We’re back for one last episode of Season 11, in which we have been taking a deeper dive into the curriculum as laid out by Charlotte Mason. We have a very important practice to share with you on the podcast today to help you finish your school year well and to get off on the right foot for the one to come.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Episode 241: Seasonal Reflections

Form Level Recap Episodes:

• Episode 83: Form 1B Recap
• Episode 84: Form 1A Recap
• Episode 85: Form 2B Recap
• Episode 86: Form 2A Recap
• Episode 87: Form 3 Recap
• Episode 88: Forms 4-6 Recap

Episode 264: The Time-Table

Episode 232: Forecasting

Short Synopsis Episodes

Awaken Living Books Conference
July 17-18 in Traverse City, MI

ADE Teacher Helps and Training Videos
(check back over the summer for new additions!)

ADE Patreon

ADE Curriculum Cohort
(registration for 2027 cohorts start Nov 1, 2026!)

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Nature Explorers Rotation B
(available for purchase May 10, 2026!)

Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Understanding Biomes
(Rotation B available for purchase by the end of August, 2026!)

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
This is our last episode of season 11. We’ve done this officially for 11 years now, guys. That number keeps getting bigger! 

We like to end each season with an intentional looking back before we turn our attention to what’s ahead. So how do we put this into practice as far as our own school year goes? 

Nicole
Before you rush into next year’s plans or even summer’s freedom…you know, I just want to go to the next thing. But I think if you take an hour – and I think an hour is a good number, could be less, but depending on the number of kids you have – and sit down and reflect on the year that’s passed and ask yourself questions like what went well this year? Where did my children grow? Academically, yes, but also in character. What was unexpectedly fruitful? What was consistently hard? Where did I feel tension? Where did I feel peace? What rhythms worked? Maybe some that didn’t. What did we abandon? And why did that happen? And what can you give thanks for that year? We can’t really plan wisely if we don’t look back and be honest about what happened. 

Charlotte Mason said every mother especially should keep a diary in which to note the successive phases of her child’s physical, mental, and moral growth. So she understood that growth is gradual and it’s just like when you watch your own kids grow and don’t really notice it. And then the grandparents who maybe live in another state come and visit and they’re like my gosh, you’ve grown, but you don’t see it. And so this is intentionally recording what we’ve seen, taking a moment to notice it. 

We are really trying to give our kids a different kind of education with greater outcomes than just the three Rs, you know? And so we value more than just how they do in math, what were their grades, what were the math scores and reading levels. We’re trying to watch for moral character and good habits for maturity. And these are some of the things that you can write in reflection: Have you noticed increased attentiveness, greater responsibility, maybe more kindness towards a sibling, a new independence? These aren’t small things. These are important things. But we notice those little tiny bits of it. It gives us encouragement, that we’re doing an important work.

Now, if you’d like more direction on this, more questions actually even written out, we created an entire episode to walk you through this process. It’s Episode 241, “Seasonal Reflections”. And in the show notes of that episode, we actually have a PDF that you can print out and it gives you whole bunch of questions that you can ask or use to prompt you to reflect on your school year.

Liz
And together, we kind of do this. Every year we meet for a whole weekend. That’s pretty intense, right? 

Emily
Yeah, we stopped calling it a retreat.

Liz
And yeah, we call it an “advance”. 

Emily
Onward!

Liz
We do reflect on all the things that we’ve done as A Delectable Education that have been good, that haven’t been good. And we course correct and set new goals and things like that.

And last year when we did that, we realized we were coming to the end of 10 years and there was basically a whole new generation of homeschool families out there. And perhaps it would be wise to go back and recap each subject again as we started out in the very beginning. So you got 10 years more experience from us this year. And we also moved to the YouTube format, which was a big change for us.

In addition to carrying on our usual annual online conference, which is called ADE at HOME.  This year our theme was Generous Hearts, Souls, and Minds. This happens the first weekend in February every single year. I believe we had, was it 29 speakers? Over 40 different workshops and about 550 people attended this year and met one another and got to share. It’s really quite a fun, joyful experience. The three of us were the three plenary speakers this past year. 

Emily
First time we’ve ever done that. 

Liz
Yeah, we’ve never done that before. And that was really good. We of course, every early summer, release some new videos, some teacher helps, and some demo lessons, and we also did that. 

Emily
We also have launched our Curriculum Cohort. 

Liz
I was just going to say the big, big change for Emily and I especially was to move away from doing a massive amount of one-on-one consultations and to try to develop a course so that mothers could go through and learn how to do this for themselves and have the security of our same instructions and teachings and guidance and book lists and all that good stuff. And there’s a community involved with that that people can participate in as much as they want to and ask questions and get support from one another. And we have over 400 enrolled. Is that right? 

Emily
Yes, ma’am.

Liz
And we are still building that airplane even as we fly it across the country. It’s been a wonderfully rewarding thing so far. And we’re just in the middle of the first year. So we still have a class that will wind up in July. 

Emily
That’s basically been consuming Liz and I the entirety of the last six months or so. That’s my personal update. That’s all I’m doing right now. My kids are seven to 12 now. Jonah is going into eighth grade next year. So this is the last year before high school and it’s just… 

Nicole
I don’t know how that happened. 

