When Charlotte Mason admonishes us that we don’t have the right to pick and choose which subjects to educate our children in, her primary example is Latin. “But we do not know how much we are shutting out from Tommy’s range of thought besides the Latin grammar,” she says. “Latin itself is a means of providing our students with stimulating ideas.” Join us on today’s podcast as we discuss the teaching of Latin in a Charlotte Mason education.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Visual Latin (can be purchased from a variety of retailers)

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.

Emily
Well, we do not have a lot from Ms. Mason on why she included Latin in her curriculum. It was really just a matter of course in that day and age. Education was virtually synonymous with classics in classic Latin languages. 

Yet she does tell us that we may not reject Latin as a subject for our children, not because of the traditional reasons that probably her fellow Brits at the time would say, but because Latin itself is a means of living ideas, and we can’t predict which of our children are waiting to receive those ideas. She tells us, “Of course, it is only now and then that a notion catches the small boy, but when it does catch, it works wonders, and does more for his education than years of grind.” And all of that is in the context of talking about Latin. 

So Nicole, let’s just take a big-picture look at the scope and sequence of Latin in a Charlotte Mason education. Do we start this, like French, at age six? 

Nicole
Nope. For sure not. Thankfully, this one we do not do at all in Form 1. And even in Form 2, which is, Form 2 itself is grades four, five, and six, but we don’t begin this until what we call Form 2A, which is grade five. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And at that point, it’s simple reading, learning words. By age 12, so towards the end of that time, they’re supposed to have some elementary Latin grammar, be able to read fables and early tales, and she said possibly have read one or two books of Caesar. 

Emily
It doesn’t seem like that little.

Nicole
It doesn’t really, does it? But then, by Form 3, so grades seven, eight, they’re continuing the Latin grammar, which I think is also one of the really valuable parts of Latin. 

Emily
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Nicole
Translation increases. They start doing parsing and rule application. On an exam for Form 3, we see that they are translating into English and back to Latin and parsing each word of a sentence and identifying the grammatical rules. So they’re really doing a lot. 

But then in Form 4, that’s ninth grade, the caliber of the books increases that they’re reading in Latin. They’re reading more substantial classical texts in that language, fables, more Caesar, perhaps Virgil. 

And then in Forms 5 and 6, so 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, they’re just continuing to read Latin authors, and translation and comprehension are really at a high level at this point.

Liz
And by parsing, you just mean pointing out the parts of speech, knowing which is the nominative case and which is the adjective and things like that. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
Do you want to share before we go on how your students who, I don’t know if this is the best time to do this, but you have shared with us that your dyslexic students were particularly thankful for Latin studies. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
My son, too. 

Nicole
Yeah. It was really an odd thing, because with dyslexia, there’s often some memory issues. A foreign language was really hard for them. 

Emily
Yeah. And also, it’s entirely written down, right?

Nicole
Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Emily
They’re speaking it, but they have to read it in order to learn it. 

Liz
The part that they can’t do.

Nicole
Yeah. But there was something about the structure and the just really straightforward rules that I think were very helpful to them, and it helped them with English, with spelling and stuff like that. 

Emily
That’s so interesting. 

Nicole
We went ahead with it, not right on target time-wise, but I went ahead and introduced it just

kind of on faith, and it was really popular. 

Emily
And you never knew that until after they had graduated, that they felt like it was helpful.

Nicole
Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Liz
What my son liked was that he could find the verb. He knew it was at the end of the sentence. And stuff like that. It helps.

Nicole
It’s very straightforward.

Emily
Mm-hmm.

Nicole
The English language isn’t always quite so straightforward.

Emily
It definitely is not, and there’s fascinating reasons why that is, but we will talk about that a different day.

So let’s talk about the lesson format. First of all, in the week, students from 2A through 6, so fifth grade through 12th grade, two Latin lessons, 30 minutes, or twice a week for 30 minutes, so an hour a week. They do that, though, for all of those eight years, whereas many other Latin curriculum, and we get this question all the time- 

Liz
Five hours a week.

Emily
They’re expecting it to be done in a classical school or maybe even some public school classrooms where they’re doing the same subjects every single day for about an hour. 

Nicole
Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Emily
And so it’s about five hours a week. So we just have a lot longer to go over that same material. But because of that, it’s slower, it’s building on it, and we’re not learning something and losing it, right?

Liz
Cram isn’t always great. 

Emily
Yeah. And yes, she uses that word in a very derogatory sense. Always talking about how Latin was taught during her time.

So Latin is a dead language. People will quibble over that term because people do– We can say the words, but what–

Liz
Churches still use it. 

Emily
Yeah, sure. But the definition of a dead language is one in which no child is born and that is their native tongue.

Nicole
Mm. Oh that’s interesting. 

Emily
And so it is. Many people learn and can speak Latin around the world. 

Liz
Right. 

Emily
But it is not something anybody picks up as their native tongue. And so because of that, it does have a different method in Charlotte Mason. I just want to make that distinction very clear because we’ve been talking for the last couple episodes on how we acquire speech- Hearing, speaking… And so we are starting with the grammar, and we are going to be reading it from the get-go. So because of that, it varies from those modern languages. 

However, there is the use of narration, which is very Charlotte Mason. This is what she felt like her method did bring to the subject that was still – And just when you’re saying they’re reading these texts even from by 12 years old, like sixth, seventh grade – they are also narrating them. It’s not just translation. They are acquiring it as a speech. It’s just different than we would do with our own. 

Liz
And it does sound intimidating for us to say Caesar, but I don’t think we have any concept of how short the Roman letters were. 

Emily
That’s true. 

Liz
They make the epistles in the New Testament look positively…

Emily
Lengthy. 

Liz
Yeah. So they’re not long readings. 

Emily
Like 2 and 3 John are long letters, and they’re Paul’s shortest…

Liz
So don’t be intimidated when you give your child a piece of Caesar. 

Emily
Yeah. Charlotte Mason said that “Latin is taught by means of narration. After each section has been thoroughly studied in grammar, syntax, and style. The literature studied increases in difficulty as the student advances in grammar. Nothing but good Latin is ever narrated” – so same, no twaddle, no Latin twaddle – “so the pupil acquires style as well as structure.”

So if you haven’t yourself any experience with Latin, we have a program that we would recommend, and that is Visual Latin. I’m actually kind of doing resources out of order here. I hope that’s okay. 

Liz
Free advertising here. 

Emily
But it is a very enjoyable lesson with a Latin instructor and his video lessons. And he actually does a translation of Genesis 1 that they work on translating into English and narrating back.

Liz
Right at the beginning. 

Emily
Right at the very beginning. He uses simpler words and sentence structure, but he’s doing that. So it is good. There’s also, of course, other traditional courses like Cambridge Latin or Lingua Latina that do base their curriculum on stories, so we can still use that narration component. 

Liz
And could I just say that if you’re going to look for an online course, which there are many, just look for those that have these elements that we’ve talked about. 

Emily
Mm-hmm. Exactly. 

Liz
Because other people have very rigid, strict memorization…just a lot of tedium.

Emily
Mm-hmm. And so reading from stories, seeing full Latin sentences and then being able to reproduce those as in narration. And that’s why I wanted to highlight those resources before I talk about the other things I usually discuss in these episodes.

So there’s prep to be done. If you yourself do not know Latin and are not familiar, it really does help to work through the Latin lessons ahead of your kids because they may have some questions, and you might go, “I do not have any idea how to help you.” And usually, we can do those much faster because we are familiar with words, we’re familiar with the roots in our English that come from Latin.

So that would be the number one tip I would give you. Our objectives are to increase their understanding and use of Latin. Pretty straightforward. So that’s all I have. 

