If you had 5 min to talk about Charlotte Mason...

[Singingmom]

what would you be sure to include?

Tomorrow I'll be on a panel that will include other methods of schooling like public, private, charter, and classical and traditional homeschooling. The idea is to give a quick overview, but there's so much to say! (I will be able to share more after if anyone is interested in a small group). I'm trying not to reinvent the wheel here since I have some excellent resources with summaries already compiled...ambleside online, Simply Charlotte Mason website, and books by Andreola, Macaulay, and Levison.

I'll try to cover the basics of philosophy (education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life) and methods (short lessons, habits, living books, narration...).

What is something that you particularly love about CM or have found to be very helpful? For example, I love the way I've learned to let the child have his own relationship with great books and ideas, rather than chasing a story or a piece of art with my own analysis.

I'd like to hear your thoughts as I prepare for tomorrow.

[BarefootBetsy]

Nature study and the focus on being outside in all types of weather has been huge for me. I try to read to the children outside whenever possible (and now we have a lovely covered back porch that makes it so much easier to do that!) and it really does make a huge difference when we get outside regularly vs when we don't.

[Leslie]

I might mention that it's based on the ancient concept of classical education (the original classical, not the neo-classical that's based on the Three Stages of Learning). The gentle, natural aspect of CM where the parent doesn't get between the child and the book tends to make people see it as unschooling, but it's actually closer to err on the side of lumping CM with classical than with unschooling.

I once challenged myself to peel away the CM method to its bare essentials and write it in a concise 100 words, and then I took those 100 words and clarified it in a very short article (of about 600 words). If nothing else, it covers the basic tenets.
http://archipelago7.blogspot.com/201...tte-mason.html

[Singingmom]

Also, they asked that we present pros and cons. I think I can be perfectly honest saying I don't know of any cons, having used CM for 12 years now! Any cons you can think of?

[BarefootBetsy]

I can think of cons! They aren't cons for my family necessarily, but they might be for some people:

It can be challenging to find living books in all the subjects. While there are book lists available (thankfully!) and more options now than there used to be, it can still be difficult to find good books for some subjects. It can also be especially difficult to even mostly rely on living books and life experiences for subjects like math where traditionally they've been taught completely differently than that.

For someone who is still in the "school at home" mindset, it can be difficult to even imagine breaking away from tests and busywork. So, for some folks it might be too loose for their taste.

For other folks, it can be too restrictive. That's ultimately why I'm not strictly CM in my approach - because my family enjoys having less structure than she recommends

If someone wants something prepackaged then there are curriculums that come close to being CM (Sonlight, for example), but none are *quite* there. With guides like AO, you still have to find the books even though it's all written out. Not everyone is going to want to do that.

It is flexible about structured vs not to a degree - you can be unschool-ish while using CM, but the two aren't completely compatible without sacrificing some important parts of both. As I freely admit as an unschooly-CM homeschooler

[Singingmom]

Ok, good points! It can be hard to pull everything together. I tend to forget about ways I don't really follow CM strictly, like upper grade science. And I was one who was steeped in the public school model and found this odd until I understood it. This could be an awkward panel with so many different opinions. The whole idea is that you have options, so I don't think I have to worry about offending when I toot the CM horn, but people can get defensive sometimes when you praise something different than what they are embracing.

[Leslie]

Cons: You have to make a paradigm shift. If you try to do CM by throwing in some historical fiction, narration and nature walks -- or even by following a CM curriculum -- without making the paradigm shift, it might be a decent education, but it won't be as effective as it could be.

This is where many CM schools run into trouble: their teachers have a hard time making the shift, so, while they might be using really good books, it's not really a CM education the students are getting.

[Singingmom]

I thought of a con...it's harder to grade something like a written narration than it is a worksheet in high school when you have to put grades in a transcript. A good rubric will help with that, but it's still a challenge. I don't really think challenging=con, but I see how it's worth bringing up.

[BarefootBetsy]

Or you have to get out of the "grading" mindset completely which might also be difficult/impossible for some folks

[Leslie]

Originally Posted by BarefootBetsy

Or you have to get out of the "grading" mindset completely

More paradigm shift.

[Singingmom]

It was hard for me to get out of that mindset, and then comes high school where you have to have grades on transcripts, and it was hard to get back into it!

[BarefootBetsy]

I'm not convinced you need grades for high school transcripts either though. My dad just wrote "pass" next to all my high school classes. I was accepted into both a state university and a distinguished private college so it apparently worked.

[Singingmom]

Really!? That's very cool.

It went very well, although everyone went over their time limits to talk, so although we had time for questions after each person spoke, we had no time to sit over lunch and get more specific with those interested. All the moms of littles had to gather them up and get them home. Thank you both for your help! I was glad to have talked it out a little before the day. And as a bonus, preparing gave me a great refresher of why I love CM so much and how I can better prepare for the coming year with my dd.

[jenny_islander]

If I have a short time, I say, "Mason observed a lot about brain development that she couldn't prove with the tools available, but modern research has largely borne out what she had to say. Three things in particular differentiate what she recommended from the conventional wisdom that was a burgeoning trend at the time and is now just what people do in school. First of all, children have to begin with concrete learning of all kinds, preferably from real objects in unscripted situations, so there's a lot of sensory training by messing around outdoors and stuff like that in the lower grades. Second, Mason argued strongly that breaking down lessons into little precisely ordered steps frustrates kids and teachers alike: that kids can synthesize conclusions from information that is presented in a format our brains can accommodate, which for most people means as close to story format as possible. And third, kids pick up more than is immediately obvious, so keeping lessons and homework assignments short is fine--and it avoids exhausting and exasperating them."

If I have even less time, I just say that Mason believed, although she couldn't have put it that way, that a child's mind is not a game of Tetris.

[ctab]

Originally Posted by BarefootBetsy

I'm not convinced you need grades for high school transcripts either though. My dad just wrote "pass" next to all my high school classes. I was accepted into both a state university and a distinguished private college so it apparently worked.

At our homeschool convention I went to a talk about college that was given in part by an admissions director in charge of the main full scholarship at the college. He said to make sure to give grades in high school, because without them you disqualify yourself from a large number of scholarships.