Emily
It’s incredible. 

Nicole
Don’t blink. 

Emily
I know. Do not blink. 

Liz
And you know, I’m not going to live forever and we just thought we need to…this is not going to be sustainable. So we’ve moved to a new thing and new things are always scary. So some of you are facing maybe high school years next year, or you’re just diving into Charlotte Mason for the first time. And you know what I’m talking about, about a little bit of trepidation. 

Nicole
The main new thing with me is that a little less than a year ago, well, I guess when this comes out, it will be a year ago, almost exactly. I started, put out into the world, a new nature curriculum, Nature Explorers, and then Understanding Biome for high school in August. And I have two more of those coming out this year and been so excited about it. If you followed me for any time at all, you know, I’ve been trying to find a way to help with nature study. And I think I was, but there was just still too much work for the parent and I finally found a way that I’ve gotten really good feedback on. So I’m enjoying doing that. 

And so I plan to do 12 years of it and hopefully it won’t take me seven years like my science curriculum took. I don’t think it will take that long – I hope not! 

Liz
Not since you’re not teaching children at the same time. 

Nicole
So my kids are now between 21 and 26. 

Emily
And you’ve got two done already, right? 

Nicole
Yeah, I do. Yeah. So really, you know, like in reflection, I would just mention, you know, a lot of you are in the trenches still. And, and I say 21 to 26 for my kids, those twenties years are so pivotal and have them kind of getting their start, getting their feet on the ground. And I’ve just been so thankful that I not only homeschooled them, but I homeschooled them this way. I’ve just seen so much fruit in their lives from the ideas that they’ve been exposed to. I enjoy them so much and I didn’t really know that was possible because maybe the way I was raised, you know, that just wasn’t as common, I guess. So the other side of this, I think, it’s such a good thing. 

Emily
So now is the time after we’ve done our reflection, we’ve taken stock of where we’ve been, what’s been going on, it’s time to start planning for the next year, right? Hopefully you have your curriculum, but there’s so much more to figure out and to get prepared for, playlists to build and pictures to buy or print, books to acquire, and maybe a good dose of pre-reading if you’re having students who are doing their lessons independently. We think it’s really good to pre-read as much as possible. And I always take the summer to do that. That’s my rhythm. So I don’t have to keep up with that during the school year while I’m trying to teach and do all of the other things as well. 

Nicole
And build a whole cohort. 

Emily
And build a whole cohort. Yes. Maybe you need to forecast out your lessons. You have to work out your timetable. 

Liz
Pre-reading. 

Emily
I always love to clear out their school boxes that hold their pencils and their notebooks and rulers and dry erase boards and all the things. They help me with this. I don’t do it by myself. And then we put everything in order and get all new paper and our math notebooks. And I love school supplies. So that’s an exciting thing. But you know, pulling out the books off our school carts and switching our shelf with our new ones. So now is the time to do it. Don’t delay. It is a much better task if we take it in small bites, just like we take our short lessons throughout the school year with our kids. If we can do this in small chunks instead of having to spend, you know, a week or two weeks of our vacation time when we really just want to be at the pool with our kids doing that. 

We have a couple of episodes that may help you as you are thinking ahead to the next year. Particularly, I’m thinking about our form overviews. Maybe your kids are moving up to a different form and you want to have a big picture of what’s to come. For them, we recorded form overviews a long time ago. They’re Episodes 83 through 88. And now we’re on Episode 340. So that was a long while ago. We have an episode on the timetable. If you are not convinced, this is the magic sauce of Charlotte Mason education. And you can hear more about why that is in Episode 264. We have a whole episode on forecasting, number 232. 

And I thought this year as we are working through Volume six, very systematically, it might help to do a revisit of the philosophy underlying Charlton Mason’s subjects. We always want to know how to teach this, what is happening, what are we doing in the lessons? And if we don’t have that foundational philosophy of the method, we are missing the point of Charlton Mason education. So I would encourage you to go back and listen to our Short Synopsis episodes. It’s not every one of these, but it’s between Episode 201 and 210. And they’re laid out on our webpage at adelectableeducation.com under the episodes. And by topic, you can find those there.

Emily
What is up with ADE in the coming year? 

Liz
Well, one never knows entirely. We basically are going to finish out what we started this year going through the subjects as she does in Volume six Toward a Philosophy of Education, chapter 10, The Curriculum. 

If you’ve been following along with us, we were not leaving you stranded in the middle. We promise we will come back and tackle all the good things that are still left in the subjects. So that’s the main plan for the podcast next year, continuing to bring weekly, approximately 20 minute segments each week to keep it accessible and short and sweet for you because you’re busy. 

I know this summer, the three of us will be speaking at the conference Awaken up in Traverse City, Michigan, which is a beautiful place to go if you’ve never been there. It’s a wonderful retreat. It’s short and sweet, just Friday night and Saturday. Wonderful food, wonderful people. And then if you really are wanting some refreshment and inspiration, you could attend one of the…each of us will be doing an all day teaching from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon. It’s usually a whole day of you being the student and learning from us. 

