Charlotte Mason Works! But Don’t Take My Word for It!

Got this delightful note from my dear friend Joann:

I have been gobbling up the Charlotte Mason books
and each one is so full of gems!

 

You know we have just not gotten to the "click"
point with Daniel and reading, right? Well, I read Home Education, specifically
the chapters on reading. I’ve read the method as interpreted by Karen Andreola and
Elizabeth Foss, but really needed to see it for myself.

 

So I chose a nursery rhyme for Daniel that I
thought he would like and printed it out and cut it up and did just exactly what
she said in the book.

And I cannot believe it, but the child LOVED his
reading lesson. And he learned to read. About 12 words! And he is picking up
every piece of printed matter in the house and trying to find words he knows and
trying to sound out other words. He’s known the sounds for ages it seems, but we
couldn’t find what was the hold up.  I could see that he was having a hard
time with seeing where one word stopped and the next started. So I think that
cutting the words apart really, really was the turning point.  Like a light
bulb, "OH! That’s a WORD!"  He’s is beyond
excited.

 

What a gift this woman is to homeschoolers and what
a shame her principles cannot be implemented more widely.

Hear, hear. And not just among homeschoolers. School-schoolers, too. Here’s a lovely account of one woman’s memories of her experience in a PNEU school (thanks to Mater Amabilis for the link).

And Willa recently posted a link to this Parents Review article about a family who enrolled in a PNEU correspondence school. I love this:

Now, nearly four years later, things have changed. The children’s
clothes are patched, their feet encased in cheap canvas shoes. Meals
consist largely of fruit and vegetables gathered from the orchard and
garden, dairy produce from our two cows, and eggs from the hens. They
cut and cart cattle bedding; they wash vegetables for market; they take
turns in milking the cows, and generally take on any job that
arisesmore or less cheerfully. A pretty poor little lot, you might
think.

You could not be more wrong. Our bookshelves are full of good books,
recommended in the programmes; and conversation is sometimes baffling
to outsiders. For the children talk about John Masefield, Granny,
Monet, our next-door-neighbour and Socrates with the same degree of
familiarity.

And:

They have retained their sense of delight and wonder. These four
average children, who find some subjects easy and some difficult, are
full of curiosity about everything that goes on about them, and
everything that has happened since the world began. They chant poetry
in the bath (in English or French); they quarrel in the words of
Agamemnon and Achilles; they give our cows and calves Greek names. They
observe closely the possible colour changes of a chameleon, and argue
over the components of a certain rock specimen. They pester the curator
of the museum, and any experts we happen to meet, for information about
their various specimens. People fascinate them, be it Pithecanthropus
Erectus, Elizabeth Fry or General de Gaulle.

Children whose epithets four years ago seemed limited to ‘pretty,’
‘quite nice’ and ‘sooper,’ now yell when flying a kite, ‘Mum, come and
look at that "bewildered" swallow! It can’t think what this kite is!’
Or I find my best pyrex dish used for a ‘suffering’ tadpole that must
be isolated from the rest. I am called to watch a ‘quivering’ Siamese
cat as she lies in wait for a bird, or a ‘baffled’ puppy trying to walk
through a glass door.

Charlotte Mason’s statement about the ‘twaddle’ has proved to be
absolutely true. The most worn books on our shelves are not the Annuals
sent at Christmas; but ‘Heroes of Greece and Troy,’ ‘The Odyssey,’
‘Stories from the History of Rome,’ Stevenson, Kipling, and all our
poetry anthologies. Robert’s favourite book at the moment is ‘Memory
Hold the Door’; Charles is deep in ‘Children of the Archbishop,’ and
Colin is reading ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’ again while he is waiting for
‘Jock of the Bushveld’ to be available from the library. Just last
night, as I switched off her light, Alison chided me sleepily, ‘Mummy,
I can’t understand why you didn’t recommend me to read your Somerset
Maugham books. Gosh, that man can tell a story!’   

The warm, lively, happy, eager, rich life depicted in this article: that is exactly what speaks to me in the CM method; that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. (Minus the cows.)

