What do Geography lessons look like once formal schooling begins? What in the world are “map questions” and how can my kids answer them if they aren’t fluent readers? On today’s podcast we explore the next step in our children’s education and how Geography is truly a delightful subject for lower elementary students in years one through three.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Elementary Geography by Mason (Living Book Press) (Yesterday’s Classics)

The New World at Home by Kirby (revised by North)

The New World at Home Geography Pictures by North (also available as a discounted bundle with The New World at Home)

The Guyot Geographical Reader by Pratt

World Atlas – search by ISBN number to get the correct edition: 9780760793091

Heidi by Spiri

ADE’s Form 1A Map Questions

ADE’s Geography Across the Forms handout

ADE’s Out-of-Door Geography in the Early Years through Form 1 handout

Kinetic Sand

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
And today we are going to look at formal Geography lessons in the first few years of school. Form 1 is a group of grades, years one through three, when children are between the ages of six and nine. 

So Nicole, can you give us a picture of what students cover in their Geography lessons at this age? 

Nicole
Yes. In Form one, Geography takes its first steps indoors. Everything they’ve been doing up to now has been out of doors and that will continue, but now we’re gonna add a couple of books to that so they can really meet the wider world on the page. 

Now in Form 1B they get a book here that is an overview of different peoples and places around the world and it really paints the picture of what the child’s day is like, from the child’s perspective at least. So there’s a little bit of a connection there, maybe to places in the far north, or how the herders work their cattle in you know South America. So kind of far places, but the connection is kind of something the child can look at from their own point of view. 

Then in Form 1A, so this is your second and third grade, which is still Form 1, but there’s gonna be a change here. We use a book that works through the world in a more orderly way, beginning close to home with the child’s own country and then their continent and then out to the rest of the world. And this is just a first pass through some of this stuff and they will come back to all these places later on.

There is one thing that I want to point out, and that is where our plan varies from what Charlotte Mason did. And that is because we don’t live in England and you may not live where we live. So the principle we see going through all of this is the child starts from their own backyard and their own country or even their region and country and continent and goes out from there. So we have to make some changes depending on where we live.

Emily
When you said we vary from Charlotte Mason, you don’t mean what she did, but you mean specifically what book she used. 

Nicole
Right. Maybe her specific assigned book, versus the principal being the same in both cases, right? 

Emily
Yep.

Nicole
So the second book that these Form 1 students would read was really a Physical Geography type of book. Charlotte Mason wrote one herself that is called Elementary Geography, and it runs through all three years of Form 1, and it really takes the things the child met outdoors, and now it lays them out in an orderly way such as how the earth turns, why we have seasons, that the sun rises in the east, how a flat map can stand in for a round world and things like that that they have already experience with, but now it’s going to very clearly explain some of those things to them. And because they’ve seen them firsthand it’ll be easier for them. 

And then there is the map work. So it’s still staying very concrete at this age. In Form 1B the child is still going to describe boundaries of a field that they know well. They’re gonna make a few landform shapes, maybe in sand, like an island, a mountain, a river. They may draw simple plans of familiar places by pacing them off with their own feet. 

Then in Form 1A, so again, this is your second and third grade student, they’re gonna begin answering six simple questions from the map before each reading. So that’s their first map questions. 

Emily
Yeah. It’s a wide program, even at this earliest stage. 

So for the lesson format, they have two fifteen minute lessons a week in all through all three years of Form 1. And then of course some of their experiments or observations might happen in their outdoor nature time or whatever.

They might do some of the pacing assignments that they have before they start drawing a map to scale. They might have to pace some of those walks in the afternoon because you’re not gonna go out, you know, on a walk down a couple of different roads in your 15 minute Geography lesson in the middle of the morning. 

Liz
Pretty tough. 

Emily
And they might need to know the sunrise and sunset. So obviously that’s not happening in that specific 15 minutes on your timetable. And of course then they can also work more on their compass skills, which all of these things are fun. We do a lot of them with our nature club, but some of the things are just different times of day, obviously, because that’s the world we live in. 

So one lesson, one of those 15-minute lessons is for the Geography reader, which except for the 1B reader that Nicole mentioned, that Geography reader is the one that has the map questions, like you said. So you would answer the six questions from the atlas before doing the reading for the day. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. 

And then the other lesson is for Charlotte Mason’s physical Geography book, which is Elementary Geography. Those are very few lessons spread over the term. So there is plenty of time to also do all of those other tasks you were talking about, like building the landforms or describing boundaries, or even a trip that a parent took. You might tell a story, an oral lesson of a trip that you took and maybe show some pictures, and that becomes part of your child’s experience, their knowledge bank as well.

So there’s time in that second lesson to do both of those things. So Form 1B, their readings in either of their books are just like most other read and narrate lessons. They might look at a picture or a diagram and discuss after they’ve read it, but you know, you’re gonna set up the lesson, recap what happened before, give them some little tidbit to excite their interest, read, and then allow them to narrate before bringing in anything else. 

But then it changes a little bit with the Form 1A starting their map questions. Those, I mean, I call this the only non-negotiable in Charlotte Mason’s Geography lessons. There’s so much latitude for all kinds of things that you could bring in depending on your own experience and your child’s, you know, your cultural heritage, your friends who you know who might live in a different place, all kinds of things like that you can bring in as it makes sense to you. There’s no formula, in other words, but the one non-negotiable is these six map questions must be answered before the reading. And that’s from the Geography reader, as I mentioned. 

So your overall goal of these map questions, I just want to read this quote to kind of set the stage of why Charlotte Mason thought these were so important. She said that map questions are used…actually it’s not Charlotte Mason, it’s Agnes Drury, who wrote why they did what they did in their program. She said: 

Map questions are used at the beginning of each lesson, that a thorough knowledge of the latitude, coastline, mountains, and so on may give grounds for deducing the climate, the product, the habits of the people. 

This is where you take all of that stored information and then, okay, if I look at what this latitude of this other country that I’m looking at, I’m gonna know some things about it because it’s going to relate or not relate to where we live, right? So it’s really teaching them how to read a map.

And it’s not comprehension questions. This is not a quiz. They are looking at the atlas while you’re asking the questions, but I liken it to a object lesson in nature study where when you are asked a question, your eye has to track to that part. And what that’s doing is helping them take in the information, learning how to digest information that they get from this map, and then also travel all the way through it and fix that into their own mind’s eye.

So they can then read their Geography reader and those questions should illuminate the reading. Like they’re not just arbitrary, hey, we’re gonna ask six map questions. It should be the map of the region that is going to come into their reading. If there’s a river that’s mentioned, you’re gonna have looked at it and where it flows and its name so that when they hear it in the reading, that kinda lights up that map in their mind and they can picture what they’re hearing. They’re connected. 

Nicole
Yes.

Emily
So then they narrate their reading and afterwards you might tell about your own travels there if you’ve been to such and such a place. If they’re starting with their own country and continent, it’s very likely that you have been to some of the places they’re going to read up. You might even pull up a picture or two as time allows, and that’s the format of their lessons. 

So as far as teacher prep, you need to find some maps, and depending on the resource that you use, you may need to write map questions. And I really do encourage you, if you’re going to write your own map questions, to really study the map questions that Charlotte Mason included in her Geography readers, because that is going to, it’s very different than this is the capital, this is the biggest city. It’s much more those physical features because that’s what’s going to help them make those deductions about what life in climate and culture might be in other places.

