Listen Now:
“We have still to complain that Grammar and Arithmetic are rather weak. When this has been reported more than twice under the same teacher, the parents absolutely ought to get help, in these subjects, from some teacher of a neighboring elementary school.” (Parents’ Review, Vol. 6, p. 75)
I know you said that you were doing an upcoming episode on recitation, but now my curiosity is piqued. The children are not to recite together? They don't always, but I didn't know that was not how that is done.
Great advice! We have a CM co-op that is fairly large (10-12 families) and I feel that it would be better served in a smaller setting. However, with the amount of moms we have, it helps share the load of teaching. We meet only once a month for music, literature, art, and Shakespeare. Our nature club meets at another time during the month. This really gave me some thoughts to chew on as we go forward in planning! I asked this on the FB page – when you hire a teacher, how do you ask them to teach in a CM way (especially if they were a public school teacher previously?)
Watch for it this week!
~Nicole
Raeanna,
I'm glad the episode gave you new ideas. Pray and ask for direction. I don't know what the FB friends have shared, but I do hope you heard us say that having a teacher teaching outside of Mason's method will only confuse the children and be nonproductive.
Liz
Thank you for this thought-provoking episode. I was wondering what your thoughts are for a co-op wanting to incorporate a weekly picture study lesson, where the families are not all studying the same time period in history. What I'm specifically wondering is if it might work well to have architecture be the co-op subject and use picture study as a means of studying the archriecture as a group, (studying architecture chronologically as a group instead of linking it to the specific time periods each family is learning about at home).
That's an interesting question, Erika. I do know that Architecture was also a subject that CM thought should be tied to the time period being studied…The ideal option would be that everyone in your co-op could be studying the same time period!
–Emily
Thank you for responding. That makes sense. If a weekly co-op was wanting to study some part of the science streams together, in addition to nature study, which of those streams would you suggest would work best in a co-op setting (nature lore, or the topics that rotate by terms such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, or the special studies subjects)? Thank you for any suggestions you may be able to offer!