A CHARLOTTE MASON EDUCATION
by Catherine Levison

I just read through this book, and found myself taking notes as I went along because there were so many things I wanted to implement into our homeschooling. I also discovered a summary/book review that I found interesting here. It compares classical homeschooling from the book "A Well-Trained Mind" (which I have not read) with Charlotte Mason's ideas as given by Levison in her two books and also "A Charlotte Mason Companion: Personal Reflections on the Gentle Art of Learning", by Karen Andreola (which I also have not yet read). I found myself agreeing with the author of this review in many cases. She seemed to like the same points that I did in Levison's book (which seemed to be most of it), but also made some comments on the composition/grammar section that I agreed with where Charlotte Mason's ideas don't quite line up with my own. I just think it's important to start teaching these concepts earlier than suggested in the book.

Since reading this book, I have added the narration method to more of our reading. I have added poetry to our day, which Myah has loved! We started to look at handwriting in a different light, focusing more on quality instead of quantity. I have also just plain started reading more as a part of our schooling. We are studying a book on amphibians, and also a children's history book. We still do 5 in a row, but have just added more "fun" learning activites to our school day. Myah still also does her Math and Language Arts in the afternoon. My personal thoughts are that those two subjects are important, and should be emphasized even at this young of an age, which is somewhat contradictory to Charlotte Mason, but the author of the review agreed with me here.

So, in summary, I haven't totally changed our homeschooling methods, I just added some new twists to what we have already been doing and added more reading to our day as well. Overall, I really liked Charlotte Mason's ideas and hope to read more about them in the future. Now, if we can just get life back to normal enough to maintain a regular school schedule for longer than one week, that would be good. :)