You might also think about finding a picture or two to show maybe something was described that they have no context for and you really want to you know come up with a picture of how you know how tall the giant red woods really are and find a picture of a person standing next to such a tall tree or something like that. And be prepared to share about your own travels. So think about, oh yeah I’ve been here; maybe I’ll pull out a picture from that trip or just think about something that might interest them that you could share to connect with that.

So as far as resources, the book that Charlotte Mason used was very outdated during her lifetime, and she still used it until it could not be acquired anymore. And it is very…it meets the children exactly where they are. And so thankfully we do have a New World at Home, which is an updated, revised version of a portion of that book. And it’s published by Charlotte Mason Beehive. 

And that is what we recommend starting out with. It’s kind of the gold standard. After that went out of print for good, you see her stumbling around trying like one or two terms in many, many different books, never finding what exactly she wanted. It also talks about the plants and the animals that live in these different places and that was just so important to her. 

And then I really do recommend this portion of that Charlotte Mason Beehive curriculum. She has Geography pictures. And these show what those interesting different animals look like or, you know, a dog sled in the far north or what a laplander’s tent would be like or something like that. So it really helps them imagine and picture what those things are. So that is a really helpful resource that I do love to recommend. 

Of course, Charlotte Mason’s first Geography book has been reprinted as Elementary Geography. There’s many different editions of this. This one is just happens to be from Living Book Press, but there’s many others. So that’s read for all three years of Form 1. 

And then in North America for Americans, and also I think it does work a bit for Canadians because our countries are most of the time connected and have a relationship with one another, we have used The Guyot Geographical Reader by Mary Pratt. It does exactly the same scope that Charlotte Mason’s book does, but from an American context. So it first covers the United States and then it covers our continent and then it moves to all the other continents in turn. And it’s about the same quantity of material. 

And then we have created map questions for that resource, and so it breaks it down into lessons so you’ll know what pages to read. And here are the map questions that go ahead of that reading. So we have that available on our website, and that’ll be linked in the show notes as well. 

And of course, you need a good atlas. This is my favorite, it is out of print, and it can be hard to get the correct edition unless you search by ISBN number. I have never received the wrong edition. I bought probably 10 of these in you know for the library, for myself, for other people. And it has…if you search by publication year or publisher, it’s really hard to find. But if you go by ISBN, I’ve never gotten the wrong one by going that way. The one I like and what we use for our map questions is the newly expanded US section. 

And I just want to show you briefly why I love this atlas so much. It very much focuses on the physical geography. So the landform. So here’s one with no political boundaries, just some names of rivers and mountains and things like that. And then it will have the political, but it does still retain those physical features. And when you really study Charlotte Mason’s map questions, you realize how important that was. And then of course we get a bit more of a focused look at each region of the United States in this edition that I like. 

So you’re always welcome to vary the questions if your atlas that you’re using doesn’t have all of that information. That was something Charlotte Mason had, and her maps were very simple and published in her books. So it’s not like you need a ton of detail. And actually, a ton of detail is harder for young students to read. So that is just something that I think really helps, is having a good atlas. 

We also have a link in the show notes to our Geography across the forms document that just shows what Charlotte Mason did. Again, we’re not recommending those same books unless you’re in England and you wanna follow her scope and sequence. But what is really helpful in that document is it lists the map activities that you were talking about. So it tells you which landforms to build or, you know, to how many fields you need to describe the boundaries of or whatever. And then the pacing and making plans work that they do in Form 1A. So that is all itemized in that document. 

And I will just say one other thing. So she always says “in a tray of sand”– this is something I love to use kinetic sand for. Slightly less messy than just straight up sand but it retains its shape and it’s really easy, and I just have them keep it in a tray with a movable lid and so they’ll either put it on the lid to make a thing or they’ll do it in the actual bucket. But that’s what we like to use for our landform work.

Liz
One thing maybe we should point out too is that there have been several different printings of Charlotte Mason’s Geography. 

Emily
Elementary Geography. 

Liz
Elementary Geography, yeah. Some of them include questions, but those were not her method for…they weren’t included. 

Emily
They’re more like traditional comprehension questions at the end of a chapter. So we do not recommend using those. 

Liz
Those are not the same as the map questions either. 

Emily
Right.

Liz
Just to be clear about that. Because that is a little bit of a question or problem that people run into. 

Emily
Sure. 

Liz
I would say the most asked question by moms of children this age is how can the students find these things on the map when they cannot read? And I would just say it takes some effort on your part to maybe not always use the names, just describe– can you find on the eastern coast a big bay with mountains to the west? or whatever, you know, so just use words instead of names.

They can still absolutely find those things. And they can learn the directions of the map, north, south, east, and west, without having to read. And they can point to, I see a river here. And then you can simply say what it is. I think this is a lot like Science with Geography, just as the teacher, to just always use the right names for things. Don’t worry about defining everything. Just say, Well, you see where this little peninsula sticks out here and things like that. 

Emily
Yeah, because when you understand the goal of map questions is to fix that map in their mind and not to have memorized all these facts, then it really becomes incidental what the name is, right? 

Liz
Yeah, and I remember taking a grandchild out, not even one of Emily’s children, and for their birthday and they were holding a cup with a plastic lid that had melted a little bit funny. And he said, Oh my goodness, look it Grandma, it looks just like the Bay of Biscay. And I was like, Yeah, that is not something the average seven year old knows.

So another question a lot of times too is if you have a child who’s, say, in third grade, this is very common, and then you start a first grader, how do you combine them? Can you join them together for their Geography lesson? Absolutely, you can do that. And a child does not have to start out with the same book about places around the world in order to…yeah, they can start out with map questions at six and that’s fine. 

Emily
Yeah. I just don’t require them to answer all of the map questions like my third grader. You know, they’re still learning those. 

Liz
And then later on they you know, at another year they could go back and do those things. 

Emily
They won’t miss it. It’ll just go in a different order. 

Liz
And actually it’s even more fun usually to have more than one child looking on the map for the answers. Sometimes it speeds things up a little bit too. And just don’t forget that they’re gonna pick up a lot of these ideas just in the books that they’re reading as you know, family read-alouds – reading Heidi, I suddenly knew exactly all kinds of things about the Alps, you know, and what what grew there, what animals were there, and things like that. So Geography incidentally comes into all kinds of subjects. 

Emily
That’s so true.

Thanks for listening today. We hope you’ll tune in next week as we continue our look at Geography lessons in a Charlotte Mason education by turning our attention to Form 2, which is grades four through six, as they become even more acquainted with the world around them.

Charlotte Mason had great faith in us mothers to know what to teach our children and how. She said, “but the mother will find a hundred opportunities to teach geography by the way.” Indeed, the whole field of Pictorial Geography may be covered in this way. So stay tuned to today’s podcast to hear her ideas on how to go about this daunting feat while our children are still in the early years.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 1 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

ADE’s Out-of-Door Geography in the Early Years through Form 1 handout

The Hole in the Dike by Green

The Story about Ping by Flack and Wiese

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
Last week we began our series on Geography with a bird’s eye view of the whole subject. So today we’re going to start focusing in on the teaching of Geography at each level. And we’re of course going to start at the very earliest stage of a child’s development. So what people in the Charlotte Mason community call the Early Years, that time before formal lessons begin. 

