Perhaps your children are just now at school age, so you’ll be starting them off with
the Charlotte Mason method from the beginning.
That’s great.
May I offer you some friendly advice?
Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast.
I'm Sonya Shafer.
We’ve been talking about making the transition to using Charlotte Mason methods in your homeschool.
All of us come from different backgrounds and those backgrounds influence our thinking.
That’s only natural.
In the next few episodes, I’d like to walk through some of those background scenarios
and offer you some ideas that might help you make the transition to Charlotte Mason smoother.
I want to give you three tendencies to watch for and three tips.
Today, let’s talk about the scenario of starting from scratch.
Perhaps your children are just now at school age, so you’ll be starting them off with
the Charlotte Mason method from the beginning.
That’s great.
May I offer you some friendly advice?
Let’s go through three tendencies to watch for and three tips for starting from scratch.
Tendency number one is feeling like you have to teach everything now.
Please remember that your children’s brains can hold only so much at a time.
It’s just like if you were binge-watching some how-to videos.
After a while of it, your brain is just not registering what you’re watching.
And it’s the same thing for your children.
You can try and pour more and more and more stuff into those brains, but they’re going
to need time to process.
Remember that.
So don’t think you need to teach everything right now, this first year.
A lot of the Charlotte Mason method is layers upon layers.
You’re going to lay a nice smooth layer this year and the next year you’re going
to build upon it and the next year you’ll build upon that.
Small, constant touches add up to something great.
Tendency number two, then.
Please don’t grow discouraged when life happens.
So many times when we start homeschooling, we have this perfect image in mind, “This
is what my homeschool is going to look like.”
Now, hold on to those ideals, but also you’re going to need to learn to flex with life.
Maybe life looks like your child isn’t catching on as quickly as you thought he or she would
in a certain subject, so you need to adjust.
That’s fine.
Or maybe life looks like you walk into the kitchen and find a big, cold puddle of water
in front of your refrigerator.
That happened to me a few days ago.
You have to deal with life as it happens.
One thing that is a key to being able to stay in this over the long haul is to learn flexibility.
You’re going to need to learn to flex with life as it happens.
Remember that homeschooling is a marathon.
It’s not a sprint.
So, take your time and flex with life and just do life with your children.
They’re going to learn as much living with you and the atmosphere of your home as they
will in certain lessons that you present.
Tendency number three, then: Sometimes I have seen young homeschool teachers, or new homeschool
teachers, start to panic if the child doesn’t think that something is fun that they are
teaching.
Well, we want the child to enjoy it, of course, but keep a good balance.
You’re going to teach the child, you’re not going to push and frustrate him and require
him to do something he cannot do, but keep in mind that part of growing, at any age,
is help that child to achieve things that look hard at first.
You already did that when they were preschoolers and toddlers.
Learning to walk is not always fun, but it’s something that you helped the child achieve
and that achievement goes a long way toward helping that child to grow.
So keep a good balance in mind.
There is a place for fun, but not everything has to be fun.
You can help that child grow immensely as a person if you gently support them as they
achieve something that looked hard at first.
So those are the three tendencies to keep an eye out for.
And may I just offer you three general tips to try and make your homeschooling get started
off on a right direction?
First tip: Set up good habits now.
Make it a priority in these first few years, especially.
You’re going to want to help your children get a good habit of paying full attention
in the lessons and putting forth their best effort.
So to do that, make sure you start with short lessons and always emphasize quality over
quantity.
Maybe in their copywork, their handwriting, maybe they can only do one word and do it
well.
That’s fine.
We can get that habit established of paying full attention to getting that one word and
doing our best effort.
And as that becomes more and more natural for the child, as they grasp that habit and
it becomes second nature to write that word, we can nudge it out a little bit.
Maybe do two words.
But always have quality in mind, rather than quantity.
Tip number two: If the thought of diving into all the Charlotte Mason subject right away
feels a bit overwhelming, remember that you can ease into it if you want to.
We just went through how to ease into the Charlotte Mason approach in five stages.
Feel free to go watch those videos or go listen to those podcasts in order to help you see
how you can just ease your way into it, a little at a time.
And then tip number three: I encourage you to look farther than just this first year.
Lay out a long-term plan: “I’m going to start here and over the next few years, I’m
going to teach this here and this here and this here.”
That’s going to help you stay on track and not panic when you start talking to some of
your other homeschool friends and they say, “Oh, haven’t you taught this yet?” or
“Why aren’t you doing this?” or “I’m doing this, shouldn’t you be doing that?”
If you have a long-term plan and you know “Yeah, I’m not teaching English grammar
in first grade because Charlotte didn’t start it until fourth grade.
But I know that when I get to fourth grade, I’m going to teach it.”
If you have that long-term plan in mind, it will help you remember why you’re doing
what you’re doing and when you’re doing it.
In other words, continue to educate yourself in the Charlotte Mason philosophy, the ideas
of why you’re doing what you’re doing.
That’s going to help you stay the course.
And keep reminding yourself of why you’re doing what you’re doing.
It will help a lot as you make the transition to starting on the wonderful journey of teaching
your children with the Charlotte Mason approach.
Next time, I want to give three tendencies and three tips for those who might be starting
a Charlotte Mason approach homeschool and they have come out of a classroom setting.
Whether they’re pulling their children from that classroom setting, or maybe the parent
is coming out of the classroom setting.
We’ll talk about
that next time.