This immersion lesson demonstrates how to combine children of different ages and levels of learning during a single math lesson with Charlotte Mason’s method of teaching. Emily Al-Khatib and her three sons give a dynamic picture of how a sunshiny atmosphere, order and discipline, and living ideas make math a productive and enjoyable lesson together.

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Math at the Ready: Emily’s Handout with Independent Work Ideas

Simply Charlotte Mason’s Math Number Cards

Charlotte Mason is to be thanked for introducing young children to the beauty of art in school lessons. This episode of Charlotte Mason in our homes is an interview with Matthew Milliner, art history professor at Wheaton, College, whose children are being taught at home with Miss Mason’s method and who is learning to apply her pedagogy in his college classroom.

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“The wonder that Almighty God can endure so far to leave the very making of an immortal being in the hands of human parents is only matched by the wonder that human parents can accept this divine trust with hardly a thought of its significance.” (1/333)

“You will see at a glance, with this Captain Idea of establishing relationships as a guide, the unwisdom of choosing or rejecting this or that subject, as being more or less useful or necessary in view of a child’s future. We decide, for example, that Tommy, who is eight, need not waste his time over the Latin Grammar. We intend him for commercial or scientific pursuits,-what good will it be to him? But we do not know how much we are shutting out from Tommy’s range of thought besides the Latin Grammar. He has to translate, for example,-‘Pueri formosos equos vident.’ He is a ruminant animal, and has been told something about that strong Roman people whose speech is now brought before him. How their boys catch hold of him! How he gloats over their horses ! The Latin Grammar is not mere words to Tommy, or rather Tommy knows, as we have forgotten, that the epithet ‘mere’ is the very last to apply to words. 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.” (3/162-163)

“If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day , out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in ‘wise passiveness,’ and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand or eye-she would let them be.” (3/33-34)

“The question is not,-how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education-but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (3/170-171)

Parents and Children, Charlotte Mason

Mornings in Florence, John Ruskin

The Descent of the Holy Spirit Fresco here and here

Episode 3: The Role of the Teacher

Matt’s Lecture including the Spanish Chapel (He mentions Charlotte Mason and discusses the frescos in Florence around 15 minutes in)

David I. Smith

Charlotte Mason’s vision for children spread throughout the world. A special celebration called “The Children’s Gathering” occurred a few times, a holy holiday for experiencing learning together, including with parents and teachers. This episode explores highlights of the camaraderie experienced there as they worshiped, studied, played, danced, paraded, displayed and explored the treasures of the surrounding countryside in a lovely kaleidoscopic, nostalgic, and inspirational picture.

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Winchester Gathering: Parents’ Review Volume 23

Whitby Gathering: Parents’ Review Volume 31

Canterbury Gathering: Parents’ Review Volume 36

Ambleside Gathering: Parents’ Review Volume 47

Episode 131: Scouting

Charlotte Mason In Community

Charlotte Mason’s method of education impacts our lives on many levels. This episode of short topics includes ideas for collections from our physical world, ideas for getting more out of books beyond the usual narration that expands our intellectual world, and some of the many, many benefits we who use her method have in common with others that we would not have shared before to widen our social world.

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School Education (Volume 3), Chapter XVI, pp. 174-180

“To make collections of wild flowers for the several months, press them, and mount them neatly on squares of cartridge paper, with the English name, habitat, and date of finding of each, affords much happy occupation and, at the same time, much useful training: better still is it to accustom children to make careful brush drawings of the flowers that interest them, of the whole plant where possible.” (1/52)

“To make collections of leaves and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form, affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing of differences and resemblances. Patterns for this sort of classification of leaves and flowers will be found in every little book of elementary botany.” (1/63-64)

“I would not teach them any botany which should necessitate the pulling of flowers to bits ; much less should they be permitted to injure or destroy any (not noxious) form of animal life.” (1/62)

“Neatness is akin to order, but is not quite the same thing: it implies not only ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place,’ but everything in a suitable place, so as to produce a good effect ; in fact, taste comes into play.” (1/130)

“This, of getting ideas out of them, is by no means all we must do with books. ‘In all labour there is profit,’ at any rate in some labour ; and the labour of thought is what his book must induce in the child. He must generalise, classify, infer, judge, visualise, discriminate, labour in one way or another, with that capable mind of his, until the substance of his book is assimilated or rejected, according as he shall determine ; for the determination rests with him and not with his teacher.” (3/179)

“There is much difference between intelligent reading, which the pupil should do in silence, and a mere parrot-like cramming up of contents; and it is not a bad test of education to be able to give the points of a description, the sequence of a series of incidents, the links in a chain of argument, correctly, after a single careful reading.” (3/180)

“This is only one way to use books: others are to enumerate the statements in a given paragraph or chapter; to analyse a chapter, to divide it into paragraphs under proper headings, to tabulate and classify series ; to trace cause to consequence and consequence to cause; to discern character and perceive how character and circumstance interact ; to get lessons of life and conduct, or the living knowledge which makes for science, out of books ; all this is possible for school boys and girls, and until they have begun to use books for themselve.s in such ways, they can hardly be said to have begun their education.” (3/180)

Winter Weed Finder, Dorcas Miller