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When a child is first born, they already are a person with their own unique talents, abilities and personality. They are not a blank slate that will eventually develop into a person. Children should be cherished and valued for the person that they are and allowed to develop to their full potential. For this reason, we should not underestimate a child or lower our expectations of them. Charlotte Mason explained that although a child is born a person, they don't know much about the world yet, and so need to learn about the world. They also don't yet know how to...

A key part of the Charlotte Mason philosophy is for your child to learn to develop good habits over time. The reason behind this is because the more something becomes a habit, the less you need to think about it. If a child is regularly and consistently taught to behave in a disciplined and obedient way, it eventually becomes second nature to them, something they naturally do without thinking.  This is easier said than done of course! Charlotte Mason proposed a five stage process to help your child to learn good habits: Inspire: Motivate why the child should learn the good...

"We owe it to every child to put him in communication with great minds that he may get at great thoughts." is a well-known quotation from one of Charlotte Mason's volumes.  Charlotte Mason recommended that we expose our children to great artworks, great music, great poetry and great literature from an early age, so that they can use these as inspiration to go on to create great ideas of their own. This is why most Charlotte Mason curricula include subjects such as Composer Study or Musical Appreciation and Picture Study, with a large focus on well-written works of literature.  While being...

One of the first Charlotte Mason philosophies that I learned about was the idea of living books. A living book is generally defined as a book which tells a heartfelt story about a particular topic, often told from first-hand experience or from dedicated research and a genuine love for the topic. It could be a biography, or a fictional story based in a particular place or time period, or a non-fiction book that tells the author’s experiences and findings. Charlotte Mason emphasised the importance of using living books to teach your child, rather than books co-authored by multiple authors that...

When sitting in a mainstream school classroom, children are used to the teacher standing upfront and being centre-stage. The teacher presents the lesson, explains all the information they need to know, re-explains it in different ways if children don't understand and needs to make sure that they keep the children's attention. So they need to be engaging and sometimes even entertaining!  Even in a homeschool setting, the parent often feels like they need to play centre-stage and everything the child learns needs to be filtered through the parent and presented in some easy-to-understand package.  Charlotte Mason disagreed with this view. She felt...