We plan to homeschool our children. Our oldest are only three years old, so I’m trying to get a head-start on planning which general approach we will use. I am gravitating toward the Charlotte Mason method, because it seems to most closely match my own educational philosophy, even though I’ve never sat down and outlined exactly what that would encompass. Perhaps I should.
My favorite in vivo example of a Charlotte Mason education is found at The Common Room. In trying to explain to E what a CM education means and what it would look like, I’ve spent quite a bit of time perusing their archives as well as digesting the wealth of info at Ambleside Online. Unfortunately, our local library carries nothing by Miss Mason and nothing on her methods and philosopies, so I’ll either have to read her books online (which I generally dislike) or go visit Amazon.com. I have a feeling I’ll be wanting to regularly re-read, so I will likely do the latter.
I was eager to accept narration as a superior test and exercise of a student’s retention of a reading, but had little experience to prove it. Until the Harry Potter book came out, anyway. E and I were both chomping at the bit to read it when it arrived, and although I had given him the first read (it was, after all, the week of his birthday), he graciously offered to share it. “I’ll read two chapters, then you can read two chapters, and we’ll just trade off until we’re done,” he suggested.
Begin to read a distractingly-anticipated book, and then voluntarily (albeit temporarily) stop after only two chapters??? Surely he was joking. I was looking forward to reading it in the same manner I’d read book 6: putting the kids to bed, brewing a pot of coffee, and ravenously consuming the entire thing while the household slept. I mean, it was nice of him to want to share, he knew how much I wanted to read it (and boy, did I!), but truthfully, the idea of reading it in small bites sounded like self-inflicted torture. I’d made it this long spoiler-free, I could hold off another 24 hours until he finished.
So I thought. But I surreptitiously began to pick up the book and read whenever he set it down to go to the bathroom or get a drink. The desire to read some of it now was stronger than that to read it all-at-once later. So we agreed. Two chapters for him, two for me. Two for him, two for me. Like children splitting Halloween candy, we dutifully shared the bounty, jealously watching to make sure neither extended his allotted two chapters without handing it over.
And what did I do during E’s reading time? I paced the floor, my mind roving over and over the details of the previous two chapters, trying to fit and re-fit the pieces together like a small child working a 1000-piece puzzle. I spoke aloud, rehashing the plot (E had the first shift, so he’d already read what I was discussing) and postulating my theories. E would pipe up his thoughts or corrections, or maddeningly assure me that my question about that would be answered in the chapter he was then reading. Whereas with a straight-through reading, I would have had my questions answered before I’d even considered asking, the bite-sized segments gave my brain more of a workout. I actually found in the end that I enjoyed the book more this way, and retained far more of it later.
I wonder if part of the magic of Harry Potter, the magic that supposedly inspired many children to read who otherwise would rather play video games and watch movies, is actually the effect of a diluted Charlotte Mason method. The mystery-in-installments format gave readers plenty of time to hash and hypothesize between books, then reformulate after finishing the next book. Kind of sounds like the short readings followed by handwork and time to think over the reading, common within CM.
Posted on September 22nd, 2007 by Dove
Filed under: Learning
That’s interesting.