I think Nicole, you’re doing nature, right? And I will be talking about helping a child to learn to read and keep loving reading throughout the years. And Emily will be doing how to structure your school morning, right?

Emily
Well, more like strategies for keeping multiple students at like, how do you teach multiple children at different levels? 

Liz
She has a little bit of experience with that. And of course, we’ll have some new teacher helps and videos and teaching tools that will be put on the website again this early summer. 

Emily
Yep. So stay tuned. 

Liz
Just a few weeks from now. 

Emily
Yep. Usually we do that by the beginning of July. So you’ll have some new resources at your fingertips for your school next year. 

Nicole
We’re also planning to do our conference again this year. 

Emily
We are. 

Nicole
A Delectable Education at Home. ADE at Home. 

Emily
And that is always the first full weekend of February. So what are the dates this year?

Liz
I think it’s the 5th and 6th of February. 

Emily
5th and 6th of February, 2027. 

Liz
Wow. 

Emily
I know. 

Liz
It’ll be the 7th one. 

Emily
Yes.

Nicole
Yeah. What else? 

We still have our Patreon. We haven’t talked about that in a little while, but we post new things every week on there. And we’re just really thankful for everybody who has chosen to support our work on this podcast in that way and try to give back as much as we can over there. 

Emily
Yep. They usually get all of our new releases for free and early. So that’s a great help as you are in your planning time. 

Liz
And Emily every month has a great tip to share on how to survive teaching. Nicole has her lovely nature ideas and you never know what you’re going to get from me. 

Emily
Some word we all need to hear. 

Nicole
A word of encouragement.

Emily
Well, my title for the workshop that we were just discussing at the upcoming Awaken Conference is titled “Feeding the Multitudes”. And that gave me an idea of something I wanted to talk to you and share about with you today. 

My youngest children are reciting Matthew 14:15-21 this term. And perhaps that is why I had that idea for the title in my mind at all, feeding the multitudes. That conference session, as I said, is going to be about managing multiple students all coming to the feast of a Charlotte Mason education together at once in the same room. And for so many of us, that seems like an impossible task. 

As mother and teacher, you are most likely outnumbered by your children. In the season of too much to do and too little time to do it in, I have been reflecting on how impossible the work the Lord has given me right now seems. 

My favorite verse at the moment and has been for many years is Ephesians 2:10. It goes like this: “for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do”. And usually that idea is comforting for me that God’s purpose for me is the work that is laid out for me to do each day. My job in that is just to be faithful, knowing that all my labor can be done for God’s glory. 

But this year, particularly, I admit to feeling overwhelmed in this season, which brings me back to the feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew 14. Let me just read it for us. It says, 

“As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a remote place and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.’ And Jesus replied, ‘They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.’ ‘We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,’ they answered. ‘Bring them here to me,’ he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass, taking the five loaves and the two fish. And looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. And then he gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up 12 basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about 5,000 men besides women and children. 

So the disciples looked around and they saw a need. They had compassion and sympathy with the multitudes. They must be hungry. There isn’t a place to grab takeout around here. But Jesus asks the seemingly impossible. “You give them something to eat.” What? How can we do that? they must be thinking. We’ve got five loaves of bread and two fish. This wouldn’t amount to even a crumb to feed each person, let alone the meal that their stomachs require.

Educating the children who are entrusted to us often feels like that. Our sleep was disrupted and we show up to the table running on fumes. We have four or five or more kids that all need our help with one lesson or another at the same time. Several of our kids are slow to learn to read, and how can they work independently so I can just help this other child with their math lesson? It all just seems impossible. Bring them here to me, Jesus says, asking for our limited resources. He knows what the children need, for they are His, and so are we. He’s not flustered. He doesn’t see the impossible tasks. He gives thanks, confident that our good Heavenly Father will provide just what is needed for each one of us. 

But what comes next in our story? The disciples don’t sit back and watch the miracle unfold. No, they are asked to facilitate it, to participate in the work of the moment. What should be just crumbs turns out to be a feast. Not only are the people satisfied, there is abundance running over. When we show up faithful to do the work before us, no matter how impossible the task seems, the same thing often happens. Connections are made, relationships with knowledge are built. The Lord has truly prepared this work of educating these children right in front of us, before the foundations of the world. We are his workmanship, his masterpiece, his poem, as that word is translated, created to do this work for his glory. 

So as we finish out this school year, let us remember to look back at the work that feels impossible, the meager crumbs that we know we ourselves could provide and give thanks, trusting him to bring the abundance because he is the divine teacher. After all, he’s our teacher. So let us give thanks and feed his lambs. 

I’d like to end this season as we began it by reading a liturgy from Every Moment Holy. This is from volume three, The Work of the People, and it is called A Liturgy for Responding to a Child’s Needs.

Oh Father, I abide in the beautiful truth that I can come to you expectantly, knowing that you will hear me and answer me. You bend to listen to my pleas for help and comfort and guidance and strength. You carry me always, you never tire of it, and I depend upon your dependability to comfort and hold me. And yet sometimes the voices of my own children become so continuous and exhausting and overwhelming. I am so easily put out and weary by the whining, tugging, grabbing, and crying to be continually held and attended to. 