About All That Reading

Yesterday when I was talking about reading aloud to the girls during our Charlotte Mason-style lessons, I forgot to mention that of course Jane (age 11) does most of her own reading. Every Monday, I print out her booklist, and we aim for a chapter or two in each, spread out over the course of the week. She reads from two or three of her books each day and narrates all of these readings either orally or in writing.

Her reading list has been tweaked a little since I posted it in December: we never did find our copy of Ivanhoe. She is reading Great Expectations instead. Unlike the dozens of books she wolfs down in her free time, I am making her take Dickens (and the rest of her CM list) slowly, for the reasons Linda Fay lays out in this excellent post:

Years
ago, when my children were young, we devoured several books a week.  It
was a point of pride for all of us.  "Wow!  I thought, my children must
be learning a lot.  They have covered so many ideas this year." My
daughter could finish a book a day.

 

Then, I read this:

 

"We
hear of ‘three books a week’ as a usual thing and rather a matter of
pride. But this, again, comes of our tendency to depreciate knowledge,
and to lose sight of its alimentary character. If we perceive that
knowledge, like bread, is necessary food, we see also that it must be
taken in set portions, fitly combined, duly served, and at due
intervals, in order to induce the digestive processes without which,
knowledge, like meat, gives us labour rather than strength." (vol. 5 of
CM’s educ. volumes)

 

Now,
I probably would have never listened to such advice, but living in
Turkey has its drawbacks.  I had no library and no bookstore with
books  available in the English language.  My children, out of
necessity, were going to have to spread out their books.  I could never
keep the supply up with the demand. I decided to try this with their
most important books, the books that I considered ‘ the cream of the
crop’, over a several week period.  So, instead of reading a book or
two a week and then going on to the next one, my children started
several books at the same time but read them slowly over a 10 week
period or longer.

Slow reading was a novel concept (ba dum bum) for my young book-glutton, but I am seeing results very similar to those Linda Fay describes in the rest of her post.

Charlotte Mason discusses the difference between pleasure-reading and reading-for-knowledge in her Volume 6, Towards a Philosophy of Education:

"In the first place we all know that desultory reading is delightful and
incidentally profitable but is not education whose concern is
knowledge. That is, the mind of the desultory reader only rarely makes
the act of appropriation which is necessary before the matter we read
becomes personal knowledge. We must read in order to know or we do not
know by reading."

Now, I have certainly seen my kids learn an awful lot from their desultory reading, and if you want to know whether any of that knowledge has stuck, just ask Miss Jane what she recalls from All About Weeds (and then settle in for a looong answer). But I think Miss Mason is correct in describing this kind of knowledge as "incidentally profitable." It’s like the distinction I make between "accidental" and "on-purpose" learning.

I trust that my kids, all kids, will "learn an awful lot" from devouring the books strewn in their path during our low-tide times. But Charlotte Mason convinced me that a slow-and-steady diet of carefully chosen literature, narrated back, leads to something more than an encyclopedic collection of facts. The CM method promises a relationship with knowledge, not just the memorization of it.

But, it will be said, reading or hearing various books read, chapter
by chapter, and then narrating or writing what has been read or some
part of it,—all this is mere memory work. The value of this criticism
may be readily tested; will the critic read before turning off his
light a leading article from a newspaper, say, or a chapter from
Boswell or Jane Austen, or one of Lamb’s Essays; then, will he put
himself to sleep by narrating silently what he has read. He will not be
satisfied with the result but he will find that in the act of narrating
every power of his mind comes into play, that points and bearings which
he had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and
brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or
argument has become a part of his personal experience; he knows, he has
assimilated what he has read.
—Vol. 6, p. 16.

Reluctant Narrators

Jennifer asked:

Here’s our problem. I ask "Can you tell me about what we just read?"
She answers, "No, I don’t remember anything." but when I ask her
questions, she CAN answer everything. When are they supposed to do this
without prompting?

"How do I handle a reluctant narrator?" is a common question in Charlotte Mason circles. For me, the answer involves two strands of discussion. I’ll tackle the more practical strand (the "how") first, and tomorrow I want to talk about the "why."

See, coming at homeschooling the way I did, via the writings of unschoolers—John Holt, Sandra Dodd, and others—any time I decide to require a schoolish task of my children, I have to give a lot of thought to the question, "Do I think this is important enough to make them do it even if they don’t want to?"

