“What’s your takeaway from the workshop?” “I really need to work on my art anxiety.” I spent last week in the Lake District, with three days at the Charlotte Mason Centenary Conference in Ambleside, put on by the Charlotte Mason Institute and University of Cumbria, the institution that incorporated the Charlotte Mason College (formerly the…
What does it mean that children are born persons? This is Charlotte Mason’s first principle and one of the most important. If we don’t grasp her meaning, we will struggle to make sense of the rest of her ideas and apply them well in our homes. It is deceptively simple. We all have an intuitive…
Last month I had a chance to chat with Cherelle German about spreading the feast Charlotte-Mason-style in my homeschool. I know it’s very typical to say that it was a blast and a super fun conversation, but I genuinely enjoyed our conversation and it was a joy to spend some time with her. Cherelle has…
It’s that time of year. We are well into autumn, and your plans and schedule are making plain that you are either: Totally on track to finish your autumn term well. Waving a complete goodbye to the idea of a ‘strong finish’ and hoping that you can limp across the finish line and somehow find…
The second lecture in my class on natural law is about metaphysics – one of those big words that comes up reasonably often, yet I would struggle to tell you what it really means. A simple google search tells me that it’s the study of the first principles of things – the nature of things….
What I desire to set before the reader is a method of education based upon natural law. Charlotte Mason, Home Education There is something about Charlotte Mason’s ideas that is extremely intuitive. I don’t think it’s just me, either. Plenty of people find that her principles speak to something that they’ve known, but couldn’t articulate….
Ambleside Online (the curriculum we follow) has posted their folk song choices for 2022-2023. They are good. It always feels a little funny to wrap up school the same week that a lot of things are launching in preparation for the next school year (and when a lot of people are coming to the end…
A few thoughts on Freddie deBoer’s updated article on why education doesn’t lead to educational mobility (children moving from one level of educational attainment to another, over the course of their formal education). First, people failing to appreciate how percentiles work always causes me to languish. I have a son who is over the 99th…
I appreciate this post from Nancy Kelly, which is a transcription of Charlotte Mason’s notes on her trainee teachers’ teaching. There is no one around to observe a homeschool mom when she teachers her children (unless your husband is working from home upstairs), but I imagine I’m not the only one who finishes a lesson,…
I think that school’s terrible. It’s not a great fit for human nature. Some people like to sit in a chair, and be talked at for a long time, and then go off and read a lot, and so forth. But, we, generally, are not creating a very curious, fun, even intellectually-engaging place for young…