In my humanity, I am confronted with my many limitations. I am so easily given to selfishness, exhaustion, tedium, frustration, and irritation. My back aches and my neck and shoulders are aflame from hoisting small children up again and again and again, and balancing them on my hip while trying to accomplish my tasks for the day. How easily my sin can twist the joyful blessing of holding a child into drudgery and a wearisome task. Is this not what I prayed for, Lord, when I ask you to fill my arms with children?

I am so like the Israelites who complained, though you rescued them from their enemies, who complained though you rained manna from heaven and provided water from a rock. Yet you never tire of coming to the aid of your children.

This is my prayer for us, guys: 

Father, give me the capacity I need to respond lovingly to my children who cry out to be picked up and held again and again. Remind me of the blessed truth that while I hold my little ones, you hold me. Let me display to them what it looks like to joyfully lay down one’s life for another. Help me to show them that while I will fail them at times, You will never fail them and you always hold us fast. Amen.

That brings us to the end of season 11 of A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. We thank you for joining us this year as we have worked our way through chapter 10 of Charlotte Mason’s final volume, An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education. 

If you’ve been reading along with us, you’ll notice that we haven’t cleared the table of the entire feast yet. So stay tuned for next season, airing in August as we return to discussing the remaining subjects we haven’t covered yet in Season 11. Until then, keep laboring for the children’s sake.

How do you feel about classical music? Like art, music is a language in itself that conveys thoughts and ideas that words alone cannot. Charlotte Mason recognized this and included musical appreciation in her curriculum as knowledge that was due to all children. Join us in today’s podcast and get inspired to begin your own musical education if you haven’t already.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Composer Study Guides from Tillberry Table

Music Study with the Masters series from Simply Charlotte Mason

Great Musicians series by RaeAnna Goss (info here; shop here)

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
Just as art communicates in a language without words, so music conveys ideas to us in a medium that is entirely its own. Charlotte Mason realized that music might give great joy and interest to the life of all people and that just as children who are educated in Charlotte Mason’s methods are given the greatest literature and art so they should have the greatest music as well.

The greatest classical music is an acquired taste to many of us. One that can be trained from a young age, however. And Nicole, can you tell us a little bit about what this looks like in a child’s education? Maybe your own too. 

Nicole
Yeah. Well, I thought that our last episode was very easy, but this one I think is even easier for me to explain. Music Appreciation started in Form 1 and it’s the same all the way through with the addition of something later, but it is truly just listening to music. But the same way with Artist Study that we had one composer each term and we listened to various pieces, or we looked at, now we’re going to listen to various pieces of music from that same artist and the same result that we are recognizing their style, maybe able to recognize a piece of music we haven’t even heard before.

So that continues on all the way through high school, but in high school there is the addition of a music history book that would again, just like with art history, pull all of that together, all that familiarity they have and give every piece its place in history and tie that together. 

Emily
So this is a weekly lesson. Again, we do just 10 minutes once a week. In Charlotte Mason’s day, they didn’t have MP3 players and phones that everyone carried around that could play the world’s music. 

Liz
So much easier for us to do this. 

Emily
They would have to literally have a person play, and later phonographs would play recordings. 

So they wouldn’t necessarily do this in the middle of the morning lessons, but we can. And it’s a wonderful way, but it doesn’t have to just be confined to the morning lessons. They can absolutely be listening to the pieces that they’re studying or more than the ones that they’re giving active listening to outside of school. 

So just as you said, Forms 4 to 6, they add in that music history and they had books on music theory and technique as well. That reading time, they had an additional 20 minutes a week set aside to read through those books slowly. And just like with Art, their composer, especially in those upper years, really should tie to the historical time period that they’re studying, to give us a bigger picture of what life was like and the ideas that were happening at that time. 

So the individual lessons are very simple, just like Picture Study, maybe a brief note about the composer or a brief note about the piece, why it was written or some distinctive thing, information easily gotten on the internet today. You might do that. 

And then we just have careful, attentive listening to the piece. Or if it’s a longer piece, we might just do a part like a movement of a concerto or a symphony or something like that. And then afterwards they can describe what they heard, the images that came to their mind, any patterns that they noticed that might hum parts of it, the melody line, anything that made them think of. My kids also like to talk about the colors that they heard.

Maybe the dynamics or as they get older, maybe they’re studying in their own piano and they can actually pick out on techniques or whatever musical instrument they’re playing, they might have more to say just, you know, to bring into it just as we all do as we go through our lessons. 

So that’s it. You know, that’s our 10 minute lesson once a week. And again, it’s a lesson that fills the morning with delight, even if it’s not every day. And it’s good to not pack Music and Picture Study on the same day. Spread those through the week, give our brains a break and our bodies, just a chance to relax and enjoy some beauty. 

Our objectives in our lesson are to introduce students to some great piece of music and to increase their knowledge and love of music and introduce them to a specific composer each term and to train their ears to listen carefully, which also increases their powers of attention. Want to build attention? Composer Study can help with that too. 

Our prep as teachers, I think the easiest thing to do is build a playlist so you’re not having to scramble and find a recording on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you want to do that. You might do a brief little bit of research about the composer or maybe the piece that you’re going to look at. You may need a speaker to play it so all of your students can hear it well. And that is about it. 