But we’ll tackle that question tomorrow. Um, you know, if all goes according to plan. Which it never does. Beanie has a 102 degree fever today, so there’s no telling what tomorrow will hold. Let’s just say I’ll tackle that question next.

Today, let’s tackle Jennifer’s question. I do have a bit of experience with a reluctant narrator. I don’t think Rose would object to my telling you that she was none too keen on the idea when I reintroduced it recently. Now, she was narrating enthusiastically a year ago, but this year, not so much.

I treat it the way I treat anything my children aren’t super-keen on doing but which I believe is important. Brushing teeth, say, or tidying their room. I expect compliance.  There are consequences for non-compliance.

Now, the last thing I want is for narration—or anything related to learning—to involve a power struggle. My whole platform about education is that it should be a joy. I emphatically do not want to find myself in the position of sternly insisting upon a narration. When I found myself in exactly that position with young Rose, I had to step back and look at what was behind her reluctance. (Answer: We’ve just uprooted our whole lives. She’s always had a hard time adjusting to change. Not only did we leave her beloved friends behind, but also our whole lifestyle was radically altered. Daddy works in an office now. Big changes all around. New people for this introvert to get used to. New activities, new house, new rhythm.)

Okay, so I’ve rooted out the reasons. None of it, you note, has anything to do with the actual process of narration. I mention this because my course of action was directed by the needs I perceived at the root of the conflict. In this specific case, I believed that Rose very much needed the comfort of some structure and expectation. She needed also to understand that although the walls are different here, the boundaries are the same.

So while under other circumstances I might have set aside my CM plans for a long "breathing-out" or "low-tide" period, in this specific case, for this particular child, I deemed it best to persevere through her reluctance. Since the rocky period only lasted a few days, I think I made the right call.

Once it’s established that "we are going to do this; your participation is expected"—and I think a bright, light, cheerful attitude is extremely important here—then comes the nitty-gritty of doing it.

Start small. Read a sentence, and ask the child to tell it back to you. Sometimes the child will say she can’t even do that, not one whole sentence. So break it down further: a phrase, a clause. Now she’s just parroting, sure, but this is a baby step on the way to real narration. Have her narrate a phrase at a time for two or three sentences, slowly lengthening the phrases. Think of yourself as a labor coach, rooting her on.

Spend no more than, say, five minutes on the exercise the first day. She might be surprised when you shut the book and announce, "All right, time to go for our walk!" right in the middle of the paragraph. That’s great. If she asks to keep going, use your own judgment about what would suit her best. A little teasing anticipation? Or continued immediate success?

From phrases work up to sentences, to paragraphs, to passages. This may take several days, but will probably NOT take weeks. I think that a firm, cheerful sense of expectation combined with a patient, steady approach will bear fruit in a very short time.

Something that worked for my Rose (but I don’t think this would work for every single kid): Once, when she said she couldn’t remember ANYTHING, Beanie (two years her junior) piped up, "I do!" and proceeded to chatter off the whole passage in perfect detail, oooh did that get Rose’s goat. Her narrations got noticeably better after that.

A shy child might prefer to be alone with mom for narration. Another child might feel too on the spot for that and be more open to it with her siblings around.

I try to follow Charlotte Mason’s advice about not asking questions—not detailed ones, at least. For example, I wouldn’t ask, "What happened when the woodsman killed the king’s pet wolf?"  But I might say, "Tell me the story of St. Brigid and the wolf."

Most often, though, I simply read something and then say, "Tell it back to me!"

It took some nurturing, but Rose is past the hurdle now and narrating in articulate and vivid detail. That’s not to say we won’t hit the stumbling block of reluctance again. Tomorrow, as I’ve said, is anyone’s guess.

But I know (and she knows, which is more important) that she can do it. She knows I think this is worth doing, or we wouldn’t be doing it. Most days, just knowing that is enough, because the heart of our homeschool is relationship. I strive for a sense of camaraderie and fun. I let her know I’m on her side, and that she is capable of anything.

I keep these CM lessons short and finite, and we spend the rest of our day keeping house, playing games, making things, and having adventures. Narration is one thread of the fabric of our family life, as is cuddling, singing, baking, praying, and going for long drives.