What objections or questions do people commonly have about teaching Latin? 

Liz
Well, similar. I think it’s very interesting because as I’ve studied a lot of history in recent days, read several history spines, they all bring up the fact that Latin went out of the secondary education or post-graduate education system around the turn of the century, and Charlotte Mason continued to use it. 

Emily
Yes. 

Liz
She didn’t do anything just because it was or wasn’t done elsewhere. She always had a purpose for it. So I think it’s really good to know the why of what you’re doing here, and we’ve talked a little bit about that here in this class.

Emily
Yeah. Even the English grammar, and when you read about it in this section of Volume 6 that we’ve been going through this season. Or no, I’m sorry, it’s actually in Home Education where she talks about English grammar. She said Latin grammar is actually more straightforward and helps the child understand English grammar. 

Liz
Oh, absolutely. 

Emily
So there are lots of benefits. 

Liz
Countless moms have reported to me that their children are just whizzing along in Grammar once they start the Latin. So it’s definitely a great connection there. And I just want to encourage moms, I know we all feel we can’t add another thing to our plate. But as Emily said, if you would just do the lessons ahead of your children, I actually found it to be kind of soothing. It was like solving a puzzle. It was very straightforward. It wasn’t ambiguous at all. And it was like sewing new ideas in my mind. I thought it was nourishing to me actually. 

Emily
Mm-hmm.

Liz
And I do enjoy languages, but it was just fascinating to discover things, I felt like. And of course, we know that a lot of our language is based in the Latin, as much as 60%, maybe coming from the Romance languages, Italian, German, Spanish, and French. 

Emily
German’s not… 

Liz
It is a Latin-based language, though. And a lot of the German grammar is very close to the Latin grammar.

Emily
I learn something new every day. 

Liz
Yeah, well, I didn’t get far enough in German to really concur that fact, but that’s what I’ve been told. But I think what you said about the dead language, part of that is to realize that all languages are very fluid.

Emily
Yes. 

Liz
Words that we say today, I’ve used words that I used when I was a child and had my children just freak out. Like, “What are you saying?” Because it has a different meaning now. 

Emily
Yeah. But Latin doesn’t change like that.

Liz
And Latin doesn’t. And so for your children who really maybe are a little OCD, and they just like things to be true or not true, and they’re very black and white, they will love Latin. And what Mason loved about it is that it teaches precision, that there actually is such a thing as an exact meaning. And it doesn’t have 1,000 shades of gray to it. And so that’s what helps them with the translation. So whatever program you pick out, make sure that they are doing a lot of translating back and forth between English and Latin. 

And just, it is still very much with us. I have talked to moms that keep a little booklet for their kids, and whenever they spot Latin phrases anywhere, they put it in their book, and they have discovered hundreds of them just living life.

Emily
Carl Linnaeus gave them a Latin-ish name. 

Liz
Right. He put himself in there. And then it’s really fun to know what a flower is by that Latin thing because you’re like, “Oh, that means red, and that means branching,” or whatever. Yep. And medical terminology. I used to be a medical transcriptionist way back in the Dark Ages, and I had to memorize hundreds of – it seemed like hundreds, probably was – roots, prefixes, suffixes. I always knew what the doctor was talking about because of the words. And I still find that when friends are going through medical things or I am, that I understand a lot of the terms. They’ll start to translate it, and I’ll… It does have still very practical value. 

Emily
Two things. One, my friends in high school who were applying to prestigious universities all studied Latin on their own, and it was to help with ACT, like the word component, right? Vocabulary. That’s the word I’m looking for. I know. 

Liz
Vocabulary is what she’s looking for. 

Emily
But I was thinking, isn’t there a PNEU article, a PR article or somewhere about someone saying it’s sad when we don’t know the Latin because we see the relationship between species more than what the common name of plants or whatever? 

Liz
Yes. 

Emily
Do you remember now what I’m talking about? Do you remember that thing?

Nicole
I don’t remember it. 

Emily
Okay. But just that we miss connections because we aren’t familiar with the Latin. And just, this is what Charlotte Mason means when she says there’s living ideas to be explored and discovered in these things.

Nicole
Yeah. That’s great 

Emily
Just this week, my boys are reading their Roman history book, and it said, “Veni, vidi…” Oh, no, it was in our Plutarch. And Plutarch translates, or doesn’t translate. I mean, he does. He says, “Veni, vidi, vici,” right? And he says, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” but he says, “But in no other language is it so pleasant to come off the tongue as in Latin.” So, even Plutarch. 

Nicole
Yeah. You mentioned missing the connection in a totally separate subject, but I wanted to point out as we come to Latin here, that if you’ve listened to all of our episodes on this language acquisition, you see not only how each one has some of those same overarching principles with how it’s learned. You see narration all the time. You see translating back and forth. You see, in most cases, not this one, but hearing before you’re seeing.

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And things like that. You see the logic that is there and how this is almost like a brain exercise, a lot of these things. But I hope that people also see the connection between each one of these lessons to one another. And how every one of them helps, how Latin helps us with English and also with all of the Romance languages.

Liz
And science. 

Nicole
Yes. There’s so much interconnection. And we are always saying that. Don’t just drop one part, and you started with that. 

Emily
Yes. Because you don’t know what you’re going to be kind of crippling yourself with– 

Nicole
Yeah … if you pull out a component. It’s like this whole tangled web of things, and you just pull out a piece of it, and what is lost in those other subjects because you don’t have that part of it. 

Emily
And sometimes people really want to learn Greek, and I commend that. I’ve been trying to learn Greek on my own for several years…in fits and starts. Because I really do want to read and understand the original Biblical texts that were written in Greek. But I think the harder barrier to that is you have to learn a totally different alphabet, whereas you don’t with Latin, right? That does make it more accessible, and maybe Greek is another…

Don’t just stop. I think that this is the whole point of Charlotte Mason education is we are continuing to educate and build relationships, and educate ourselves more, and gain knowledge for the rest of our lives. 

Liz
And the skills of translation in Latin will help you with the skills in translating. And a lot of the noun cases and verb conjugations, the terminology is similar in Greek. And it’s not ever used in English in most schools now. Yeah. They come up with much easier names for things. 

Emily
We are so glad you joined us for the discussion today. Next week, we will turn our attention to the arts and dig into one of the most distinctive lessons in the feast, Picture Study. Thanks for joining us as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason method.

Charlotte Mason’s school programs had students studying three languages, besides English and Latin, by the time they graduated. Why was the study of Foreign Language so important to her? We’ll explore that idea and lay out her method for teaching languages in today’s podcast episode.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

TalkBox.mom (a variety of languages)

theULAT.com (French, Spanish; Italian and German coming)

aliceayel.com (French)

Academia Late y Llama (Spanish)

*You can also search on YouTube for “Comprehensible Input [target language of your choice]”

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill. 

Bonjour!

Emily
Bonjour. You want to say it in German? 

Nicole
No. Hahaha.

Liz
Hola! 

Emily
There is no subject included in the feast of a Charlotte Mason education for simply a pragmatic purpose. Instead, Charlotte Mason recognized that knowledge itself is delightful. And we never can tell what ideas are going to be the key that our child needs to open the door to the rest of their life. The study of Foreign Language may just be one key.

Though it can be very useful to learn a second language or a third in order to communicate with other people of another nationality or ethnicity, a way to love our neighbor even, Charlotte Mason believed, learning another language gives us much more. By learning another tongue, we learn to see the world from a different perspective. We begin to think differently and learn that other peoples are as we are with a difference. All language is metaphor, and to learn the metaphors of another tongue can be a revelation to us. 