And like Science, Geography is a subject that can and we probably should start introducing our children to these topics even in the early years because it can be done very naturally outside, as Charlotte Mason said, by the way. And we have all those long hours out of doors. So this is one of the ideas she had of how we can use that.

So we’re just going to be looking at those very earliest lessons today. Nicole, would you share what ideas we might consider introducing to our children? 

Nicole
Yeah, because there’s no book yet, and no map, they’re just really starting, like you said, with the early ideas outside their own home, their own neighborhood, and that area. Charlotte Mason said, 

There are certain ideas which children must get from within a walking radius of their own home if ever they are to have a real understanding of maps and of geographical terms. (1.73)

So that’s the whole spirit of this stage is really learning their own neighborhood. That is like their first Geography book. 

And like you said, like early Science and Nature Study, it’s outside and there’s no rigid sequence. Kind of like we talked about when we talked about the early years of Nature Study. It’s more of a menu for you to draw from. I like that you pointed out “a hundred things;” I’m like I maybe pick out five... 

There are resources for you of course but first here’s some ideas that we can pull from. The first is what Miss Mason called the Pictoral Geography and it’s as you’re out walking you teach Geography by the way:

A duck-pond is a lake or an inland sea; any brooklet will serve to illustrate the great rivers of the world; a hillock grows into a mountain––an Alpine system; a hazel-copse suggests the mighty forests of the Amazon; a reedy swamp, the rice-fields of China; a meadow, the boundless prairies of the West; the pretty purple flowers of the common mallow is a text whereon to hang the cotton fields of the Southern States. (1:72)

So you’re using those small things right in front of them to teach much larger ideas. And one thing that I loved about this is that you know how when you’re little and then you go back to something later in your life, you’re like, that was way smaller than I thought it was. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And so I loved this idea because she’s just playing into what is natural for the children anyways. 

Then there’s simply noticing where the sun is in the sky, where it rises and where it sets and how that changes at different times of the year. Just some of those noticing things and then learning to tell time by it. So big ideas, but really introduced in a gentle way. 

There is the feel of distance that they’re getting. They love this because it’s done with their own feet and counting and so they walk familiar distances around the house and they get to know how far is a long way and a short way and we can calculate that. 

They start learning a sense of direction. Again, you know, where the sun rises, where it sets, and then from there they can learn some direction. They can start getting their bearings in that way. And that’s kind of that first map idea, which direction does the road run, you know, versus the river and things like that. They could even get a pocket compass at this time once they’ve learned these things, which is pretty exciting.

There’s also reading their own neighborhood, like where things are. And as he notices this, like what’s growing in the fields, what bounds them, then he can start to draw the maps in the dirt, like with a stick or his finger of what he is seeing around him. 

Emily
And of course we give that example first, like show them how that’s done. And we’re not expecting him to have that inherent knowledge, right? We think it’s inherent, but it really isn’t. You know, we had to learn it. 

Nicole
Yeah. Right. And so much better to learn it this way, you know, maybe even on a hill where you can see down at the neighbor’s field or the the road that’s, you know, near your house. So just a great way to very concretely give them a look at this. So just again rooted in their own place. 

And then this is just like Nature Study and Science, this is setting the foundation for what is to come. So it’s important work.

Emily
And you notice how intertwined the two are, ’cause even when they’re learning boundaries, it’s what’s growing in that field? You know, it’s so hard to pull apart what is Science and what is Geography. 

Nicole
Right, right. Yeah.

Emily
So remember, of course, these are lessons by the way, as Nicole just said, there is not a scope and sequence, there’s not a rigid order. It is what captures their attention and let’s help them get a bigger idea from what has captured their notice or what their attention is focusing on. 

So be on the lookout for ways to open your children’s eyes to something. Maybe it’s a mud puddle they’re splashing in, and after they have fun with that, you could just talk about how the puddle could be a pond or a lake or something like that.

Or they’re noticing ants building a little ant hill. And you could say, can you imagine how big that anthill must be to an ant? Can you imagine? And just pull on their imagination and then go, that’s how we feel when we’re climbing a really big hill or a mountain. We feel as small as the ant compared to that big hill.

So much imagination is used. So just be on the lookout. I think that’s our biggest lesson here as moms at this age. Be on lookout for what’s already captured their attention and then how can we sow the seeds of some of these ideas. I also like instead of just dirt and a stick, sidewalk chalk, which is just a fun play, you know, and a lot of people are like, Well, I don’t have a lot of dirt around me, I live in a concrete jungle or whatever, we live in the city. Sidewalk chalk is such a fun play that we already are doing with our kids, and we could turn that into drawing boundaries and some like basic sketch maps. 

And that these are just not, it’s not like we’re meticulously methodically teaching them how to read a map, but these are the initial ideas to give them a different perspective, right? Their perspective is I see the world from three feet off the ground, and so to think about things from a bird’s eye perspective, which is what maps do, it’s just a different skill. So play with it, have fun. 

And then as the opportunity– so I just I say that because I don’t want you to think that this is just silly. This is literally such important groundwork for what’s going to come in their lessons, and it’s very worth our time to do with our young kids. And so, as opportunities present themselves, just maybe consider where is the sun in the sky, and maybe once a month, look at you know, if you go out for your outside time after lunch or before lunch, notice where the sun is. And it changes through the year, unless you live on the equator. Well it still does even at that point, right? 

Or what direction their shadow falls, or where the sun rises and sets if you have opportunity to do that. Sometimes it’s really hard for us to do that because it’s way before or way after children are awake. But you can also consider weather, and again this is where all of these are Geography ideas, but they’re also Science ideas. So it’s very intertwined with your Nature Study outside. 

So, as far as resources, you will notice if you’re reading along with us none of this is covered in Volume 6, but it is very much covered in a section called “Outdoor Geography” in Volume 1. And so we gave you that chapter and those pages in our reading schedule, so you would have all of these ideas. 

And then we at A Delectable Education have taken those ideas and put them in kind of a logical progression. It’s obviously not rigid or anything, but it’s like they do need to have some concept of the sun rising and setting before you introduce the cardinal directions of the compass, for example, because that’s why we have them, right? 

And so there is a progression and it starts in the early years and it goes through Form 1. So they’re going to continue building on these ideas. But if you’re just at a complete loss of what kinds of things do I even talk about or introduce them to, that document is linked in the show notes. So take a look at that.

And like I said, Volume 1, “Outdoor Geography”, that is going to be invaluable to you just to get that big idea and hopefully inspire you to tackle some of these ideas with your kids. 

Liz
I think that’s one of the biggest questions that moms have is just if if someone asked you point blank for ideas about Geography with a little child, you would absolutely have no idea. 

Emily
Or we get wildly inappropriate and start this is how you measure longitude…

Liz
And part of it is that we have for the most part become city people and we’ve kind of disconnected from being outdoors as much as earlier generations. But even growing up in the city, I remember my mom telling me as a little child, when you can see the shadow of the house, you need to come home for dinner. You know, stuff like that. 

