Spreading the feast of the Charlotte Mason method of education through weekly podcasts. Join us for short discussions that provide information, examples, and encouragement to the homeschool parents putting CM's ideas into practice in their homes.
Welcome to Season Eight! Emily, Nicole, and Liz are delighted to bring you up to date on new helps for teaching being offered at A Delectable Education’s site, events to look forward to, and an overview of the great things you can expect in the coming school year on the podcast as they continue to share the riches of the Charlotte Mason feast.
Listen Now:
Parents and Children (Vol. 2), Charlotte Mason: Chapter 25
It’s planning season and we have been busy working to prepare many new products for release today!
First, you’ll notice that our menu has been reorganized to help you find all these new items (and our old ones too): we’ve organized the Teacher Training Videos by type (full-length workshops and shorter demonstration lessons) and all the rest of our products are now grouped under “Teacher Helps.” These are further broken into three categories to help meet you in whichever stage you are at:
Planning the big picture (Curriculum Templates, Exam Planner, Schedule Cards, Subject Planners, etc.)
Forecasting (Things that help break down resources/subjects across your terms)
Lessons (Teacher Helps that you’ll use in your day-to-day lessons)
We know that most families are feeling the crunch of higher prices everywhere, so we’ve also made special bundled prices on several products. Check out the new Reading Bundle, Subject Planners Bundle, the Will Bundle, and bundled prices for each level of Geography resources!
Charlotte Mason encouraged the habit of gratitude. This end-of-year season wrap-up episode is a collection of testimonials from mothers who have experienced the benefits of her method. Emily, Liz, and Nicole are encouraging every mother, before the books are tossed aside for the year, to take time to reflect on the past year of lessons. If you want to end the year with a song instead of a sigh, listen to be reminded of all that’s good.
Listen Now:
“May we recommend the following suggestion to Parents?––
A Mother’s Diary––”Parents and teachers should endeavour to answer such questions as these: When do the first stirrings of the moral sense appear in the child? How do they manifest themselves? What are the emotional and the intellectual equipments of the child at different periods, and how do these respond with its moral outfit? At what time does conscience enter on the scene? To what acts or omissions does the child apply the terms right or wrong? If observations of this kind were made with care and duly recorded, the science of education would have at its disposal a considerable quantity of material from which, no doubt, valuable generalisations might be deduced. Every mother, especially, should keep a diary in which to note the successive phases of her child’s physical, mental, and moral growth, with particular attention to the moral; so that parents may be enabled to make a timely forecast of their children’s character; to foster in them every germ of good, and by prompt precautions to suppress, or at least restrain, what is bad.” (2/105-106)
As with every subject, Charlotte Mason’s method starts with ideas and continues with natural instruction according to her principles. Math is no exception. Guests Emily Al-Khatib and Heather Schultz unpack the underlying principles of Charlotte Mason’s approach to math and reveal a glimpse of the beauty and truth that will be revealed as Miss Mason’s method is applied to mathematics. Emily, Liz, and Nicole touch on the most common questions, concerns, fears, and perplexities teachers have about math with these enthusiastic math teachers.
Why did Charlotte Mason include drawing as one of the essential subjects in her curriculum? And why is ADE re-releasing the original discussion on drawing as one of the basics this season? This return to the subject of drawing will refresh your thinking about the necessity of drawing, its broad application to many subjects, and some practical guidance for implementing drawing in the feast.
Listen Now:
“It is only what we have truly seen that we can truly reproduce, hence, observation is enormously trained by art teaching. Personally, I believe every living soul can learn to draw from actual objects, if the eye has not first been vitiated by seeing copies of them.” (Miss Pennethorne, PR 10)
“This is what we wish to do for children in teaching them to draw–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.” (Vol. 1, p. 313)
“Art, when rightly directed, is educational, for it trains not only one faculty, but all the faculties together; it trains the hand and the eye, and it trains the head and the heart; it teaches us to see and to see truly; it teaches us to think–that science can do; but it teaches us also to admire and to love; it disciplines the emotions.” (Mr. Collingwood, The Fesole Club Papers)
“…the great benefit of “brushwork” being that it can be made quite a moral training in exactness and decision.” (Mrs. Perrin, “Brush Drawing”, PR 4)
“Children should learn to draw as they learn to write. The great point is that they should be encouraged, not flattered. With no help and encouragement the child gradually loses his desire to draw.” (Mrs. Steinthal, “Art Training in the Nursery”, PR 1)
“There are two great points that must be remembered if we wish to make our system of art teaching…successful. The first is, always keep the children interested. Next, let us understand that drawing is not only learnt with a pencil and a piece of paper….The chief value of drawing is that it trains the eye to see things as they are.” (Mrs. Steinthal, PR 1)
“…we must be careful not to offer any aids in the way of guiding lines, points, and other such crutches; and also that he should work in the easiest medium; that is, with paint-brush or with charcoal, and not with a black-lead pencil. Boxes of cheap colours are to be avoided. Children are worthy of the best.” (Vol. 1, p. 313)
“The first buttercup in a child’s nature note book is shockingly crude, the sort of thing to scandalise a teacher of brush-drawing, but by and by another buttercup will appear with the delicate poise, uplift and radiance of the growing flower.” (Vol. 6, p. 217)
“Drawing is nothing to do with talent, but can be done with observation, intelligence and application–or by seeing, remembering and expressing and is a fundamentally educative subject.” (Juliet Williams, “The Teaching of Drawing and Its Place in Education”, PR 34)
Home Education (Volume 1), pp. 292-295 (What is commonly thought of “drawn narrations”)
School Education (Volume 3), p. 205
Ourselves (Volume ), Book I, Part II, Chapters II and V
An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education, Book I, Chapter X (f)
