- Let me tell you,
most Charlotte Mason homeschoolers are learning as we go.
Let's talk about it.
(gentle music)
Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason Podcast.
I'm Sonya Shafer.
Sometimes we look at other Charlotte Mason homeschoolers
around us and we think,
"Wow look at everything they know."
And we think they've always known about the artists
and the composers and the nature and the handicrafts,
but that's not the case.
Let me assure you.
All of us have had to learn as we go along.
Here to help me discuss that topic is Amber O'Neal Johnston.
Thanks for joining us again Amber.
- You're welcome.
I'm excited to be here.
- This whole idea of learning as we go,
can you relate to that at all?
- Absolutely.
It's something I feel like I'm constantly letting moms know,
experienced and new Charlotte Mason moms that
I have not always known what I know today
and I'm still learning.
- Well, let's back up.
Tell us how long you've been doing Charlotte Mason
and how you got started.
So we'll kind of back the camera up a little bit
and start at the beginning.
- Okay, yeah.
So we've been doing this for six years
and then I had a year of study before we started.
So I'd been introduced to her principles and ideas
really early on.
And thankfully had a year where I was nursing a baby
and had time to sit and read and read and read
and I spent that time and then since then
we've been actively pursuing it for six years.
- And so when you started in
I'm assuming you didn't know everything about everything
in the Charlotte Mason approach.
What subjects would you say were the biggest learning curve?
- All of them.
(laughs)
Everything except math.
No, I think that,
I mean, I'm joking but in a way I'm also serious.
I was not what you could consider
to be an expert on anything
other than kind of your basic subjects that I had in school.
But even then, the way that we do them is so different
than how it was.
I mean, I took AP History in high school
and did well with it.
This is totally different than that, this is not that.
What we're doing, I mean,
we're just living it out through our books.
So I would say I wasn't an expert at any of them.
Some of the more challenging ones for me were
the artists and composers.
Part of it was the pronunciations.
Like these were words that I had seen before in my reading
but I really was never around a group of people
who were talking out loud about these people.
- I always joke about, I had heard of Monet.
- Yes, that's basically.
Well, I always share a story that I took my kids
and I was like we're going to go.
We went to the Art Institute in Chicago
and we got an Airbnb and we made this big deal about it.
We're going to go see people
and I went to the desk and I was like,
"Can you please show me
the direction to the pictures by David?"
And he was like, "David?"
I was like, "Yeah, these, I want to show my kids."
And he was like, "Oh, it's David." [long i]
And I was like, "Okay, thank you." [whispers]
And so that was just like
I said, "This is me right here I know,"
but you know what?
I was there with my children
and I showed them those pictures and I laughed at myself
and I said, "You don't know what you don't know.
It looks like David to me."
And so I think that was an area.
I grew up playing the cello
and so was exposed to all types of classical music,
but I approached my music as a subject in school
just like check it, you play it, and move on.
I never listened to that music.
And so, being accustomed to hearing it
and hearing it and playing it around the house
and connecting it with certain artists.
Nature study,
I tell people "I was raised in the air conditioning
and so go out in nature and do what?"
I don't fish.
I don't hunt.
So I couldn't really possibly know.
So I think almost every subject,
all of our lessons now,
almost all of it was new to me.
- And as you said,
there's the body of information in that subject.
Like you had taken AP History,
so you had memorized the facts, I'm assuming.
And so you had some of the information,
you didn't have all the information.
But then there's also
that whole body of the methods being used,
and so when you put those two together.
I think most homeschool parents
have to deal with the content.
"I don't remember how to do algebra,"
those types of challenges.
But when you throw in,
now we're going to do it a whole different way
that's I think, it can seem like a scary obstacle almost.
- It feels overwhelming and I think for me,
what I found is just getting started is the hardest part
because history for example,
I'm like, "I don't know."
But when we started reading these books,
it was so interesting and it started coming alive
in such a tangible way that it became it almost
it's like the subject taught itself.
- Yes.
- And I was able to take a back seat and I can say,
I learned history but I never heard these stories.
I learned about things and events and dates, but not people.