So just as you start to notice things, you’ll notice more and more things. You’re planting your garden and you talk to your children while you’re doing it about why the rows have to go this way across our yard and not the other way because we want the flowers to have the full sun from the south all day long, right? Little things like that. 

And Nicole, I think you mentioned driving, but you know, I used to ask my children, well, if we’re going north and we’re at a stoplight, if we need to go east, which way do we go? And it’s a fun game for them. You know, noticing how plants turn toward the sun. Children have little competitions with each other about whose shadow is the longest and things like that. 

So a lot of it is training ourselves just to be more alert. And I will say that children pick up on ideas even in their little picture books at this age. The Hole in the Dike was one that made a tremendous impression on me as a little child. Like, do you mean these people in Holland live in the ocean and have to keep it out? 

Emily
Yeah. 

Liz
You know, or The story about Ping and learning about China and the big river, the Yangtze and stuff like that. So there’s just myriad ways once you start paying attention. 

Emily
We had a map that was well loved and I finally had a throw away because it was just getting so beat up on the side of our refrigerator for I don’t know…I maybe got it when Jonah was two from the Target dollar spot. But it was just such, it looked nice, you know? It was just simple – the states, the names. I don’t even think it had capitals. Maybe it did, I don’t know. And he would sometimes ask me, what state’s this? And all the states were different colors. 

And I remember before he started school, so he was not reading, he recounted from memory all the states we would pass through going from where we lived in Virginia to Michigan for our trip. And then he did it for like if the Alabama cousins came, they would go through these ones. And just from taking it in. 

And so that’s not a ton of active teaching, right? But we’re just strewing these ideas and giving them contact with maps. And some kids are gonna be fascinated. We’ve known quite a lot of those who just– 

Liz
It was easier in the old days when your parents literally pulled a map down from the visor to check it out. 

Emily
I think I bought a road atlas at a used bookstore when we were up in Michigan just for something for my kids to look at you know, on the twelve hour drive home.

We hope you’re inspired to try some of Charlotte Mason’s ideas with your own young children today. Next week, we’ll start to look at Geography lessons for Form 1 students, the beginning of their formal schooling. We hope you’ll join us.

Today we’re embarking on a new subject series, one very adjacent to Science, but also adjacent to History. That is the subject of Geography. Join us today on the podcast to get an overview of this amazing subject’s scope and sequence across a child’s education, and find out why Charlotte Mason considered this the most delightful subject of all.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

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. (Laughs) Who goes first?

Emily
Today we are beginning our look at Geography, the subject that Charlotte Mason considered perhaps the most delightful subject of all. So we invite you to follow along with us as we work through this subject by reading the relevant sections of chapter ten in Volume six, which is her essay Towards a Philosophy of Education. And we have a reading schedule that is linked in the show notes so you’ll know exactly what pages to read for each week that we’re releasing an episode on the topic.

As we start out, we like to first consider what is the reason behind the subject or the philosophy that undergirds it ,since we’re talking about a philosophy of education. So why is Geography so delightful and why is it such a huge part of the curriculum? 

Well, Charlotte Mason and many other people have considered Geography to be the study that helps a child find their place in the world. Literally, like their actual physical location. But even broader than that, how they fit into their culture, how other cultures relate, how they relate to people who live very differently from them. And it does help them to develop an understanding of people in other places, which just gives them empathy and understanding of people who are different from themselves. 

So essentially, Geography provides this framework for building all other relationships, I kind of think, right? More than any other subject. It really is their physical identity, their cultural identity, their personal, individual, and also how they’re part of the group. It just…every relationship starts from there, right?

So there are two aspects to Geography teaching. There’s the physical nature of the earth itself and how that impacts how and where people live on the earth. And the second part is the people themselves. And so we think about cultures and nations, like political divisions of the globe, how they live and work in every corner of the globe.

Even scientists and geographers disagree on the definitions of certain things because some of it is more science related and some of it is more anthropological. And so these two are just two aspects of the same thing and they’re very enmeshed. We like to compartmentalize and divide everything up into neat and tidy little packages, and that just can’t happen with Geography. 

Charlotte Mason said that the peculiar value of Geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and to furnish the imagination with pictures. And I think that gets to the heart of why she considered this subject so delightful, right? It helps inspire imagination. It fills our mind with living ideas and pictures that are worth thinking on, contemplating, and carrying with us.

So her method of teaching the subject she called a panoramic style, because she felt that it unfurled a vivid picture of the landscape of the world to her students. And so it gave a map of a country or a region to the child. So they would just have that in their mind whenever they heard a word, like the name of a country or a people group or something like that. They would have this whole panorama in front of them.

And then she also thought it provided him with a knowledge of general principles. So those principles would help him make deductions about how things might be in a place very different than somewhere that he had experienced. 

So, Nicole, will you give us the picture of how these ideas, these foundational principles of hers play out over the course of a whole student’s whole entire education? 

Nicole
Yeah. It’s like, how do we get there? This is a very inspiring idea, but how do we get there?

Emily
Yeah.

Nicole
Geography and this method, and you touched on this, runs along three streams side by side from the early years all the way through high school. The first stream is what she called pictorial Geography, and that’s living books that describe places in the travel book style that paint the peoples, the landscapes, the plants, and animals too, of far off lands. And again, so that the child could really picture them. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And then the second stream was the Physical Geography, and the reason I’m recapping this is because this is where we’re going to actually spend our time, this is what we’re gonna do for the kids to get there. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
This is how the earth works, the sun and the seasons, the day and night, mountains and rivers, things like this. And really that’s kind of that science side of things. 

And the third stream was the map work, learning to read and make maps, drawing plans, working with a globe and an atlas, and eventually even finding their way with the tools of the map world and using them. 

So all of those run all the way through. But it begins like many things in this method, which is outside. 

Emily
Yes. 

NIcole
Which is so cool. In the early years before any books at all are used, the child is simply noticing what’s happening in the world around them, watching the sun cross the sky, feeling how far a mile is underfoot, like learning distance that way, which way is north and south, and then even like using a twig to scratch little maps in the dirt. So it’s just all outside.

And then in Form 1, those first books are introduced to the child. They begin reading the living Geography. And it’s really like this initial tour of the world through a child’s eyes, something they can really relate to even though they are kind of far-flung places. And then they also have Charlotte Mason’s own little book of Physical Geography, and they start making maps, and then they start using their hands to make maps, little landforms like in sand and drawing simple plans and things like that. So it’s really an introduction to it.

And just follow along because I love how these all build on each other. So in Form 2, this is where the child learns to know their own country intimately, going region by region. And Miss Mason was really set on this because when they know a place well, they can then learn about other places in the world by either comparison or contrast. So they need to know their place well. So that is what Form 2 is just all about. 

Then Form 3 is when it starts to explode. So this is your grades seven, eight, and nine, Forms 3-4. And now they move from their own country to their whole continent. And we’re gonna talk about a variation we recommend on this in the episode that is on Forms 3 and 4. But also at this level in Physical Geography, it grows into a real science at this time. And they are really testing and experimenting with some things. 