So Nicole, would you lay out the scope and sequence of how in the world we’re supposed to add multiple languages to our vocabulary? 

Nicole
Yes. Well, partly I can tell you that. I can just tell you what was done.

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
So we see Charlotte Mason’s programs, through the assigned work that she gave, that Foreign Language was a steady stream of education, begun very early, even before school lessons began.

Emily
Right.

Nicole
And then just strengthened over time until students could really use that language. So in Form 1, so grades one through three, the Foreign Language lessons are primarily oral at that point.

As we talked about in a previous episode, at this point, it’s the same as learning our own language that students are hearing. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
And maybe not even being able to reply yet; they’re just hearing and trying to understand.

So her emphasis was that French would be the first one, and that it would be acquired as living speech, not as grammar. Training the ear to hear the new sounds and slowly the lips to be able to form them. She even said that the children shouldn’t see the words, so we’re really learning just an oral language at this time. 

I just have to emphasize that we really have to do it though. We’re not expecting a lot to come back, but we are setting a lot of groundwork at this early stage. 

Emily
Just think how much input your child, toddlers, have to have from infancy through to toddlerhood of hearing before they’re able to repeat the sounds.

Nicole
Absolutely. And we can use things like nature study, learning words there, or songs. So there’s a lot of ways that we can, just like we would again with just learning English, right? 

Liz
And they say that even in English to an English speaker, if you hear a new word, you have to hear it 15 times before you’ll have the courage to say it. So I think that gives us some balance about it with our kids.

Nicole
Right. So in Form 2, that’s where it does start to get more structured at this point. Charlotte Mason still prioritizes language as speech first, but now students begin to narrate short passages in French after the teacher has read them to them, describe pictures in French, and move towards reading an easy French book. 

And then also just important to note here that by the age of 12, Charlotte Mason said children should have some power of understanding spoken French, be able to speak a little, and read an easy French book without a dictionary. So this is really a bridge, I think in their language learning.

Because by Form 3, now we’re really getting into it. Charlotte Mason said they should be learning French still, but then she says we can add German, or better, Italian…or maybe both. But I would say just to remember that at this point, if they’ve already got two languages, English and French, settled, they are more equipped to learn more languages at this point. 

Emily
Everyone tells us the more you learn, the easier it becomes.

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
And it is just the easy part, like they started way back in first grade. They’re learning simple things. It’s not like they’re joining in at the level that they’re at in their French. 

Nicole
No.

Emily
Or their first language, yeah. 

Nicole
Yeah. But they are at this point reading and then narrating longer French stories. 

Emily
Yeah.

Nicole
And they’re really beginning, I think, to maybe think in French at this point and take in ideas and express ideas. It’s not just vocabulary at this point, right? 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
Then in Form 4, which is ninth grade, Charlotte Mason describes more use of advanced books and she noted that when possible, that the French and German books illustrate the history being studied, so the time period, but in their language. 

Emily
So books that were written during the time period that they’re studying. 

Nicole
Yes. 

Emily
In history.

Nicole
Yes, and greater caliber of works at this point also.

And then Forms 5 and 6, so grade 10, 11, and 12, she describes just really higher level outcomes like narrating substantial readings in French. She even gives an example of a teacher standing and reading a whole long history account, I think it was extended, not short, and then the students just picking up immediately and narrating all the way through that. 

Emily
In French. 

Nicole
In French, yeah. And then she also talked about writing a resume, which Liz tells me is a summary, in French, of plays like, and you have to read them for me…

Emily
“Le Misanthrope” or “L’Avare.” 

Nicole
Yeah. So whatever that means, but this was an interesting one too – translating modern verse into French. So that was interesting. We see that, translating back and forth and things. So really, just like our own native tongue, it’s really the same exact progression. It’s just set back a little bit because our children are learning English from birth. And maybe you have some French, and you can start that from birth too. Or you have another language that you’re starting from birth.

Emily
Exactly. 

Nicole
But if not, then starting at least in first grade or maybe just before with nature study and stuff, and that same progression we see in English, the same grammar lessons, things like that, are going to apply. 

Emily
Mm-hmm. So let’s talk about the specific lessons in Form 1, again, grades one through three. These are four 10-minute lessons that they cover vocabulary from pictures. They’re not seeing any words written in the target language. They’re learning short stories or even Charlotte Mason talks about the Gouin method, where you’re basically learning the steps of an action and learning how to say whole sentences that way. So three times, or four times a week, excuse me, and then another lesson, so really every day, a short 10-minute singing lesson in their target language. So really, 10 minutes every day for French or whatever target language you’re using.

In Form 2, that increases to 20-minute lessons, but it’s only three times a week. So it’s really the same amount of time, right? Did I do that math right? No, it’s a little bit longer. 

Liz
Little bit. 

Emily
A little, 10 extra minutes longer.

But then by Forms 3 and 4, they have three 30-minute lessons, which you just get a lot more when you can do a longer lesson than the short one. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Emily
But then they start their other language, and they have two 20 to 30-minute lessons for that. And so they’re starting out with longer lessons in their second language. When you start your second target language besides your first that you’ve been working on since Form 1, there’s no injunction that they would not be seeing the words written. And I think that that is generally agreed upon–

Liz
They’re older.

Emily
–because they have firmly learned how to read in their first language, their mother tongue. Then they’ve been reading their second one that they are much more familiar with, and so now when they’re starting their third language…yeah fourth if you include Latin, they are able to do that without confusing the reading. 

Nicole
I also wonder, because she talks about the pronunciation being hijacked by the English language, but if German was your next language, it’s much easier to sound out the German than it would be the French. So maybe that’s also part of it. 

Emily
And then in the highest forms, Forms 5 and 6, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade or years, still three 30-minute lessons for their first foreign language, two 40-minute lessons for their second, and possibly third. So, there is so much time on the timetable for these. 

As far as individual lessons go, the lessons are going to vary. This is a living speech. Think about how you learned English. Did you sit down with your baby and start working through systematically? It’s going to be much more variable.

Charlotte Mason did have a target in this earliest form, Form 1, that they would learn six new words per lesson, but they would also hear them in sentences. So we present vocabulary with gestures. We use pictures to convey meaning without having to translate and say what it is in our native tongue, right? And then to hear it spoken in whole sentences. So they are starting to get that grammar and syntax. 

Students repeat, just as young children learning to talk will say things back, and we might say, “Oh, no, it’s like this,” and you just repeat it again.

Liz
Until they get it right.

Emily
And we’re not making a big deal of it. They’re just experimenting and trying to form their tongues and their lips and developing their palate to pronounce these different sounds. They hear short stories. They begin to narrate them, even in the very first year. It’s just much, much more simple than what they will eventually get to, and they have lots of auditory input to accommodate their ears to hearing the language. 

And as they start to hear and understand, it’s perfectly fine for them to narrate in English what they’re understanding, right? We don’t have to have them immediately narrate to French. It’s showing us what they understand. 

As they move into Form 2, they begin to read their target language, and then narration is still a key component, even if they’re just looking at a picture. The resources that we know that Charlotte Mason assigned and used, it was much set like that. There would be a picture with a story, and then the child would narrate. But it was basically repeating the sentences that they heard, and so in that way, they’re starting to get that. 

They are also taught to translate, or expected to translate from the target language into English. And then, as you said, Nicole, they would also take English and translate it into French.

And Charlotte Mason said that first step, they would translate from the target, let’s just say French for simplicity’s sake. They would translate French into English, and then they would reread the French, and then they would narrate in French. So that’s kind of the next step up that they get. They continue to progress in their study of grammar and composition in the target language, just as we have done in English. 

And she has several example lessons in Volume Three, appendix five, that are higher level French, German, and Italian lessons back there. So if you want to see the format for that, that is where I would direct you. 