And so, this is a different beast.
And so I almost became,
I feel like in a lot of ways I'm guiding my children
but I'm also sitting next to them.
We're kind of on this trip together.
We're taking a trolley ride
and I'm maybe the seat in front of them,
but I'm still on the same trolley
and we're following out this path together.
- So is that where you started with history?
Is that the first subject?
- It is.
Because I had read that so many things were rooted in that
and you're going to really go into your time period.
And also we had been spending time
a lot time out in our community.
So we were used to going to,
this is before formal lessons started.
We were used to going to the local museums
and we're in Georgia where there's a lot of rich history
just all around us, pretty much everywhere we go.
And so that was the easiest thing for me to grasp hold of
and to kind of root some of those other things.
"I don't know which artists to pick,
I don't know which composer."
But once I saw what we were doing in history
it made it easier for me to
at least have an idea where to start
with some of the other lessons that we would add in.
- So then how did you approach that?
Do you remember?
- Yes.
- How did you go out about it?
- I went to the Simply Charlotte Mason website.
(laughs)
I mean I hesitate to say that
but I also can't think of something else fast enough.
But just because the composer and the artist folders
I could look at the dates on them
because I really didn't know.
I mean, yes, I've heard of Beethoven and Bach and Mozart,
but I don't know what years they were born
and lived in honestly.
And I didn't know how to match up artists
and which pictures to pick.
And I didn't know at the time I'm still trying to figure out
what a living biography is.
And so I wasn't sure what to look for even at the library.
And,
I wanted this so badly
but I couldn't do it all at the same time.
So where are there were opportunities
where some of this had been organized for me,
I kind of went with that.
I looked in and I saw a lot of times,
what were other people doing?
When you study this time period,
I would look online and see
what are some of the other moms doing?
And I didn't just blindly pick that
but at least it narrowed down the playing field for me
where I could say these are the artists,
these are the composers.
This poet has wonderful poetry for children
that may relate to some of the things that,
or some of the experiences that we're talking about.
It gave me an opportunity to narrow down the playing field
where I could select from a smaller group of things.
So I think that was an important part for me.
- I often think of it like spinning plates.
It's like, "Okay we're going to
get the history plates spinning.
And once we're comfortable with that
then we're going to add in the music study plate
and get that one spinning.
And then, okay now let's take a dive into composers
and have that in."
But then,
as I was going through,
I went through the same process.
I didn't have Simply Charlotte Mason to go to
but I went through the same process of finding other people
and just doing research and it's a journey.
And I'm still learning more things now.
I remember, I got history going pretty well
and one of the first things I did was narration
learning how to do narration.
But about five years into it,
I discovered I've been doing the narration lesson wrong.
I knew the concept of tell it back in your own words,
but I had not fine-tuned it into
first you review,
then you set up today's reading.
Now we read and narrate.
I was missing that whole first chunk.
And so we're still learning as we go
and I'm still learning as I go.
I'm still trying to figure out new handcrafts
and it took me many years
before I realized how Charlotte actually taught spelling.
I was using a spelling curriculum because
that was one area I hadn't researched yet.
And because there are so many subjects we put in
to a Charlotte Mason education,
there are so many subjects to research.
- Yes, you can't become an expert at all of them
all at the same time.
And I found that same situation with me.
You bring up spelling, when I was doing dictation.
I'm just like, "Here you go.
Study this.
I'll be back."
And so,
I wasn't walking through that passage with my children.
We weren't kind of looking at maybe
what some of the words are that might trip us up
or talking about it.
It was just,
"Here's something that we're going to do next
and you're going to study this
and then I'm going to come back
and I'm going to read it to you one time
and you're going to write it all out."
- And it's going to be perfect.
- Yes.
I'm like, "It's just not working."
And so that's just something that we've had to grow into
and it's been okay.
One thing that has given me a lot of peace is that
I feel that even with all of the subjects
that we don't execute perfectly on from the very beginning.
So let's just take what we are doing well,
and then all of the other things
that we're learning and growing on
I still feel even at the baseline,
that it's a beautiful education my children are receiving.