And then Forms 5-6, so that’s 10, 11th, and 12th grade in high school, the students are traveling through living books. They are looking at a continent, but now that continent isn’t their own. They’re moving out from there looking at the other continents of the world. And then they actually learn to navigate with the real tools of the trade for geographers. And even their map work changes a touch here where they’re not doing the map questions, but they are using the maps in like real life ways. 

So I hope you can just see that they’re starting–

Emily
It’s a panorama.

Nicole
It’s a panorama, but it’s also this progression. And like you said, I love that word unfurling…I know my backyard. Now I know my country. Or my county even, or state. And now I know my continent. And just going out and really knowing the world really well this way. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Well, we will talk about at each level some common questions or concerns that people have in teaching Geography, but what are some of the big geographical, maybe objections to how Charlotte Mason did Geography or questions or just what kind of disconnects do people have when they try to tackle this subject? 

Liz
I think it’s pretty basic to our view of education in general. And she talks about having too utilitarian of a perspective on Geography. Most of us just think of it as a school subject. And I love how she emphasizes in Volume six that we lose the awe and the wonder and the beauty and just the variety and diversity in the way the world looks, you know, its structure, but also in all the people and places and different ways of life.

Emily
I thought it was really interesting because I was reminded in rereading through this section that the quote you always say, unless a subject or unless science teaches a child to awe and wonder, it’s failing basically. I’m here paraphrasing Charles Mason. That’s in the Geography section. It’s so interesting. 

Liz
And so we’ve kind of divorced the subject from you know… 

Emily
From awe and wonder. 

Liz
Facts and not real life. And also I think a lot of people think that Geography is irrelevant. You know, we have GPS. Why is this really necessary? And which I think is similar to saying, Well, we have calculators and computers. Why do we need to teach children basic math? 

Emily
Right. 

Liz
We have a trust in machines. 

Nicole
I’m gonna take it a step further, that you could say well, I have a family, why would I need to know anybody else in the community of the world?

Liz
Yeah. and I think a lot of times we remember our own dreary drill schooling and we just think of it as memorization of names and places and maybe boundaries to pass tests. 

Emily
Yes. And exports and population density. 

Liz
Yeah. And we just don’t realize how it’s behind a lot of the major issues in the world right now. Reasons for wars and understanding cultures and why other people have such strong feelings that we don’t on certain topics. And even just the way we live, our economics, are tied to the place that we live. 

So I think it is really practical, but to just view it as we have to live on this earth and that’s all we need to know is kind of short-suiting ourselves. 

Emily
Yeah. We’re recording this during the summer of 2026 when we in North America are hosting the World Cup and people from all over the world are coming to America. And it’s so interesting how their stereotypes are confronted and confirmed or just honed a little bit, and just the things that they thought about America before they arrived here and what they’re coming up with. 

And I think that has given us a window onto ourselves, right? To see ourselves through somebody else’s eyes is often what is needed. Because we are just like the frog in the boiling water. We don’t know what we don’t know about ourselves and we lose that perspective. And I think the study of Geography, how we go about it in Charlotte Mason can really help give us that bigger picture and also understanding of ourselves, and hopefully kindle a healthy affinity for the place that we come from. 

Nicole
Right. And also I mean just on a bigger scope sometimes just the Charlotte Mason method in full gets some pushback because it maybe isn’t global enough. And I think that this is where it really becomes global.

Emily
Yes, when you understand what she was doing with Geography and how you see this is exactly how we can…

Liz
You could never make that accusation again. 

Emily
She gets criticized for being, you know, a product of her day, which was imperialistic Britain. And the fact that she put such emphasis on all these other places at this time, I think, really kind of debunks that. And she was ahead of her time. Even as much as she was a product of her time, she was very forward thinking and I think that we can just pick that up and continue with it in our global society. 

We are so glad that you joined us for this discussion of Geography lessons across a child’s education. Just like Science, Geography lessons begin even before our children have started school, as Nicole mentioned earlier. So we hope you’ll join us next time to learn about what we can and ought to open our children’s eyes to about the world around them.

If you’ve been following along with our series on Charlotte Mason Science lessons, you likely have some lingering questions. We’ll address many common queries that we hear from parents and teachers about Science and Nature Study on the podcast today.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

Sabbath Mood Homeschool (SMH) Science Curriculum

• Lower Elementary (Form 1) Nature Study Scope & Sequence
• Upper Elementary (Form 2) Science Curriculum Guides
• Middle School (Form 3-4) Science Curriculum Guides
• High School (Form 5-6) Science Curriculum Guides

SMH Special Studies Guides

• Nature Explorers (Rotation A) (Rotation B)
• Understanding Biomes (Rotation A) (Rotation B)

ADE Special Studies Rotation

The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen

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

And this is our final episode in our Science series. We have covered a lot of ground. In these series wrap-ups, we like to address any lingering practical considerations and questions and also anything that we might need to discuss when we have children in multiple forms. We like to talk about those overarching ideas or practical application questions. 

So Nicole, can you tell us…probably the question we most want or our listeners most want to know is how and where and if we can combine kids in different levels. At what point can we combine them? 

Nicole
Yeah. 

So Science is a subject where we can combine students in some places and in others we really should not. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
And the deciding factor is always the type of work and the amount of time the form requires. If you’re following along you saw that there were some very big jumps that happen from form to form sometimes. 

Emily
Yeah. 

Nicole
Within any single form students can combine without any trouble and, in the upper Forms they combine well across Forms like the high schoolers in Forms 4, 5, and 6, so your ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders, those can be combined and work together and and you can really have that younger high schooler jump in wherever the older high schooler is. And that’s the same in all of the forms, just having your younger child jump in wherever your older child is within that form level. 

Liz
So, are you saying if a child came in in ninth grade and the 11th grader was doing Chemistry 3, that the ninth grader would also do Chemistry 3? 

Nicole
You know, I really think there is so much benefit to that. I know that that seems kind of crazy…

Liz
Yeah, because we don’t like doing things out of order.

Nicole
We don’t, and we still…Charlotte Mason did this over and over. There was never a time she didn’t. And sure, that younger student maybe won’t get as much out of that part 3 than they would have if they had done it later when they’re older. But they’re gonna get more out of the first part than their older sibling did when they went through it. 

Liz
So the benefits outweigh…. 

Nicole
Right. There’s just so many places in a Charlotte Mason education where one thing doesn’t necessarily have to come before another thing. 

Emily
Right, and I think that’s the nature of the Living Books. And also really Science is not Math. It uses math sometimes, but it’s not like you have to learn this concept before this concept before this concept. 

Nicole
Exactly. Right. For sure. 

So Form 3 can even be combined with high school students sometimes. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
This is especially when the older student is new to Charlotte Mason. So you have a new older student, they’re new to this, they can actually begin the core subjects with the Form 3 guide, and a lot of times I recommend that anyway. So students could be combined that way. 

Emily
So you’re saying use the Form 3-4 guides for a new Form 4 student who’s not had all of those so far. 

Nicole
And not necessarily all of them. They don’t need to do two years’ worth, but if they’re going to begin Biology, say, don’t start in the high school Biology, start with the Form 3 Biology and set that groundwork before moving forward. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
Still only requires three to get a transcript credit so an older student doesn’t need to necessarily continue all the way through, but getting those early ones are good. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
Okay, where we can’t combine is at the bottom. So Form 1 should not be joined with any other form. The work is a totally different kind of work. The timing is different and there is this practical danger too that if a young child moves ahead to Form 2 books you find yourself needing to hunt down other books, other experiments. You know, there’s a lot of work that you’re gonna have to do later on to fill that gap. And your student won’t have gotten that foundation, that I hope if you listen to this whole series, that foundation is vital. So they need to kind of live where they are there. 