Our lesson objectives for Foreign Language is to increase their powers of understanding and speaking the language very simply. So we’re just helping them make slow and steady progress, just like in all our other lessons. 

The teacher prep for this subject is really going to depend on the resources that you use, and also how familiar you are with the language. Some of us don’t know one, and so we’re going to have to rely on other resources. Thankfully, in our technological age, we have a lot more at our fingertips to use, and so that is just going to vary. But maybe you need to plan out sentences for the vocabulary words that you’re planning to use, or find pictures that help describe them, or passages and stories, et cetera. 

There are so many resources that we could list that use what is known in the language acquisition community as comprehensible language input. What is it? 

Liz
Comprehensible Input Instruction.

Emily
Comprehensible Input Instruction, which is really essentially the same method that Charlotte Mason was advocating. And we have compiled a list of those that just vary depending on the language you’re studying, and we will include those in the show notes. 

Liz
Well, this is sometimes one of the most intimidating subjects, and I have moms all the time, “Well, I don’t know any language at all. I have no idea what I’m doing.” Well, I would just encourage you that when you start a Charlotte Mason education, you dive into a lot of things you’ve never done before, don’t you? 

And then another question is commonly, “Which one do I choose?” 

Emily
Yes. 

Liz
And I always say, “Don’t choose the one you want, choose the one you know or have had at least a tiny bit of experience.” If you took one year of Spanish in high school, and you don’t even think you did very well in it, you’re still farther ahead to just go on into that. 

Emily
Or what you have recently, like maybe you have an in-law or a family member that speaks another language that– 

Liz
I mean, the most ideal thing for all of us would be to have a tutor. And you can pray for one of those to come along in your life. You can ask around at church, friends, the local library. There’s lots of ways we can find other native speakers. But if that doesn’t happen, like Emily said, you’re going to have to study it yourself and stay a step ahead of your children. 

Another consideration, well, I guess I would just encourage you, because I have a lot of moms that tell me, “I had a couple years. I remember nothing.” Well, when Emily used to teach my youngest two French, because she knew French, and they loved it, and it’s really amusing to me because as adults, they still know all the things she taught them. But she got married and left me, and I said to the boys, “I think we’ll switch to Spanish because I know Spanish better.” Because I had three years of high school French, but had a different teacher every year, and none of them were very strong teachers. And that’s why I switched to Spanish in college. And that went much better, and it was more recent. It had been 45 years since I had had French, and at first, I did sometimes speak French, Frenish, as my boys said. But the French came back. I was astounded. 

Emily
Did you teach Spanish or the French? 

Emily
I did French with them–

Emily
Oh, okay.

Liz
–because that’s what they wanted to continue. I wanted them to switch, but they didn’t want to.

Emily
Okay. 

Liz
So I just want to encourage you that even if it’s been a really long time, it will come back to you. Remember what we said about language acquisition. The more you hear something…so start listening to Spanish. Our libraries online are full of Spanish resources. Listen to the Bible, some chapter you know yourself, in Spanish over and over again. Listen to a whole book. Or what I find really helpful is listening to Spanish, or whatever language it might be, newscasts…because they speak very slowly and clearly, and after a while you’re like, “Oh, they’re talking about our president,” and all these sort of things. So, getting it into your own ear, and just do the lessons with your children. Work as hard as they do at learning the words. 

And honestly, this is not something you can just turn in for those 10 minutes. That’s the formal part, but you’re going to have to be speaking that language with them all day, as often as you can possibly work it in. Don’t you think that helps a lot? 

Emily
That’s why we really do like the talkbox.mom boxes, because they have words and phrases that we use all the time in our homes, and none of my children will say, “Please pass the butter.” They always say, “Passe le beurre, s’il te plait.” And just by replacing those things that we say all of the time. And so we often do those around dinner as a whole family, when my husband joins in. 

Liz
And honestly, in this day and age, Emily alluded to this, with Google, any of the search engines, and all the AI we have, you can type in, “I want the translation of these English sentences.” And I think Google Translate on your phones has improved tremendously.

Emily
It has improved.

Liz
I will just say that for North American, especially in the US, we have a huge Spanish population, and you’re going to encounter that a lot, and it is an easier language, so if you have no experience, that might be a good place to do. You don’t have to start with French just because Charlotte Mason did.

Emily
Maybe we should talk about why she did French. 

Liz
Well, I was just going to encourage them. However, if you would like to dive into French, I think having to do it for school, because it is a little more challenging than Spanish, that would be good. Because like we’ve said, every language you pick up comes easier, and Spanish is much easier. So they’re going to naturally encounter it more, and they would acquire a little bit of Spanish, just living.

Emily
It used to be that all English speakers also, educated English speakers, all…

Liz
They always learned French.

Emily
Yeah. Our language is very amalgamated by French.

Liz
Right. I think 60% of our words…

Emily
Because the Normans came over…yeah. And this is why we have words like sheep for the animal and mutton for the meat, because the nobles spoke French, and mouton is the word for sheep in French. We just don’t know how– 

Liz
And you all know restaurant.

Emily
Yes, and theater, and all kinds of things. But when we read classic literature, even when written in English, even reading Charlotte Mason’s volumes, there’s a whole ton of French, just thrown in there untranslated…because they were educated. So for her, that was the natural first language to do. But– 

Liz
And it was their closest neighbor, too.

Emily
Yeah. But you might…well, they didn’t learn Celtic or Gaelic, which were actual distinct languages.

Liz
True, true. But if you have a grandmother who’s Norwegian, and is in your life, or Portuguese…

Emily
Or you have a strong different cultural heritage.

Liz
Yes! Go for it. Yeah. 

Emily
But as you were saying, the one that you’re going to be the most successful is the one that you can speak, even if it’s just a little. 

Liz
Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

Emily
Do you have any other?

Liz
I don’t think so. 

Emily
Okay. Thanks for tuning in today. We have links in the show notes for many resources for teaching Foreign Language in accordance with Charlotte Mason’s methods. We hope you’ll join us next week when we finish our look at language lessons by turning to the ancient tongue, Latin, as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason method.

When you hear that Charlotte Mason doesn’t begin formal lessons in grammar until Form 2, do you think she’s crazy? Or at least wonder why? A young Ms. Mason would’ve agreed with you, but after working with real children, she changed her mind. On today’s podcast, we’re discussing Grammar lessons in the Charlotte Mason method. Join us and find out more.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

ADE’s Form 2 Grammar Lessons Guide by Mason (updated by Liz Cottrill)

ADE’s Grammar Lessons: A Short Grammar of the English Tongue by Meiklejohn (updated by Jessica Becker)

ADE’s Poetry Scansion Lessons by Jono Kiser

Episode 237: Writing: Grammar and Composition

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.

Emily
Charlotte Mason said that we have nothing new in the teaching of Grammar to suggest. But for those of us who are used to Language Arts curriculum and workbooks beginning in kindergarten, the Language Arts progression does seem quite different, not only compared with our own education, but also compared to what all the voices in the homeschool community seem to be saying, right?

Nicole
Mm-hmm. 

Emily
Nicole, can you paint the picture for us of how Grammar fits into the whole scope of a child’s education?

Nicole
Absolutely. So in Form 1, so that’s grades one through three, there are no formal Grammar lessons. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And instead, students are absorbing language naturally through rich reading or being read to, and narration. That was very intentional. 

Charlotte Mason tells us Grammar is a logical study. It’s abstract, and it’s, she said, “Uncongenial to young minds who deal best with the concrete.” So at this stage, they read living books, they narrate, they copy passages, they learn poetry, they absorb correct usage while reading and even speaking, like we talked about in our last episode. They’re forming habits of speech and thought, but they’re not studying parts of speech, or analyzing, or parsing, or anything like that. 