We do have some resources to recommend to you that make this so much easier. When I first started, I didn’t have any of these. They were not available yet. So it is much, much, much easier now. My favorite are the Tilberry Table Composer Study Guides. I just print those digital guides off and keep it with the notes. But the digital is helpful because she has links to specific playlists and pieces of music that you can find on Amazon Music or YouTube.

Simply Charlotte Mason also has packages that have an actual CD if you prefer that as well as a booklet and I think they might have links to digital music as well in them. I forgot to look today guys, I’m sorry. 

And then there is another resource by a fellow Charlotte Mason mom, RaeAnna Goss, who did the Composer Study Companion. This is a book with multiple studies of different composers. But there are also digital versions and again that have digital playlists that make it easy for you to implement this lesson without a lot of extra work on your part.

What objections or questions do you have? 

Liz
Oh you know, like I don’t know classical music. How do I pick? Which composer do I pick? You know, I’d say if you’ve heard of them before, it’s probably a good idea. But I personally have been known to Google “17th century top 10 composers”. And when you go to some place like YouTube, you don’t have to know which piece to pick out. I mean, there are some that have millions of listens. That’s probably a pretty good shot.

But we can’t love what we don’t know. We have to be exposed to things. Right, Nicole? 

Nicole
I don’t know why, but Composer Study was way more intimidating to me than Artist Study, that didn’t bother me at all. Beautiful pictures…but I had no history of hearing classical music and I was very intimidated by it. So you mentioned we didn’t have resources like this early on and I, we, my co-op did do this together and there was a woman who told a story about it and had us listening for the rain in a piece and all of a sudden it came to life for me. So I think using a resource like we’ve mentioned, if you aren’t familiar with classical music can really help you to start to hear things that are here the beauty in it that you maybe aren’t naturally. 

Emily
I love that the rain is what was the key for you. I remember everyone in my liberal arts college had to take a musical appreciation course and I had had years of piano and was kind of like classical music is boring, even though I was more familiar with it having played a bunch of it. There were a few pieces I liked. But we had a teacher or professor in college who made us purchase a CD, because this is early 2000s right, this is still before digital music was a huge thing…we had to purchase a CD of one of the composers or pieces that had interested us. And for me I got this Richard Strauss symphony that is the sun– well it’s called the Alpine Symphony, it’s a symphony of the Alps. And the piece that I love that we had heard in class is Sunrise Over the Mountain. And it just is so vivid knowing that. But he told us this is what this piece is about and then listening to it, hearing that it just made it come alive. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
And there’s lots of free courses online of Music Appreciation. You can listen to lectures like, what is that series called? Great Courses. The Great Courses. Things like that. And again, you’re going to want to pick some artists that are composers in your historic time period. 

Emily
Unless you have very young children, that’s not as important, right? 

Liz
Right. Just like with Picture Study or poetry or whatever. Form 1 is just introducing them to a lot of different flavors of things. And I do recommend, I kind of miss the old CD days in a way, but I mean today with Alexa and all that it is just not hard if you’re studying Haydn and you can during dinner have it on just a lot of times and children… really all my grandchildren have favorite composer pieces and they just love it. So that’s something that they will attach to a certain song, a certain movement, a certain dance or whatever that they’ve heard. It will really surprise you. 

And I just also think we need to recognize that music is soul language and every human society has had some form of music and this is some of the best music ever written.

Emily
In our culture. Yeah, and again this is a lesson that everybody can do this 10 minute listening you know even if your older students are having another time during the week that they read, they can do it all together. 

Liz
It’s also super relaxing, if they’ve just had a stressful math lesson. You just have everyone close their eyes and listen. And like Emily said, sometimes they’ll even say, this reminds me of the color purple or whatever. 

Emily
One thing that our family does is we have the favorite dinner that they like at the time and then a special dessert at the end, like our last day of exams. And I always buy a CD of our composer that has many of the pieces, I try to get as many as possible that we’ve listened to, because we do have a CD player. I like them to be able to put in music without getting on a screen. So we’ve always had a CD player in our house, and they will still get out in the Hall of the Mountain King and dance around the house to the Grieg Pyrrhic suite. 

Liz
And I have discovered a lot of composers that I didn’t know. Even though I was exposed to classical music and took piano and all that kind of thing, you know, I remember my first grader listening to Vaughn Williams and he just adored it. I mean, he was a really difficult child and had ADHD and when he turned that on, he became a different person. So you may discover some really great benefits that you aren’t even thinking about right now. 

But you don’t need to know much about it. It really is training the ear, attuning the ear to listen to many different things. And it’s so great, just like you might go to a museum to see artists that you’ve been studying, to actually go to the symphony. It’s great training for your children too. 

Nicole
One of the important aspects of this is the formation of musical taste. And I think somebody like me who had no history of it, I didn’t have a taste for it. I do now, but I didn’t. And I was homeschooling some older children who were new to Charlotte Mason, my siblings, and they didn’t have a taste for it either. And I would say just keeping yourself open to, we’re just gonna do this. Reading a little bit of that, one of the resources we talked about, I think helps get everybody’s attention. But just trying to keep a good attitude yourself as you do this, it’s only 10 minutes and it will take. You will get hooked on somebody and really learn to appreciate or enjoy. 