Likewise, Form 2 shouldn’t be pulled either down to Form 1 because you’re trying to do everybody together, or up to Form 3. The level and the time allowed, they just don’t line up in either direction. There’s just a real developmental process that’s happening with all these. The students need to stay in their spot. 

Emily
And unfortunately, it’s the spots that everybody wants to combine because they do have these strong readers and it’s hard to get together, but it’s imperative. 

Nicole
It is. And just one thing I would say to help yourself out with this is do be thinking in terms of your child moving towards being independent in their work. However that looks for that child, you know, you might need to do the reading early in Form 2, but maybe later in Form 2 they can do the reading by themselves. So there’s a transition in that Form 2 level typically. Work that, make sure you’re getting to the point where in Form 3 they can do the work independently of you, even if there are some workarounds that you have to do. 

Emily
I was just thinking, like your oldest student is profoundly dyslexic and he never was able to be independent with his reading, but he was quite capable and needed, his mind needed, the ideas that were appropriate for his age and form. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
But you would read a lot of his books because you weren’t able to read them in real time to him, and he would have to listen to a voice memo. 

Nicole
Right. And at the same time, he needed that independence. So I would either read early in the morning and record myself doing his reading for the day…but later and now there’s so much technology available. 

Liz
Just with your phone, you can read anything. 

Nicole
You can read anything. Yeah. And so I used to have to— 

Emily
I just saw someone say it’s a great time to be a dyslexic! 

Nicole
Totally. It is. PDFs can be read, the sections of PDFs, so they could read the beginning of the lesson. That’s kind of their setup. They can then read separately, this is what you need to read today. Take the phone over and read the book. You know, there is so much independence that can be worked in there for your older students. 

So the principal is the same one that runs through this whole subject: combine where the content and the developmental stage naturally overlaps, but really protect that progression. And just remember that each stage is built on the stage before it, and the real value comes from letting the students meet these ideas at the right time and in the right way. 

Emily
Yeah. 

So kind of along with that, or tag teaming that idea, we always have the question of placement. Like my kid is new to Charlotte Mason, or new to maybe your Science curriculum or whatever. At what level do I place them? 

And our answer is always the same. Charlotte Mason believed that except in Math and Grammar, they needed to go in at the level appropriate for their age. So if they are in the Form 2 ages, they start in Form 2 Science even if they don’t have the foundation of those other nature lores. Probably they’re encountering a lot of those ideas anyways and their minds are ready to pick that up or you can work on some of those things even in their Nature Study time. 

So that would mean Form 1 students are six to nine year olds. The grades are years one through three. Form 2, nine to twelve year olds, grades four through six, that’s what you put them in. Form 3 is twelve to fourteen year olds, depending on when they come in. and that is grades seven through eight, and then Forms 4-6 is fourteen to eighteen year-olds. Years nine through twelve. 

However, one thing Nicole did not get into is if your students are new to Charlotte Mason and they’re new to Nature Study, the area you can combine everybody is really at the Form 1 level of Special Studies. So your afternoon field work will be the same. You might even well, the older Forms won’t have the time in the morning to read the books, but you maybe could have them read the same ones that you’re reading with the younger kids. They’re just getting it more…they’ll speed through those because they’re usually much smaller and simpler. But that is a good thing to do. 

So you would even recommend using your Nature Explorers guide all the way through high school if they’ve never done it, because it is the foundation for Nature Study, Biology. They need those broad categories and those big ideas. 

Nicole
Right. 

Liz
But the Science and labs you would need to do at their level.

Emily
And book reading, and even the Nature Lore, like Form 2 still has Nature Lore, but that should be a different caliber than their Form 1 Nature Lore. 

So again, there is not any order to those Form 2 or really even Form 3 Sciences and then a lot of them are, like Chemistry 1-3, separate guides. Physics 1, 2, and 3…. But even with that, the order doesn’t exactly matter. Each term stands on its own, and so you do not need to think, well, they didn’t have what Nicole recommends for fourth grade, and they’re coming in as a fifth grader. Do I need to start there? You could, but it doesn’t matter. So you do need to put them in the right level, but the actual topics don’t matter, right? 

Nicole
Right. One thing I suggest to people is if they are new to this and they’re just coming in right in the middle, pick a topic that your kid is most interested in or that you think will really light their fire. Because once they get a taste for this kind of a Science education, usually they’re just gonna take right off. 

Emily
And again, Science is not like Math or Grammar. There is not one entry point, right? There are many, many entries into this world. And really, something they’re interested in, they probably already know a little something about. And so they have a relationship started with that and then can go deeper. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
Well, what other questions do we have hanging out here? 

Liz
You know, I just would say overall just the typical parent insecurity, they feel inadequate to do a professional enough job of teaching such an important subject. And I would just say, even if you love Science and did a lot of Science, you think, well, in the 25, 35 years since I was in school, there’s so much more. You know. But to remember that the student is the learner. 

And I recently read a book called The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen. And she talked about the serious disconnect with children now in the digital age, that they’re not getting enough hands-on experience with anything in life. And I just think that this Science will work against that problem. They’re doing a lot of personal investigation and Science is all about trial and error, and emphasis there on the error. 

And I think we need to face our faulty thinking that knowledge is a sphere just for the professional. You know, that is totally antagonistic to Charlotte Mason’s principles and beliefs. We just need to get over our fear of that and jump in and start learning where we’re at and let the ideas seep into them and ignite their fire for Science. 

Emily
One other thing that maybe kind of plays into that insecurity that we feel as teachers or our inadequacy to teach Science to our children is how do we know that they’re doing well or how do we assess their progress? What do you think, Nicole? 

Nicole
Okay, well I’ll tell you that if you do use my Science guides, I do include an exam. So you would have that to work with, you don’t need to write the exam questions. But first I wanted to talk just a word about what kind of exam we would give for Science.

At the end of each term, you ask a set of Science or Nature Study questions to the child, one at a time within the normal lesson time. They are not multiple choice questions. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
They are not tests of their memorization either. They are essentially narrations. They’re open invitations to tell what they know, what they’ve noticed. So questions might be something like, what do you know of our sun and its atmosphere? Or describe two songbirds, saying what you’ve noticed yourself. Often a drawing is required in these, and you just think about, so that’s a drawing from memory of something that they’ve looked at well enough to be able to outline it and get it there on paper. Could be wild fruit, a twig, phases of the moon. There’s usually a choice of questions, so a child could choose what they feel strongest at answering.

Emily
Because exams are trying to give them a chance to show what they know. 

Nicole
Exactly, right. So because the questions are open, there’s not really right or wrong answers, it’s just about the child telling what they remember. 

So then the question becomes how do you evaluate them? And we do have some principles to look at. Relevance is one of them. Do the observations connect to what was actually studied that term? 

Liz
Or does their answer answer the question that was asked. 