But then in Form 2, so that’s grades four through six, this is where the formal Grammar begins. And it begins with sentences, not parts of speech. Charlotte Mason made it very clear. She said, “It’s better that the child should begin with the sentence, not with the parts of speech, that he should learn a little of analysis before he learns to parse.” So at this idea, the first ideas that are presented to them are that words go together to make sense.

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
And they kind of learn that, and then we teach them that a sentence has two parts, that which we speak of and what we say about it. So we’re going to start slow on top of all of that. Then we’ll move to dividing it into subject and predicates, understanding those words. Verbs are introduced, being verbs, and doing words. Exercises that involve prefixes, use of words in multiple grammatical ways, and so we’re still seeing that it’s kind of analysis before parsing. We’re not doing that. 

Liz
And it’s all sentence work.

Nicole
Yes. So by the age of 12, we see sections in her volumes that say, “By 12, they should know,” and she said, “They should have a fair knowledge of English grammar,” just through these basic things. 

Then in Forms 3 and 4, so this is seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, Grammar continues. But now they’re going to parse more complex sentences, they’re going to analyze poetry, they’re going to work with prefixes and word structure. At this stage, Charlotte Mason said that Grammar functions as one of the disciplinary subjects alongside Math and those kinds of logical subjects. In Volume Three, she says, “Mathematics, grammar, logic, leave the record of intellectual habits in the brain tissue.” So it kind of reminds you why we’re doing this and what kind of lessons these are. 

So I would also say that at this point, it’s starting to support composition and translation, which we’re going to talk about in another episode. 

And then in Form 5 and 6, so those are your grades 10, 11, and 12, it’s really integrated in the advanced language of studying and writing. At this level, they’re writing papers, they’re translating other languages back and forth from English to that and back again. They’re really reading deeply in both their English language and their foreign language, and the grammar – and even Latin – and the grammar is really helping them with all of that. So it really undergirds everything at this point and isn’t an isolated subject there. 

So yeah. That’s the big picture. So she’s putting it off, but she’s taking it very seriously.

And we see that in how she presents it to the children over those years. 

Emily
Charlotte Mason also says in Home Education that Grammar, being a study of words and not of things, and that children can’t dream parts of speech, is by no means attractive to the child.

Nicole
No. 

Emily
And nor should he be hurried into it. And just like you said, that’s why we don’t see Grammar lessons starting in Form 1, and it’s one of those areas we have come to really trust what she says. We’ve seen it play out in our own children. And actually, I have to tell you, my own students who have begun the study of grammar, that is their favorite subject of the week, which can any of us say that?

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
My husband, maybe. 

So weekly in Form 2, there are two very short, 15-minute lessons a week for the study of Grammar. So they’re just slowly working through…it’s a little bite. And what you said about the logic. They’re always seeing words in sentences, which English needs to be…it’s where we put words in the sentence that depend upon its meaning, right? Our words don’t change like in Latin to give that meaning. And so they’re having to deduce always what they’re saying. 

In Form 3, they have, again, twice a week, but these lessons are longer. They’re 30 minutes this time. So they’re actually getting quite a bit of time to work out even more detailed analysis and using their logical reasoning skills.

Form 4 cuts back to just once a week for 30 minutes. By now, they have got five years of Grammar under their belt. Grammar is a finite study. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
We use it all the time, but there’s only so much we need to know about it, so they cut it back a little bit. And then Form 5 and 6, we don’t see a subject called English Grammar on their schedules. Instead, it is English Language, and grammar is wrapped up into a lot of other things, such as word study, like learning the etymology of words, and also some reading and writing instruction. So it becomes part of that subject. So like you said, it’s all integrated and interwoven. And they do have two 30-minute lessons a week for that subject. 

So as far as the individual lessons go, there’s really not a single format that a lesson has to take, but there are some common ideas. So the new idea is presented orally. Grammar is primarily an oral lesson. There’s practice, just like we do in Math, where they get to actually bring their powers of reasoning to exercises in looking at different sentences.

Liz
And by that, what you’re saying is the teacher instructs a little more than in most subjects.

Emily
Correct in Charlotte Mason we don’t have a book that’s doing the teaching at this point.

Liz
She’s explaining.

Emily
Yep. And then you can actually see some really good sample lessons in Volume One on pages 296 to 300. Charlotte Mason lays out a couple of different lessons herself. So the child then is introduced to the topic, gets to play around with it, work through it, and then he applies his new knowledge by creating sentences himself that use that part of speech, and he’s coming up with.

So it’s really taking his knowledge and owning it, I think.

So as he progresses, he identifies the grammar concepts that are in his actual school book. Whatever grammar idea he’s working on in his lessons, he’s looking in his actual school books for those. So it’s not a removed, isolated, compartmentalized subject, but is integrated into the very books that he’s reading and narrating and writing from. So you can see just this beautiful cohesion of this subject. 

Nicole
Even just the fact that a lot of times we worry about changing to written narration, and we talk about how that transition happens, but the importance of when they’re older, still maintaining that oral narration and that they are using, how do I say this?

Emily
Different sentence structures. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

So he analyzes example sentences, and he works through the logic of what each word’s place is in that sentence, expanding and kind of adding to the knowledge that he’s gained. 

Also in Form 3, they do a formal study of Scansion, which is the grammar of poetry, which is different. It’s the rhythm and meter and breaking words into syllables and foot patterns and rhyme schemes. So that is another facet of Grammar that happens.

Liz
In Form 3. 

Emily
In Form 3 and up, mm-hmm. Yes. 

So our objectives for our Grammar lessons are to increase their reasoning powers and their logic. Primarily, it’s not just to become better English speakers, right? It’s really honing their ability to reason. And then, of course, we do want to increase their knowledge of English grammar at the same time. 

So our teacher prep for Grammar lessons is really just to look over the next lesson and wrap our minds around it. Maybe you’re like me and never had formal Grammar instruction and you’re really fuzzy on what participles are. Or whatever it is. So make sure you understand, since this is an oral lesson, that you’re presenting the idea. Thankfully, we do have some resources to recommend I’ll tell you about in a minute. 

But another part of our prep is maybe they need more practice on a thing, so we’re looking over their school books that they’re using and just choosing out a couple of passages that they may need to work from.

So we at ADE have two of the resources that Charlotte Mason used, but we’ve updated them and included answer keys, which is, I think, essential for those of us who did not have study. So Liz herself redid Charlotte Mason’s own First Grammar Lessons, and that is our Form 2 Grammar Resource that we sell on the website, and you can find a link for that in the show notes.

And then once that is finished, completed, and the child has had lots of practice identifying those parts of speech in their school books as well, and writing their own sentences, then they can move on to “The Short Grammar of the English Tongue” by Meiklejohn, and we have two years of that resource. Which may take your child more than two years to complete because, of course, Grammar is one of those studies that Charlotte Mason said there must be no gaps in the child’s knowledge. We have to move at their own pace of understanding, and that is perfectly fine. 

And then my husband, Jono, actually, has written us a Scansion manual for those of us who’ve never studied, let alone English Grammar, the grammar of poetry, and he has done additional exercises as well once your students have worked through that. So if you are lost completely on the word “scansion”, we have some– 

Nicole
What’s that word even mean?

Emily
Yeah. Yeah. We have resources for you as well. 

So Mom, do you want to tell us some common questions that you hear, or just considerations we need to make and think about as we place our children in Grammar lessons?