And so that's one of the things that helps center me
that I don't start feeling anxious
about what I don't know or what we haven't done
or when I find out that
we should've been doing something differently,
I think what we were doing is so far above and beyond
what I did when I was growing up,
that it's still good.
I think that helps.
- It does
and you hit on a good point.
It's so easy for us to
when we discover,
"Oh I haven't been doing this
exactly as Charlotte Mason outlined
or in a way that would work best with my child,
there's still more to learn about this particular subject."
It's so easy for us to fall into
what I call bad mommy syndrome.
"Just give me the bad mommy trophy,
I'll put it on the shelf with all the others."
How can we encourage our listeners in that area?
That we're all still at this together.
Nobody is doing everything perfectly in all of the subjects.
- It's so true and I think for a long time
especially if you're someone who watches a lot of videos
or reads online a lot in the Charlotte Mason community,
you start feeling like
Charlotte Mason moms are these amazing people
who know everything about everything.
And I was feeling bad about myself,
but I started really looking and I'm like,
"She knows a lot about nature and nature study.
She knows a lot about different types of handicrafts.
And this mom over here is really, really excellent
with the living math and separately,
they are all kind of sharing with the community
within their gifting."
But this is not just one composite woman
who knows all of these things at top level.
And that we all have different gifting,
and for some of us and myself
I would use as an example, it's not this one subject area
that's a Charlotte Mason lesson
where you are like gung ho about that area.
But some of us are a little bit Janes-of-all-trades.
And so I feel in my house,
we hit everything,
we do a little bit of everything and it's good
and we're getting better
but I don't have like a wonder woman area
that I just really stand out in and that's okay too.
So I think just being more realistic of the fact that
none of us have
a super power in being able to know everything
about every lesson that Charlotte Mason laid before us,
but part of the fun and the learning is the journey,
it's getting there.
So I think there are resources we can depend on
and lean into to help with those things as we go.
- Yes, absolutely.
And it's funny that
when you say you're kind of the Jane-of-all-trades,
it's like you are rising the tide across the board.
It looks like to other people.
Everything's going up at the same time
and other moms really excel in this area
or excel in this area.
But when we were talking earlier you mentioned that
people who know you, your longtime friends
who know you from pre-Charlotte Mason days
look at you and what do they say.
- "Who are you?"
- This is like,
the person I am today is totally different
than who I was before I started on this path
and it amazes even me.
I'm kind of like, "Who am I?"
But it gives me so much hope in that
I just, each day taking the next step
and I do set goals and I'll think "For this school year
we are going to watercolor
and we are going to love it and be good at it."
And in some years we do dig in deeper in a certain area
where I see that I haven't been,
maybe I've been shying away
because I have no idea what I'm doing
and I'll just intentionally lean in there.
So I think that we can change.
That's the one thing,
we can legitimately change over time
if that's what we'd like to do.
And that a lot of the change comes naturally,
it doesn't all have to be clawed for
through really hard work.
For me, I think more than it being hard
it's about it being consistent.
And I feel like I am consistently working to learn more
but I'm not scrambling or forcing it,
It's just coming along as we go.
- And that is so much
what we want our kids to learn, isn't it?
That science of relations is a gradual process,
those small constant touches
are going to add up to something great
and we don't want to force and pressure our children.
You must learn all of this in all of these areas
and you better do it, whether it's fun or not.
And it's the same for us
as we are learning these things.
I like how you highlighted that aspect
that it is a journey and we can enjoy the journey
instead of saying,
"I haven't got to that goal yet," and get tunnel vision
and not even look at the journey as we go.
- That's what's making me enjoy what I'm doing.
I'm having fun and I'm growing as a person
and my children are growing too.
- And that's something we're showing our kids too
that learning, growing, and continuing to grow and learn
throughout our entire lives is enjoyable.
- That's right, it's pleasurable.
Something that's worthwhile and it feels good.
- Thanks Amber. - You're welcome.
- If you enjoyed this podcast,
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Thanks for joining me.
I'll see you next time.
(gentle music)