Liz
It’s like poetry.

Nicole
Yeah. Just give yourself a minute and give the kids a minute if they are new to this. It really will change your musical tastes.

Liz
And one day you’ll be listening to something and all of sudden you’ll just have tears and you don’t even know why and that’s what I mean is speaking to something inside that you know, it’s not like any other kind of language. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Well, we’ve reached the end of this season of a Delectable Education podcast. We will be back next week for one of our favorite traditions here at ADE, the End of Year Reflections. We hope you’ll join us for a look back at the past year before we turn our gaze to what lies ahead.

Children should learn pictures line by line, group by group, by reading not books but pictures themselves, Charlotte Mason writes. At a time when colored reproductions were non-existent, she required each student in her schools to own their own set of art prints. In this episode of the podcast, we’re going to discuss how and why to teach art appreciation in the Charlotte Mason Method.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Emily’s Picture Study Portfolios from Simply Charlotte Mason

Artist Study from Riverbend Press

Picture Study from A Humble Place

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, not all ideas can be conveyed in words alone. How does one communicate the glory of a sunset or the loving look a child exchanges with his mother? We need to learn the language of images and the great artists of the world help us to do that.

In volume four, Charlotte Mason says, “there are those present with us whom God whispers in the ear through whom he sends a direct message to the rest. Among these messengers are the great painters who interpret to us some of the meanings of life. To read their messages aright is a thing due from us.” That’s kind of weighty words. We have a duty to read the artists aright. Nicole, why don’t you try to lay it out how Charlotte Mason thought we could do this with our children. 

Nicole
Yeah. Well, in a Charlotte Mason education, Picture Study, that’s what we call it, Artist Appreciation, but we often refer to the lesson as Picture Study, begins in Form 1. And it, with some additions, it doesn’t really change all the way through school, right? I mean, you truly have every single term, an artist and six pictures assigned, from that same artist, so that the students are really learning that artist’s style, the colors they use, the things they’re painting about. And they’re just really coming to know them even if they haven’t seen that particular painting, they might see it on a wall and recognize it. So they’re really familiar with that artist. 

Just for clarification, Charlotte Mason stated that the pupils should learn how to appreciate rather than how to produce. And we are talking about Art Appreciation and there are subjects in which they would learn how to produce some art. 

Emily
We’re going to talk about that in a coming episode. 

Nicole
Right. But for now, what we’re talking about is truly just learning to recognize. But there’s also an aspect of this is that they are learning to visualize it and be able to tell back. So like every episode we talk about narrating what they have learned or taken in and they, it’s no different with this. 

Emily
Correct.

Nicole
So again, they’re doing it the same way all the way through with some additions, in that as they as they grow they’re sometimes drawing a portion of that painting–

Emily
Always from memory. I can’t stress that enough. 

Nicole
Yes, good. And and often in the early days on chalkboard and so maybe maybe that’s different for you in your home but– 

Emily
Whiteboard.

Nicole
Whiteboard, yeah, something that it’s just discarded; it’s really about the memory more than it is the ability to draw it. 

Emily
Correct. 

Nicole
Right. 

So then in Form 3, so seventh and eighth grade, we see assigned on the programs where Charlotte Mason said study, describe, and draw from memory details of six reproduction of pictures by the artist. But those drawings were more detailed, not just a simple line drawing. And again, from memory. 

Emily
Yes. And often she’ll say to do it in a monochrome, like you’re not trying to match the colors. You’re just trying to capture some of the light and shade, the form.

Liz
Of the whole picture? 

Emily
Details. So you might focus on a face or a particular tree on the riverbank or some hands or something like that. 

Nicole
Hands are what I always think of, I don’t know why. 

And then in high school, there is an added thing and that is that they’re reading some books. So the books would teach art history and then they have some architecture books too. And this really just pulls together for them the understanding of, I’ve lost the word, like the fields, the…

Emily
Schools.

Nicole
Schools of styles and throughout history and kind of just kind of, I feel like in a lot of ways everything we do is that the students are experiencing it first and then they’re getting words and more explanation later. 

Emily
Yeah, just like we have been talking recently about Grammar naming the parts of speech that they’ve been using. They’re absorbing all of that information unconsciously. Like when we’re introducing the artists, we’re not saying this was a Romantic painter and this is a Baroque painter and this is a Rococo painter, whatever it is, we’re not giving them any of that information. So moms take a breath of, sigh of relief. You do not have to know any of that information to do Picture Study well in your home. 

But then in high school, these highest forms, they’re actually starting to read about that and putting the people into their schools. 

Liz
But by then it means something to them because they’ve known these different artists. Now does this have to tie to the historical time period they’re studying in history? 

Emily
Charlotte Mason would say absolutely say yes. It was the humanities, the literature, the art, the music that had to illuminate a historical time period. So in those upper forms it’s especially important that the time period you’re studying you’re doing your artist from that time period. 