Liz
Yeah. I think some of us get a bit into a cold sweat, just like teaching Math. And probably the most common thing I hear is that I never learned it myself. And I just am here to tell you that when I was going through school, millennia ago, they were in a phase where Grammar was not taught at all. I knew what a sentence was, and I might have known a noun and a verb, but I knew no particularities at all. And when I had to do my college entrance tests, I think I did the ACT, when my scores came back, I almost had a perfect score in Grammar, which just floored me. But my counselor, she’s like, “Well, that’s not surprising. You know how to read.” So I really encourage you that if you’re a reader, this will make sense to you. It’s just putting names to things. 

Emily
Much like in nature study, right? They’re familiar. 

Liz
I was just going to say that.

Emily
Oh, you were going to say the same thing. 

Liz
Yeah. That’s fine. You go ahead.

Emily
Just like we are familiar with by watching and looking at plants and animals. 

Liz
Right. 

Emily
And then later, we just gently introduce them to, Oh, that’s a stamen, and that’s a pistil, or the inflorescence or whatever. 

Liz
So naming comes after experiencing things and knowing about them. And your child has had amazing grammar since childhood. And when you think about how much it takes to learn a language, to realize that from babyhood to, say, kindergarten, their grammar has improved tremendously over that time, and it’s just from using it. So there’s such a practical thing about grammar. We all know the right way things are. Maybe we get stuck sometimes and say things incorrectly, but we know it isn’t right. 

So anyway, and that is another common thing moms just say, “I don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me.” I just want to encourage you that if you start with your fourth grader, and even if you have an older child, but they’ve not had grammar, you just start at the beginning, just like with Math and several other subjects. You’ll learn right alongside of them, and you will be having many aha moments. It will make much more sense.

A lot of moms are scared if their children ask them complicated questions that they don’t know the answer to because they’re not adept. And I’ll just say, in this day and age of instant answers, it’s not hard to Google and find out. But there are the handbooks for English Grammar, and they’re really helpful. 

Emily
And also, experts don’t always agree, right? 

Liz
Well, that is a-

Emily
There is sometimes not just one right answer in Grammar, and a child can make a case for a logical reason why this word is such a thing, and they can be right. 

Liz
And like so many other things in life, some terms have changed. You might have called this a clause, and now they call it, I’m making this up, but they might call it a different name, like section or something. The names for adverbs and certain types of parts of speech have changed a bit. So yeah, it’s a living subject because our language changes too.

Moms often have the question, if their child isn’t reading yet, should they begin Grammar? And I usually do recommend holding off if they’re not reading at all. You could do some oral lessons and begin to give them the ideas of what a complete sentence is and how to even detect the subject and the verb in a sentence without them being able to read, but you will have to do it with them, which isn’t too hard in Form 2 because the lessons are short, and there’s just a couple every week. But you might delay until the child has more confidence at reading. And then some children, because they’re slower to get to read, they write slower, and they can’t always write all their exercises. It is fine for them to tell those to you.

Emily
Absolutely. 

Liz
I had a son with learning disabilities, and he got through all of Charlotte Mason’s early grammar lessons, all four parts, and never wrote one sentence because he couldn’t do it. 

Anyway, if you guys can think of some others, that’d be great. I just want to encourage you that with all the living books they’ve read, as Nicole pointed out, they are hearing beautiful grammar usage, and it will come out. It has come out in their narrations. It’ll come out in their writing, and they will understand it. And honestly, there’s no need to panic about all the parts of speech being nailed down because really, at the end of Form 2, she just wanted them to know subject, verb, and object of a sentence. 

And like Emily said, looking in sentences in books can help. And just the principles that she gives you of saying to yourself, What is this sentence about? And then, What are we saying about it? will help you through even some complicated sentences in their history or their novel or something.

Emily
I think one thing that we hear, or the one common concern or query that we get all the time is, Can I combine my kids in this subject? And we would say, just like Math, Grammar, because there needs to be no gaps for the most part, unless you have two children who are in the same grade level and have the same understanding, you’re going to need to probably do these individually. 

Liz
And they might be in the same book. One’s just beginning, and the other one’s a ways through it, and they could have their lesson at the same time because the older student by then is probably able to do most of their lessons on their own.

Emily
We hope you’ve gained more clarity on Charlotte Mason grammar lessons after today’s discussion. Next week, we’ll be talking about learning languages apart from our mother tongue. In the meantime, please check out the show notes for links to the resources that we mentioned in this episode, including our previous episode on Grammar, number 237. We hope you’ll join us next week as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason method.

Learning languages, both our own and other tongues, is a significant portion of a Charlotte Mason education. More time is given to their study than any other subject on Ms. Mason’s timetables. In today’s podcast, we look at the foundational principles of language acquisition to lay the groundwork for learning to speak and write in any language.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Thirty Million Words by Dana Suskind

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

Episode 44: Language Acquisition

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Nicole
…Nicole Williams…

Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.

Emily
Charlotte Mason had a very distinctive method for teaching language, both our English tongue as well as foreign languages, both modern and ancient. It is this part of her curriculum that usually causes the most trepidation in parents and teachers because it looks so different from what we ourselves have experienced. Yet despite a gentle start in the first form, which is grades 1-3, if we steadily present each component as Ms. Mason laid out, we will be amazed at the command our students have of language. 

So today, Liz will be sharing the foundational ideas underlying this subject. 

Liz
Yes. We are going to begin to explore this area of the feast called language, namely English Grammar, the study of foreign languages, and the study of Latin. But before we dive into those individually in subsequent episodes, we want to talk about her particular method of teaching there. It’s important here to think about our relationship to language, how we gain confidence in any language. 

Language is part of what makes us unique as persons. Without it, we would be unable to thrive or function. Language, by definition, is the process or method of human communication, words used in a structured, commonly understood way by groups of people in a community or a country. So to consider the whole world with its eight billion people, and think about the fact that there are over 7,000 spoken languages among them. There are a lot of languages out there. We can get lost in other places and not understand a thing. But within each group, those members understand one another.

Most of us know only our mother tongue. Some of us maybe one other language, or a little bit of a couple of others. Americans, in general, because of our geographic location, separated by two big oceans, are pretty isolated, and we tend to only use English, and we get along just fine. But Ms. Mason included the study of English, of course, naturally, but the study of other languages was included in her feast as well. She believed learning other languages put us in sympathy with our neighbors in the world who don’t share our history and our customs. So the wide feast means widening our view of the world and the people in it who are like us with a difference. 

Since English is what most of us have in common – I’m speaking in English right now, this minute, and you’re understanding me because you know that language. We’re communicating. So let’s consider the process by which we gain this language. The average adult knows between 20,000 and 30,000 words, and obviously it takes some time to acquire that number of words. This also shows us, when you think about it, how many combinations of all those words that we can invent. 

How does a newborn baby become the adult who can comprehend and make sense and use those words? In the world of linguists and language specialists, the official term is called language acquisition. Ms. Mason understood this progression. She said the sense that is most needed to learn language is the ear. So before speaking a language, babies must hear it spoken. Beginning in utero and throughout infancy, they are receiving language spoken by others. An intriguing book about this is “Thirty Million Words” by Dana Suskind. And another really fascinating classic I read a couple of years ago is called “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker. 

Whatever language a baby hears from birth is the one that he learns. All babies begin to make sounds in their first year, but soon their mouth becomes adept at replicating and pronounce all the phonemes of the one language that they hear. From the ear, it goes to the mouth. They make more and more attempts to imitate what they’re hearing. Say words at first for objects and actions, and then babies are incredible linguists. Before long, words become sentences, and it’s incredible how their grammar is so well-formed right from the very beginning. It is instinctive to all of us. That’s what Pinker’s book goes a lot into. It’s really fun reading, but I like that kind of thing. 

