I'm Sonya Shafer with Simply Charlotte Mason.
I often get asked why I chose the Charlotte Mason Method for homeschooling my children.
One reason is that I love good books.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the living books, the
literature, the stories of people’s lives, that I remembered most and that had affected
me most as a person.
I learned all sorts of life lessons and gained lots of ideas from, for example, the Little
House books.
I pulled ideas about diligence and family and thrift, and even good manners, from Laura
Ingalls’ experiences in those books.
And those ideas became a part of me.
They helped shape who I am now as a person.
But that’s not all.
I also realized that when I was reading a textbook for school and I came across information
about the pioneers, I immediately related that information back to the ideas I already
had in my mind from reading about Laura’s life.
To this day, I don’t recall most of what I read in those textbooks.
Even though I got excellent grades, which were symbols that I knew that material, what
I remember is what I read in the living books.
And once I realized that it was the literature, the living books, that had the most powerful
effect on me, I wanted to tap into that power to educate my children–the power of good
literature.
Another reason I chose Charlotte Mason is because of her foundational principle that
the child is a person.
Body, soul, spirit, mind, will, emotions–all of these are included in that person, and
we must respect and educate the child as a whole person, not just the mind.
I have a special-needs child and I love how Charlotte’s methods allow for, and even
embrace, the differences between children.
Her methods dovetail beautifully with the way children naturally learn and yet they’re
flexible and leave plenty of room for customizing to help each child grow at his or her own
pace.
Charlotte’s emphasis on giving my child living ideas makes sure that I’m feeding
my youngest’s mind and shaping her life, encouraging her to keep growing as a person,
even as we progress in academics at her slower pace.
And the beauty of it is that I can take those same methods and use them with older children
and make their education as rigorous as I need to.
It is a whole-person approach that encourages me to nourish each child as an individual,
to focus on helping each one grow as a person, and to me that is true education.
Another reason I chose the Charlotte Mason approach is because I wanted my children to
have a good combination of academics, the arts, and life experiences.
Charlotte Mason offers that balance.
Mornings are filled with a wide range of intentional, well thought out studies that spread a feast
of ideas through good living books and the things around us, but we’re done by noon
with no homework.
So the children have the afternoons free to explore, to play, to pursue their personal
interests, and to dig into their hobbies.
It’s a wonderful balance of teacher-directed and student-led opportunities.
Then, too, I was beginning to understand Charlotte’s wisdom in having the children form their own
relations with what they were learning, rather than my telling them what should be related
in their minds.
Let me explain: When I first heard about the Charlotte Mason flavor, we had already been
homeschooling for a year.
That was my oldest’s kindergarten year and we had been doing a unit study approach.
During that year, I had discovered that unit studies were not a good fit for us.
I was burned out from preparing and overseeing all the hands-on projects and on top of that
I discovered that my children could recall a couple of the projects that we had done
during those months, but they didn’t remember the point of those projects.
It was kind of like remembering a commercial but not remembering the product or the business
that the commercial was promoting.
Well, they knew we had covered a doorway between our living room and dining room with paper
and had drawn on it to make a triumphal arch, but they remembered nothing about the Roman
emperor that we had studied and for whom the arch was built as a monument.
Even though I had tried to connect the two in their minds, they hadn’t made that connection.
And I realized the problem was that they had not formed their own personal relation with
that emperor or his life.
They had not gotten any ideas of their own from his life story.
So when I heard that Charlotte Mason encouraged the children to make their own relations,
rather than my trying to connect all the dots, I knew this was the flavor for us.
And in the years since then, I’ve seen for myself how effective it is for the child to
make her own relations with what she is learning and to draw her own connections between them
because that’s when learning really sticks.
I could go on and on, but let me just mention two more quick reasons I chose Charlotte Mason.
First, her emphasis on habits.
Charlotte understood the power of good habits in a person’s life and she encouraged parents
to make habit-training a part of the children’s education as a person.
But what is brilliant to me is how her school methods were designed to reinforce those good
habits, too.
For example, one of the reasons we can be done with schoolwork by noon is because her
methods reinforce the habits of full attention and best effort.
You can get a lot done in a short time if you give full attention and best effort.
And then last, one of the main reasons I chose the Charlotte Mason flavor for our homeschool
is because I wanted my children to love learning for the rest of their lives.
I know too many people who went through a traditional, textbook style education and
couldn’t wait for graduation because then they would be finished learning.
To me, that’s so sad.
I wanted my children to know the joy of learning, and it is a joy when you’re learning through
such wonderful books and allowed the time to marvel at God’s creation around you.
Such a rich life when we can keep that love of learning alive!
So that’s why I chose the Charlotte Mason method.
I settled in with that approach, which was a beautiful fit for me and my family, and
we have thoroughly enjoyed our homeschool journey for twenty-five years and counting.
If you would like to learn more about Charlotte Mason and her wonderful methods, I encourage
you to visit our website at SimplyCharlotteMason.com.
You'll find lots of free resources, including hundreds of blog posts, our weekly podcast,
and a variety of free e-books that you can download and enjoy.
Thanks for joining me.