Yeah well let’s talk a little bit about the lesson format. So this is a very simple lesson to include and I don’t know why people are so intimidated, maybe, that they keep them back from doing it. It’s one 10-minute lesson a week and it is one of those lessons of delight for most children.

Liz
And easy to implement. It takes so little prep on your part. It’s like why would you leave out one of your easiest parts? 

Emily
So we recommend another 20 minutes in high school, so Forms 4-6, one additional 20 minute lesson for that reading that Nicole was just talking about, where they get that more systematic. It’s tied to their historical time period, and hopefully the artist that they’re studying is going to be put into their context by the time they get to that. 

So this is what an individual Picture Study lesson looks like. And this is, it’s so easy guys. You can do it. You have your children look at one picture for several minutes and take in that image, and make a picture in their mind. That’s what I always say. And close your eyes. See if you can see it. If some of the details are fuzzy, open your eyes and look at the picture a little more until you have it. 

And then I have my kids turn it over. So I know when they’re done with their looking, but it’s like three to four minutes if any younger kids can do like one to two, you know, it is training your eyes to absorb more information. And then we narrate what we saw. 

Now I have noticed from doing this with my own children, but also many, many other children, they, children tend to focus more on the detail that was interesting to them first. And so I came up with this, I actually may have borrowed it from somebody, I don’t know, but I started doing this thing, maybe after we went to a field trip to an art museum. And I said, okay, before you start telling me, I want you to pretend that I work at the museum and you want to come in and see this particular painting and you don’t know the name and you can’t remember the artist. And you have to describe it well enough to me so that I, as a museum worker, can know which picture you’re talking about. 

They love this. And if I forget to say this, someone will remind me, remember, mom, you work at the museum. But that has been much better in that they first tell me the big picture and, you know, instead of the there’s 32 ducks on the pond, whatever it is that they like spent their time counting all of those, those things. And so that has worked really well for us.

And then after they’re done narrating it, which again just takes a couple minutes, we can have a tiny discussion. And not like what school of painting is this? or how the artists use chiaroscuro to bring this figure out of the background or whatever it is, right? It is what time of day do you think it is? What do think that person is doing? You know, anything that they might want to talk about more, you might not even have the answer. You might just ask the question and they think about it a little longer, right? 

Liz
That was me for sure because I didn’t even see the picture so I would just ask those questions so that I could picture it in my mind. 

Emily
Yeah. So Charlotte Mason was adamant that they do six pictures per term and I just want to affirm what you said, Nicole, that they will see pictures they never studied by their artists and say, is that a Millet? or that looks like a Van Gogh? because you, after seeing multiple examples of an artist’s work, do absorb their style. 

I remember as an art student in a college going to the Art Institute of Chicago and from across the room seeing a picture and just like going, I think that’s such and such, you know, it just gets engrained into you even though I’d never seen that picture before. It was just something about the artist’s style. And no one was describing this is what to look for in a Renoir or whatever. So it’s very simple.

I should say those images that they do– so we have six pictures and there’s 11 weeks of lessons. A short biography can be read to interest them in the artist’s life. Usually those really help set the stage of why they painted, what they did, in what place they were at. Those drawings from memory that start out as simple like the main lines or principal lines of the picture, just showing where figures and objects are in the picture, from memory. 

As they get older then they’re doing those details up and in the highest form she would actually have…and you’ll notice in Form 3 it was every picture, they were supposed to do details from every picture that they had studied whereas in earlier forms it would just maybe be a couple you know or one a term. In higher schools they were to do a full monochrome reproduction of it from memory, not a copy. Charlotte Mason said it was a mistake to ever have the children copy directly from the picture because she said it would make them lose reverence for the work of art. So they are free to do that but just from memory and that’s increasing their powers of visualization. 

So this is a very simple lesson that everybody can do but it has a huge impact on a child’s life, and it’s very enjoyable and it’s a great break between two very meaty books. I’m thinking about my second and third graders reading Pilgrim’s Progress, it’s a great relief to have. It lightens the load. 

And Charlotte Mason did believe that we see this in the programs that everybody was to have their own set of pictures. And so I do get a set of pictures for each of my kids. It’s an investment, but they, I will see them pulling their binders out, they have them in the page protectors, and re-looking at them. And they’ve noticed how similar that Tanner’s picture, excuse me, Monet’s pictures were to Turner and they’re literally comparing, this reminds me of this one and I said, I had never told him this, said, actually Monet was inspired when he went to England to escape the Franco-Prussian War. He saw Turner pictures in the art galleries and that inspired him and they’ve made that connection on their own just from looking at past artists that they had studied.

I could go on and on, guys. We’re moving on. It’s a very simple lesson. I could talk about it for a long time. 

The objectives that we have is to store their mental gallery, their art gallery that they carry along with them with beautiful images to increase their powers of attention and visualization. This helps with their reading and their writing and so many other subjects that use visualization.

And then as Nicole is saying, those older students then do get that direct teaching on composition, even some design elements in their reading books. But they have been unconsciously absorbing it for years. So it’s just really kind of putting, like a Book of Centuries kind of collects the things and then we see the big pattern when we get more and more added to it. 