Emily
And sometimes it’s been more logical than our actual grammar.

Liz
Oh, yes. When they put all those patterns. What was the good one of your kids that they used to say?

Emily
Two of my four children have, of their own, they’ve never heard this. Obviously, we don’t say, “I amn’t,” but they say, “I amn’t” instead of, “I’m not.” And it was just crazy. Because we say, you aren’t. 

Liz
Well, yeah, we say “we aren’t”. 

Emily
We usually contract the “o” in “not”, right? In I amn’t instead of I’m… 

Liz
I always love that. Why do grandchildren have to grow up?

Anyway, it’s not long before all those words become sentences, as I said. And then there comes a time when their mouths just flood us with their sentences. And one of the reasons young children ask why? so often, Charlotte Mason said, is they’re trying to gain some vocabulary. They have thoughts to express, and they’re figuring out all the ways that can be done by listening to us describe and explain things as we respond to their questions. They become very conversational. 

This seems really basic information to all of us. It’s our experience, but there is a pattern and a progression and a definite stage that language development happens. After speaking comes reading. And interestingly, most children begin acquiring this skill between ages five and nine, the early years of school when it begins. And because by that time, they have become quite proficient at verbal communication and begin learning the symbolic code that communicates meaning from a page of print. Reading takes several years for them to become comfortable with it.

But written language is the last phase. Just as hearing precedes speaking, reading precedes writing. Like those first babblings, once children understand that print tells you something, they start scribbling and pretending to write, or at least show interest in writing. Writing also, like reading, takes many years. And first, as with reading, they begin with learning how to form the letters, then they move to making words, and then sentences. 

Charlotte Mason’s scope and sequence in language follows the child’s natural development. They learn how to write the mechanics in Form 1, but putting original thoughts on paper doesn’t begin formally until Form 2 or fourth grade. That’s when they begin learning about the structure of language. We call it Grammar, and that’s what we’re going to discuss next week.

Emily
Thank you for joining our discussion today. You may like to go back and listen to our earlier episodes on language, particularly episode 44. You can find links to that episode in the show notes.

As we continue to discuss a Charlotte Mason curriculum this season, we invite you to read along with us in chapter 10 of Volume 6. Next week, we will be looking at the subject of English Grammar, discussing the particulars of these lessons and considerations Charlotte Mason made that apply to the study of your native tongue. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason method.

How do I help my older students develop their composition abilities if they’ve not been narrating from the beginning? How can I keep up with all the many narrations my children need to tell and write each day? How do I know that they’re getting the facts right in their narrations? We’re addressing these questions and more as we wrap up our Composition series on the podcast today.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

ADE Composition Planner

ADE Exam Planner

ADE Teacher Resource: A Point or Two of Correction and Critique

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill…

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams. 

Emily
So as we close out our series on Composition, we want to take some time to answer some common practical questions that often arise. So Nicole, why don’t you start us off? 

Nicole
Sure. So one of the first ones is where we can combine our students, and with Composition…I mean, obviously anywhere where the children are sharing the same source material. So we talked in our last series of lessons about how so many of your children, well so many, depends on how many children you have, but such a wide form level range of children are reading Plutarch together. So if they’re reading the same book, Shakespeare play…

Emily
History. 

Nicole
History, yeah. Then you can tailor their narration, whether it’s a written or an oral one, so that the child, each child, is working at their own level. So that would be one way to do it. So here’s some examples I came up with. After a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, say, your Form 2 student might give you an oral or written narration, while your Form 3 student might write a short summary of the same piece. 

After reading Plutarch– I should just preface that some of these are just better done together as a group, but sometimes we might want to do this kind of thing– you might have, again, your Form 2 student recount a single incident or something. Maybe that’s going to be their written narration for the day. Your Form 4 student might create a diary entry from the main character. So just kind of mixing it up there. 

Working from a current events article…lots of us listen or watch current events together as a family. Your Form 3 student could write a descriptive paragraph in prose, while the Form 5 student maybe could craft an opinion piece for the paper on the same topic. 

Emily
Or write a ballad. 

Nicole
Or write a ballad. 

So my last one was just if everybody was on the same nature walk, then maybe everybody could write about like a frozen pond or the first wildflower of the season. But your Form 1 student might say it orally and your Form 2 student might write in verse in the meter of that term’s poet and your Form 6 student might compose 20 lines of blank verse. So everybody can kind of do their own things at their level is what I’m saying. 

Liz
From the same source. 

Nicole
From the same source, right. 

Liz
Have you ever thought about, too, if they’re doing a lesson together, two children are studying the same Ancient History text. While you’re working with the younger children, they can read out loud to one another and even narrate to each other. You don’t have to hear it. 

Emily
Yeah, absolutely. 

Nicole
Another one that we’ve talked about before is maybe they both narrate orally a little bit. And then that student who’s learning to write a narration writes just a small part of the end.

There are a few things, but again it will really depend on the source material.

Emily
Well, I want to tackle the subject of placement and I’ll ask you guys because you both have the experience bringing older students into Charlotte Mason whereas mine have done it from the beginning. I hope all of our listeners have come to appreciate just how important narration is to the subject of Composition. It is far more important than simply learning how to format a five-paragraph essay, right? If you are bringing an older student into the Charlotte Mason method and they are not fluent narrators, time must be spent working on that first. 

This might mean you don’t ask them to write all the different types of compositions appropriate for their form, at least at first. You could let them try writing those and refrain from critique until their narrating skills have grown. We can hold off even on offering our point or two of correction if they’re still developing these skills. Do you guys have anything to add to that?

Nicole
One thing you mentioned in an earlier episode that I did with my older kids when they first started this was when they wrote one I had them read it to me. 

Emily
Yes. 

Nicole
And that kind of kept eyes off, kept my eyes off the paper and allowed them not to have any embarrassment over spelling or anything like that. 

Emily
And they might notice more, which I think is if they’re older like four and three and up, she said that’s when we do start offering the correction because they see a need for it. 

Nicole
Yeah.

Emily
Do you have anything else? 

Liz
I don’t think so. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
I was just also going to say in my history, you know, we’re very careful to give enough of a story that they can narrate that without just parroting it back. But attention is the thing that has to be cultivated for this, and there were times where I had to say like just something so short, just to get them to lock in, get your brain here right now. And then I could read a big piece and they could narrate that piece. But it’s really hard to cultivate that attention. 

And I guess just one last thing is when they’re older and you’re asking them, this all comes naturally when they’re younger and you ask them to do it and they just do it forever. But when they’re older and there’s kind of a sense of embarrassment, you’re asking them to do this…

Emily
It feels uncomfortable.

Nicole
…having a little explanation. 

Emily
Why do I have to tell you, you just read it. 

Nicole
Yes, having a little explanation about why we’re doing this or what’s going on, what the purpose of this is.

Emily
Yeah what’s going on in their own brain, right. This is how you’re learning.

Liz
Yeah, because we have just read it. We know what we think. We don’t know what they think. 

Emily
Mm-hmm. I know what I heard, but I don’t know what you heard. 

OK. What other questions do people often have? 

Liz
You know, I think when you think about the overall big thing, the most common question I have is, well, feeling like I just need to get a course to work my kids through from like 10 years old up because by the time they’re in high school with my lack of skills, they’re not going to be able…I think we need to trust this method. If you do the things that she assigns at every level, you are going to be astounded at what your children can write. 

Emily
And as aforementioned, people who get into college cannot write. 