Nicole
Yeah, that’s one lot of them. Detail, do they recall specific features, behaviors, or comparisons? Do the drawings show real attention? Was their personal engagement shown through these answers? Is there delight and curiosity, a sense of relationship with the subject? Their vocabulary is something Charlotte Mason always pointed to. What kind of words they used. Are they reaching for accurate descriptive language? She always talked about the names, them using names, and the same is true here. 

And then maybe more primarily is growth over time. So look at this exam compared to last exam and see are you seeing some growth in the student? Fuller descriptions, yeah, progress, more careful drawings, things like that. 

The last one really is the heart of it. We aren’t scoring memory, we’re watching for a person’s powers of observations to mature, and it just reminds me, Charlotte Mason said the function of education is not to give technical skill but to develop a person. 

So we really…these exams are an opportunity for us to celebrate what they’ve noticed because noticing is really the foundation of scientific thinking, and I hope that you’re picking up on that kind of stuff, that you don’t have to know all the answers in order to score these tests. So while you said that part of your preparation is to pre-read these books – I think that’s wonderful. I don’t think it’s a hundred percent necessary. 

Emily
No, I mean, I do not do that so I can gauge whether my child is doing a good narration. It’s so I can have an informed conversation with them. 

Nicole
Exactly. And so don’t feel like, I don’t know the answers to this. But instead read your child’s exams as if they’re telling you something new and how much do they have to share with you on this exam. 

Emily
That’s really good. 

Did you have any closing thoughts you want to leave us with, Mom? Or is that it? 

Liz
I think you guys have covered it. 

Emily
Okay.

That brings us to the end of our series of episodes on Science lessons. Next, we’re turning our attention to the very Science-adjacent subject of Geography. So we’ll see you next time.

Today we are taking a close look at Charlotte Mason’s Science lessons for high school students. How do we spread a wide enough feast to encompass all the scientific knowledge that we’ve discovered in the last century? Are the types of lessons Charlotte Mason designed enough for 21st century students living in the digital age? Tune in to today’s podcast for our discussion.

Listen Now:

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

ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule

The Body by Bill Bryson

For the Love of Physics by Walter Lewin

Sabbath Mood Homeschool (SMH) High School Science Curriculum Guides

SMH Understanding Biomes Guides (Rotation A) (Rotation B)

ADE Special Studies Rotation

SMH Special Studies book lists
(This is a treasure trove! Use the left hand side bar to navigate down)

SMH Living Science book lists

SMH details on List Keeping

Emily’s favorite Science Notebook: Stillman & Birn Epsilon softcover 8×10

Nicole’s favorite notebook for keeping a Book of Lists: Blueline business notebook

Nature Notebooks:

• Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover 8×10 (Emily’s favorite!)
• Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardcover 5.5×8.5 (Nicole’s favorite!)

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
We have reached the highest level of lessons in the Charlotte Mason curriculum. And these are a continuing deepening exploration similar to Forms 3-4. So Nicole, will you please tell us about Form 5-6 Science lessons? 

Nicole
Yeah, so Forms 5 and 6, that is grades ten, eleven, and twelve….And we would say that in many cases we would pull Form 4 into this, so nine, ten, eleven, twelve, so our regular high school years. 

In this area, our scope widens. The students are now studying all four core branches of Science every year: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and the Earth Sciences. And we use the same structure described in Forms 3 and 4, where Biology is running concurrently throughout the year, and then one additional Science is taken per term. 

And we talked about this at length in the Forms 3-4 episode, but you can do what Charlotte Mason did where you have four streams of Science going at the same time, so each day of those four days of your week you would do a different subject, or you can follow kind of what we like to do, which is that one and then one more. That’s done multiple days a week and then each term you change. 

Liz
And you’re still getting four complete courses. 

Nicole
Yeah, you’re doing the same amount in a year, you’re just organizing them differently. And it makes it really nice with regard to experiments so that you’re not doing multiple experiments in a single week sometimes, accidentally, and so it works really well. 

Because of that pattern, over three years, a student completes the equivalent of three terms of work in each field. So we would do one term of Chemistry the first year, one term the second year, one term the third year. And after those three, they will have completed enough lab work to assign a transcript credit in each of the core Science courses. 

But I always want to make a note of caution here that Charlotte Mason did not build her curriculum around checking off transcript boxes. Even once a credit has technically been awarded or earned students should keep reading and studying Science in the same way. 

So a lot of universities now, high school graduation requirements, they only require one or two courses, often maybe two courses, one of them a lab, even to go to university sometimes. It’s just two. But Charlotte Mason really wanted them to continue. This is part of their education that’s due them. 

Emily
Right. 

Nicole
And part of that Science of Relations and becoming scientifically literate people. So we should continue this as part of their regular scope of work. Just keep spreading that feast for as long as we have them in school.

Students at this level also keep reading current events in Science, and it matters more now than ever. These are young adults who will soon be voting on scientific questions. They’re moving from tentatively weighing the news to forming and articulating their own reasoned positions on it. And that readiness is the point as they step towards adult life. 

They also still read Science biography, maybe like one per year as part of their free reading and and as students wrestle with the bigger ideas, reading the life of say Curie or George Washington Carver or Newton, they really see that real discovery is rarely tidy, and it’s also rarely just a single person. There’s like a pushback and the false starts, and there’s persistence and genuine wonder that goes into this. And so when they read a headline that’s like, this is how it is, they can stop and go, but is that how it is? We’ll see how this plays out over time. 

A couple of scope notes to keep in mind for these years. First is the relationship between Science and Math. Math is often called the language of Science, and that is especially true in Physics. A student who hopes to pursue a Science degree then should really take their Math studies very seriously, particularly their Algebra and the higher math. But a student who isn’t ready for that level of Math should not be shut out of the ideas that they can be gaining through their study of Physics. 

Walter Lewin, who wrote the book I use for high school Physics, For the Love of Physics, who was an MIT professor, he’s taught at the higher level and he makes the point that Physics is a way of seeing the world, not just a pile of formulas. So we should let students engage with those ideas and do the calculations when they can. We shouldn’t hold them back from that.

In Nature Study too, there is a big change in this level for students. They are studying a specific biome now for the whole year, and we’re hoping that they will find a specific, small local example of one of the biomes, a patch of forest, a meadow, a stream that would represent we it’s an ecoregion really. So you might live in the Midwest, but you have an ecoregion, maybe a park in your town that is treed and then someplace as a field or someplace it’s a pond that you can go for the whole year to one of these places. 

And they begin to see how species interact, what problems exist, how changes in the environment affect the balance of that life. And this is really Ecology, and this is going to really well supplement their Biology studies. It’s just again just taking it all up a notch. 

Liz
Yeah. 

Emily
Yeah. So just like in Forms 3 and 4 there are four lessons, each 40 minutes, per week and that’s why if they start at Form 3 you have you have two years, eight guides, to work through that takes there and then they can just start on the high school ones in ninth grade, or if they’re starting later they can do the Form 3/4. And a couple of those you do recommend as prerequisites to the high school course. Which ones are those? Biology… 

Nicole
…in particular Biology is one, Physics is another good one, Chemistry can go either way. 

Emily
Okay. 

Nicole
And another one is Astronomy. I really think that middle school Astronomy is a really important foundation to what they’re gonna do for Earth Sciences in high school. 