Our prep as teachers would be, of course, we have to get pictures for our kids to look at. There are economical ways, I know families that have bought art print calendars on clearance after January comes and they get those or art books or whatever. But you might also want to learn a little bit more about the artist, share biographical information that I mentioned. 

Some resources. So I actually have put together a bunch of these Picture Study Portfolios. They’re sold by Simply Charlotte Mason. Inside each of these you will get not just six but eight pictures that are UV coated so they’re not going to fade on you which is good because we display these up in our school room, which is a sunroom and gets a lot of sun.

Liz
They’re pretty heavy.

Emily
And they’re scratch resistant so they are durable. There’s eight so you can choose your favorite six or do all eight if you so desire. And then I have a booklet just again outlining the steps of Picture Study.  I include a brief biography in here and then there are notes on the pictures. So if you have time at the end of your lesson you could read a little bit more about the picture or pull out a couple of facts. So maybe your prep is just finding the one or two things that your kids would be interested in. Maybe you read the whole thing. Maybe you take one of those other days that you’re not doing a drawing or looking at a new picture and you do a deeper picture talk using the notes in the book for a deeper look at those.

So those are the ones that I have put together, but there are also prints available from Riverbend Press and A Humble Place has a very similar Picture Study package. Yeah, so there’s other places to get them.

So what questions do people have about Picture Study do you think mom? 

Liz
I think that once you’ve done it, you can’t not do it again. You know, so the only people that don’t do it the ones who haven’t tried, you know, but I think a lot of moms who don’t have an art background like you are going to ask, you know, they’re worried that their child will ask them something they don’t have the answer to. And I would just say, you know, that is true in almost every single subject. And as parents and teachers, Mason said, we need to become adept at turning the question back to the child. What do you think? Why might that be? How could… and that kind of thing and get them to think about it. And you can always tell a child, I don’t know, I’ll look that up and see if I can find out for you. 

If you don’t know art terminology, it’s okay. I know nothing about art and I’ve had my children look at pictures since even before I heard of Charlotte Mason and they all have an eye for art and are artistic children. In fact, [to Emily] instead of being the docent at the museum you could tell the children pretend I’m grandma and tell her what it’s like because that’s what I used to tell my children. I have no idea what’s on this page. You describe it to me. 

It really is about the visualization skill that Emily mentioned, which is so important for life, is building eye memorization. Sometimes I would ask my children, besides the components that you’ve mentioned, I would just ask them what ideas they got from this picture. What did this make you think about? Or if you only had one word, what word would you use besides beautiful? Because a couple of my boys always would just say beautiful. 

Yeah, so and I would just say that this is just so easy to prep. You can do it in the summer before school starts and just pick out your artists and get your packets together. And it’s just one of your quicker, easier things to do in a week. Do you guys know of any other objections that people have to the subject? They don’t have time or…

I know another one is people say well we do it at co-op and I would say so do it at home too. 

Nicole
That’s a good answer. I was gonna say don’t. Yeah don’t do it at co-op. 

Liz
Well it has a purpose like Emily said for lightning the morning load. She put those delightful things in there to make all their tougher subjects more bearable. 

Emily
Yeah, and actually I think it’s the only thing my seventh grader looks forward to on Tuesdays because Tuesdays is his long day. We have to have Thursdays be a little bit shorter because of library and so he has an extra longer lesson on Tuesdays but right in the middle of the day he gets Picture Study. 

Nicole
Yeah, it’s so easy to do. It doesn’t, you know, there’s not really a benefit to doing it in a co-op. I just think it’s– 

Emily
And at home it’s one of the few lessons you really can do with your 1st through 12th grade…

Liz
…all together. It’s definitely a whole family thing. And that’s another huge benefit. 

Nicole
I also just want to tell a quick anecdote that a couple of years ago I did a morning of lessons immersion class with more than 40 students.

Emily
Adults. 

Nicole
Adults, yeah.

And we did a Picture Study. And while you might think adults, they have better visualization. Usually that’s the opposite. 

Liz
Yeah, for sure. 

Nicole
But I went person by person in order. So my last person was a man in the back of the room, actually. But all 40 of them had something different to tell them, all the way. I honestly, if I’d had time, but I was trying to follow our morning schedule, I would have just kept going back around again.

So there is something for everybody to share, even if you have a large family. But I like that what your idea allows them to tell more rather than just she was wearing a red scarf. 

Emily
Oh, they give me all the details. I just make them tell me…they would get into there’s 32 ducks on the pond before they told me this is a landscape, you know, with a mill in the back. So just give the big picture and then they can add all of the things. 

Liz
I would also just add that when you have an interrupted day or you have to go to a doctor visit or something that’s not in your normal scheme and so you’ve only got time to do a few lessons. This is one everybody drops because they think they have to do the math every day and I just want to tell you this is just as important as math. Everything at the feast may not take up as much space but they’re equal weight.

Emily
Charlotte Mason tells us that “this is what we wish to do for children – to cause the eye to rest not unconsciously, but consciously on some object of beauty, which will leave in their minds an image of delight for all their lives to come.” 

We hope that you’ve been inspired to spread the feast of visual ideas for your students through Picture Study. Next week, we will be turning our attention to music, another subject that has new ideas for us to ponder. Please join us next time as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.

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.