Liz
Yeah. Well, that’s true there too, but we don’t want to fall to that level for sure. That’s why we’re doing a better way of educating. But I cannot emphasize enough that you just don’t have the option of skipping narrations, like running out of time, just not doing them or blowing them off in any way, whether oral or written. And especially starting in seventh grade, relentlessly give them those composition themes and those delayed narration assignments. Don’t say, I just couldn’t think of a good thing this week or, you know, I’ve got to take some time and figure this out so I haven’t been doing it for two or three or four terms. Just…all you have to do is have them write so you can make time for that. Because it’s the accumulation of the comfort of writing over time that is going to make a difference when they get to high school. 

I also get a lot of questions about how do you hear everybody’s narrations? And I’ll just say right off the bat, there’s no simple solution to this. Every single year of your school, it’s going to change because your children have different skills and you have different children at the table and you have different things going on. 

When I am working out my yearly timetable, on a day-to-day basis I will actually consider if this child, I can’t hear two narrations at one time, so I schedule lessons so I don’t have two children having to narrate. And like Emily keeps pointing out, it’s only in the younger years, especially two or three times that they’re gonna have to be doing it. And once they get to be 10, they’re gonna be writing them. You don’t have to listen to that. They’re sitting there writing. 

Emily
I have my Form 2 and 3 students do several lessons together and I never hear their narrations. I mean I hear them across the room narrating to one another but I’m not hearing the words that they’re saying. 

Liz
Because the fact is they can narrate to the wall and it would be just as effective. 

Emily
It would. Because it’s for them. 

Liz
Exactly. 

And the other thing is to be diligent about planning lessons for tomorrow because you can look at tomorrow’s schedule and decide right then which lessons will be narrated, which ones will be written, oral, whatever, and in which children are going to be doing what. You’d just be surprised. It’s not as hard as it might seem. You might feel like, oh, I have five students. How can I hear 12 narrations a day? You don’t have to, is the point. 

Emily
I think another one…moms are, I mean, we’ve perennially heard this, I think, for the last 20 years, that how do I know they’re not making up their narrations? If we aren’t pre-reading or if we aren’t hearing their narrations. It is far harder to make up than to tell what you just read, right? But again, that is not the purpose of narration. The purpose is for them to learn, to dig in, to digest the reading and do their reading. 

Liz
If they’re all studying in the same room, you can be more aware. If you’re taking time to plan lessons for tomorrow, you know where they’re at in the books. I mean, sometimes even just skimming headings in a book gives you enough of a clue if they write about the discovery of some mineral in Alaska and you know they were actually studying about something in Mexico, you know that was all made up. 

Emily
I think that the we just had a mom recently who was brand new to having a consult with A Delectable Education and she was, I think, just taken aback. Like, wait, what do mean you guys all do school in the same room? And I think it’s much easier for a child to go off and not do their work and then they have to make up a narration. 

Liz
You’re really putting them in a moral dilemma too. 

Emily
I’m actually thinking back to my 12 year old self, I probably would have done the same thing. I wanted to read what I wanted to read. 

Nicole
I had a thought too that I wanted to bring up. So lots of times we talk about narration and just the act of knowing, but this has really brought, I hope shed a lot of light on this other aspect in the ride, it’s important.

And if we think about the other forms that people try to use for narration, like to draw a narration, there are times where in their drawing lessons they’re asked to draw a scene from a history book on something. But if we finish a lesson and we draw it on the regular, we are missing this whole aspect of this. 

Liz
Right. Because narration is a verbal activity. 

Emily
And I think there is a rule with them that Charlotte Mason talks about that. Like if the material is unable to be communicated clearly in words and it needs a diagram or a map, that’s their narration is the diagram or the map. But the lessons that we have been talking about that feed composition are all lessons that they’re taking in literary form. They’re reading books, and she was absolutely persistently adamant that literary form deserves a literary narration. So if it comes into us through words, it comes out of us through words. 

Liz
Right. And one other thought I just didn’t get a chance to say, when it comes to balancing their narrating and all of that. First of all, try to read their written narrations the same day they were written. It doesn’t take that long, you know, and that way you’re keeping up with it. Don’t think, I’ll save all this till Friday afternoon. Because Friday afternoon you’re going to want to leave the house. And also, I know it is not ideal, but it is possible to hear a child’s brief oral narration while the child you’re working with is doing their transcription writing or working out a long math problem. I mean, you’re not constantly involved with the seven year old every single second. 

Emily
And you’re also always telling people they need to train the child who needs to narrate to not just come in first. They need to put their hand on your shoulder like they’ve been doing in social situations. 

Liz
Correct. Or just give them a signal. I know you need to narrate. I’ll be with you in 10 seconds. And you get the little one doing something for a moment and you turn to the other child. This is part of learning to love their neighbor as themselves, right? They are cooperating to write a narration. 

Nicole
And if they’re old enough to write a narration they’re probably old enough to make lunch. So maybe you sit with your cup of tea after school while somebody else makes lunch and you read narration. 

Emily
Aww.

Liz
Yeah. Lovely thought. And I think just as well as keeping with the writing assignments and not letting them off the hook or blowing them off just because you are uncertain or feeling insecure or something.

Do not underestimate how much wide reading helps your children to write. Help your children get beyond only fantasy books or only survival books. Help them to take their novels seriously that are assigned every term. From fourth grade on, they have to be able to read widely to ever be able to write well. That would be my major point about this entire session on compositions. 

Emily
Well, I have always at these closing episodes talked about assessing their progress. So this really kind of goes along with the “point or two of correction”, you know, definitely. But even that’s not till the end. So we definitely want to be assuring ourselves, our child, that they’re making progress in their composition skills, even before they get to the point where we’re actually intervening, right, and bringing some things to their attention.

So I think this is the most daunting area. right, especially since the majority of us didn’t grow up practicing narration, it’s just a foreign a foreign concept, right? 

So the first thing to remember is that we gauge progress not against the ideal, the most perfect Composition writing or whatever. 

Liz
Yes. 

Emily
We’re comparing the child to themselves, right? Are you making progress compared to where you were last week, last month, last term, last year…whatever the case may be. So that means we do need to look back at their old narrations. In the early years when this is all oral, we still have their exams that are written down. So we have like a term by term look at what they have been writing.

Our Exam Planner has some helpful criteria to look at and questions to help you assess their work in the front matter of that exam planner. Also, I mentioned previously Jono Kiser did a teacher training video for us and that is available called “A Point or Two of Correction and Critique”. That has a lot of things that you can do, look at to help assess how they’re coming along. 

But some simple questions you can ask yourself are, is their narration or their composition relevant to the topic or the reading? Is it on topic? Does it show their engagement with the material and ideas? Are they showing interest in the things that they’re reading about? Have they improved their fluency of communicating? Do you know what they’re talking about and do you understand their meaning? And have they shown growth over the term or from year to year?

That’s it, and I think we can rest assured that if the answer is yes, even if it’s a tiny amount of progress, if they’re making some strides in these areas, they’re gonna be okay and they will take care of itself. 

Liz
And just maybe keep a folder and keep samples maybe once a month, set something aside and save it and you go back and look over those over a year or two and you will see the progress.

Emily
Charlotte Mason said, “the response of the young students to such a scheme of study is very delightful. What they write has literary and sometimes poetic value, and the fact that they can write well is the least of the gains acquired. They can read, appreciating every turn of their author’s thought, and they can bring cultivated minds to bear on the problems of the hour and the guiding of the state. That is to say, their education bears at every point on these issues and interests of everyday life, and they show good progress in the art of becoming the magnanimous citizens of the future.”

Well that is a lofty goal and that is it for our series on Composition. Resources that we mentioned today are going to be found in the show notes and from here we’re moving into more Language Arts by looking at languages both foreign and our native tongue as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason method while discussing a Charlotte Mason curriculum.