Emily
Okay. So they’re continuing these streams. Biology, like you said, instead of alternating with Botany, it’s one day a week all three to four years, right? And it starts out with Anatomy, the human body, for two years and then you have Ecology. And if they get this far they could even look into Origins of Life. So they’re taking that topic which you said has got the most information and really taking it to a very deep high level. I know, I was just thinking that those are probably kind of contradictory – yeah it’s deep and it’s high. 

And then three times a week… so that’s one day a week and then three times a week they would do their term Science, so one of the other topics, and as you explained…Chemistry, Physics, and an Earth Science each term. And that way they’re working on all four all year. 

So for the most part, these lessons are going to be independent at this level. And again, your guides are written to the student. They complete their narrations, they draw diagrams, they write up their lab procedures all in a Science notebook. 

So as a teacher, our job is to have the supplies available. This we’ve talked about all throughout the series, how important experimentation is and direct observation. So those are essential to these courses, and it’s essential for their high school credit. 

Nicole
Yep. 

Emily
I do think though that it helps, even if you’re not doing the lessons with your students, to pre-read the books and follow the guides. The example I was gonna show is the anatomy one. This is an amazing book. There are a lot of adult themes in it, or maybe more middle school boy humor, I guess. And you actually don’t have the children read those sections, and so read alongside the guide so you’ll know and not freak out that my kids are going to get all of these crude descriptions. 

But it’s an amazing living book that is absolutely worth it. We’ve had people question that choice because of the irreverence of the author, and it is just so vivacious that many students who even have a repulsion to thinking of anything medical have been drawn into fascination at the wonders of the human body. 

So your guide is written to them. Again, it lays out everything that the students need to do and to read and gives them the prompts that they need for their Science notebooks.

They’re also going to need, like you said, to have chosen a place where they can study their biome. And you do have two years worth of the high school Understanding Biomes Nature Study guides. So just like your guides did for Science, these do for Nature Study and really help direct the focus and work of the students. 

Because it’s one thing to say, go out and study grasslands for a year, and the kids are like, I’m looking at this meadow, what do I do? You have broken it down into all kinds of projects and really research and observation that they can be doing an experiment, kind of Nature Study experiments, that they can be doing and that and gives you guidance. So these are really, really helpful. 

But as a mom, you’re gonna have to work with the child and pick a place, and if it’s not somewhere they can get to on their bikes or on their own feet, you might have to be involved in traveling and driving them there. So that is part of our preparation as well. 

So those would be our top resources we would recommend for you. Also we will link to the special studies rotation so can see what those biomes are at this level that we recommend. You would want a Science notebook. I again for my students chose the Epsilon series soft cover 8×10 nature notebook to have all of their writing and diagrams and lab write-ups in that. That is the same size as the nature notebook my kids have kept, which is the Stillman and Birn Alpha series. Nicole likes the Stillman and Birn Epsilon which is hardcover. It’s a little smaller. You can see them side by side.

And then they’re continuing their Book of Lists throughout this level. We talked about this in the Form 3-4 episode, but they keep lists of wildflowers and birds and they can really choose another thing, whatever they’re interested in, mushrooms or what else is there? Insects, moss, yes, lichen, whatever it is, to list their common name, their Latin name, the family they’re in, where they saw it, and then keep track by the month when they see those things either in bloom or when they’re around at your location. 

Also on your website you have ample book lists of recommendations for living books for supplementing their study of their biome and also Science biography. So we will link to those in the show notes as well.

So what do we hear at this level? Probably similar to the last one. 

Liz
I would say an overwhelming number of moms always want to know is this going to be enough to get my child into college? And I will just say that it is more than enough. Nicole often gets asked about particular subjects and she just told me she often says yes, they covered that in Forms 3 and 4. These are more than adequate for college entrance requirements. 

A lot of parents are concerned, especially when I talk to dads, about whether studying at home is enough if the parent is not science-oriented themselves. Wouldn’t it be better to have a professional teacher? And I just want to say that most famous scientific innovators have studied on their own extensively. And the children have had a lifetime of pursuit in the interests of Science in Charlotte Mason’s method, and that is something. Even a lot of quote unquote professionals do not have the actual enthusiasm for the subject.

Nicole
It’s also important to remember who’s their teacher. And their teacher is the writer. 

Liz
The teacher is the book. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
And your student is the learner. And so don’t worry about your own abilities. 

Nicole
Right. 

Emily
And one thing I was going to say that is different about the books that you chose at this level: they are all very living. They’re written by a very enthusiastic expert in the field, but they are also almost exclusively very newer books. So they are much more up-to-date. So we have moved beyond just the foundational ideas and we are getting into more of the current modern research. 

Nicole
Right. 

Liz
And I have also had a number of parents tell me about their students that have been through Charlotte Mason’s Science courses and the ones Nicole has written as well. And they tell me that their children actually shine in college in labs. They know what they’re doing. They’re helping the other kids who’ve been in traditional programs to think independently.

I also hear a lot of complaints that a lot of the experiments just don’t work or they just don’t turn out. 

Emily
Welcome to Science. 

Liz
Scientists have that same experience. They learn from their failures and not just the successes. And the students could write up why it didn’t go well.

Emily
Or their ideas about it. 

Liz
Yeah. Yeah, it is excellent training in following directions in precision, in timing, in measurement, and so on. 

And then I guess Nicole touched on this, but just the concern about how do you work out your transcript if they’re only doing a third of Chemistry for three years running? How do you do that? And basically, you accumulate a whole year over three years. But like she said, at the end of the three years, you’ve actually accomplished a year of four different Sciences. And then they have a whole other year for studying all kinds of other Science topics that they would just like to pursue their senior year. 

Emily
So you could assign a third of a credit each year if your program allows you to do that. You could do two half credits, I guess, if that is easier. You could just decide, well, I’m gonna give Earth Science in ninth grade and Chemistry in tenth grade and Physics in 11th and Biology or whatever, however, you want to divide that up because that’s more traditional. But they are working out all of those at the same pace and they are doing a credit-worth of work, it’s just spread across four fields instead of one. 

Liz
And I think the absorption when they go through it slower is much greater. 

Emily
One thing that you talk about, a benefit that I really believe in, is you’re able to not just take…like I did Biology in ninth grade. And as a ninth grader, you are not mentally equipped to be really tackling a lot of the very relevant and serious medical ethics questions that we have today. I’m even thinking about technological ethics, ethical questions with AI and that sort of thing. 

And so by spreading it out, you’re able to not just compartmentalize that off, and you only have ninth grade yourself or ninth grade students, right? The child is growing and their mind is expanding. And so they’re able to tackle some deeper, heavier topics in that field that they wouldn’t be able to if they were doing a more traditional way. 

Nicole
Yeah, I totally think that’s true. I mean, if you think about even the topics that are being approached, you know, Anatomy and then Ecology and Origins. Some of those you want them to be a little bit older before they really dive into them. 

Emily
Yeah.

Well, we hope you can see and appreciate the richness and depth of Science education in Charlotte Mason’s curriculum. Not only will your students understand the principles of Science, they will have built meaningful relationships in many directions. So we’ll be back next week to tie up any loose ends that remain and answer some common objections about Charlotte Mason Science.