 main responsibility that we have as persons is to accept…
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 process usually wears us…
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 country depends upon the government, which could just as easily squander its many assets as it…
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 character, then we are still on the journey, pursuing the same goal as…
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 exam, answering multiple choice questions, highlighting, and rereading the same chapter…