Classically Charlotte Mason

Our family homeschools.  For the last few years, we’ve also belonged to a community of homeschoolers who educate using a classical approach.  We love our community. We love the conversations. We love our curriculum. What we don’t love, so much, is the unrelenting workload.

Teachers, aka Parents, are encouraged to scale back the lesson plans to meet the needs of their individual children.  We’ve done that with great success.  Even though some of our community’s celebration seems solely focused on perfection, our family makes a deliberate choice to hone in on progress. This is no easy task when everyone (at least it feels like everyone) but your family goes home with a trophy or a t-shirt.  Still, we’re not an everybody gets a medal kind of family, and though it hurts at the time we deal with it.

The real push comes when in the midst of this rich curriculum and great big conversations we realize we’re more a Charlotte Mason family.   Charlotte enjoys the feast just as our community does.  She only digests it in more manageable bites.  She savors her selections more slowly.

The CM approach works for my struggling learner.

But since we’re traveling a more classical path, we learned and modified and scaled to fit each individual’s need. Things worked well or they did until we hit Jr. High. 

In 7th grade, the workload intensifies.  (As in we went from bringing a backpack/purse to the community every week to now we heft a rolling luggage cart to seminar) The lesson plan is just plain, undoable for my struggler.   Geared to take 5 to 6 hours a day at home, when we were only hitting 3 hours a day just a season prior. (without remediation) If I required my kiddo to follow the guide to the T, then added on remediation and PE we’d be looking at 7 to 8 hours of buckle down, hard tack and water school days. 

We tried it.  Gave it our best shot and shoved through. The days ended with an exhausted and defeated mama, a weeping and worried struggling learner and a more typical learner who still needed guidance and modeling to complete their day.  We burned out on week 1.  

So what did this classical mama do?

I married my two favorite methods.

  Classical education with its grammar, dialectic, and rhetorical stages and repetition met my friend Charlotte with her short bursts of focused instruction, handicraft, and habit training ways.

It’s a beautiful thing.  The curriculum is still challenging but not overwhelming.  The school day is long but not imprisoning.  The banquet is spread out but the consumer is allowed and encouraged to linger. In fact, rushing off to devour the next course is frowned upon. Savoring is encouraged.

This means my Mason kidlet gets the best of both methods. Yep, my struggling learner is still learning Latin, just not doing every problem. Yes, it’s still a push.  I ensure their hard work always ends on a victory of some kind, not with the promise of more hard work to come.   

There’s also plenty of time for Nature Studies and snuggly read-alouds. Just the sort of encouragement my family needs to keep fighting the good fight.

Nope, we still don’t win a trophy every time but that doesn’t keep us out of the race. 

What accommodations or tweaks do you make in your homeschooling day? What encourages your family on hard days?