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TIP #8: Expose your child to great minds - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Posted by Jacqui Herrmann on

TIP #8: Expose your child to great minds - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

"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...

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TIP #7: Read Living Books - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Posted by Jacqui Herrmann on

TIP #7: Read Living Books - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

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...

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TIP #6: The teacher is not the main focus - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Posted by Jacqui Herrmann on

TIP #6: The teacher is not the main focus - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

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...

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TIP #5: Keep lessons short - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Posted by Jacqui Herrmann on

TIP #5: Keep lessons short - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

                  In most schools, children are required to spend an hour on average paying attention to a lesson focused on one subject area. At a certain point, most children start getting fidgety or bored, or their attention wanders off simply because the lesson is too long. Charlotte Mason believed that children should only be required to give focused attention to one subject for a short period of time, before taking a break or moving on to a different subject altogether.  For 6-year olds this meant lessons were generally no more than 15 minutes long. As the child got older...

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TIP #4: Serve a wide generous curriculum - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Posted by Jacqui Herrmann on

TIP #4: Serve a wide generous curriculum - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason would often refer to her curriculum as a "feast". She would say that a child's mind should "feed on ideas". All of this conjures up images of serving your child a massive appetising banquet of a variety of many different and delicious foods and allowing your child to taste, test and try any or all of them.  When we apply this to a home education or school curriculum, the aim is to not limit what your child is exposed to. Expose them to a wide variety of subjects. Learning is not just about the three R's: Reading, Writing and 'Rithmetic. Children are fascinated by...

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