Welcome to the Feast Life, where we empower you, the modern homeschool mom, to create a life and homeschool you love, one founded on faith, family, freedom, and fun. I'm your host, Julie Ross, creator of the award winning homeschool curriculum, A Gentle Feast, and a certified Christian life coach. For more information on today's episode and to access my free gift for you, check out thefeastlife. me. Charlotte Mason once said, life should be all living, not a mere tedious passing of time. So on this show, we seek to help you to savor the feast of life. Girl, grab your favorite beverage and pull up a chair. You are welcome at this table.
Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to day two. I'm so glad you're here again. So today we're going to really dive in here to what a Charlotte Mason philosophy is all about. Now, I could go on for hours and hours, right? She wrote six volumes of educational philosophy. So don't worry, we're not going to dive too far deep, but I do want to give you just kind of like an overall foundation. So if someone came after you like, "hey, what is a Charlotte Mason education all about?" You could give them a real answer. And so we're going to kind of dive into a few of those main tenets. So hopefully this will be super helpful for you and kind of clear things up for you. So grab paper and a pen and your favorite beverage and let's dive into what a Charlotte Mason philosophy is all about.
All right, so let's keep going here with some of the principles here. So what you were doing again, you were telling back. So this is another foundational principle of a Charlotte Mason education. So instead of workbooks, quizzes, recall little worksheets, little cut and paste and glue things to make sure you remember all the stuff, children narrate.
"This is so beautiful," Charlotte Mason said. This is what people do naturally. So you go see a movie, you come home, and your husband's like, "what was the movie about?" You tell him. That's narrating. You read a really good book. Your friend's like, "Oh, what's that book about?" You tell them. It's narrating. This is what we do as humans. When we learn something, we tell someone else about it. And Charlotte Mason said, "Why are we not using this as a tool for education?" And as those of you who went through the process, like it is hard because you're doing higher level thinking skills. Recall what was the name of Andrew Jackson's vice president? That is lower level thinking. Being able to take in ideas, being able to synthesize them, being able to put them in some kind of logical sequence. Then being able to communicate them either verbally or in written form. There are so many high level mental processes through that whole thing. And we don't, I think, sometimes appreciate how actually hard that is.
Like I said, she said, go read Austen or Dickens, or go try to read like an engineering book, or one of these higher level high school science books, and try to narrate it for yourself. It is a harder process. But by starting small when they're little, or even if you're starting with an older student. Starting just reading one page at a time and talking about it. And again, I hear from people all the time, like, "Oh, my kid doesn't like narration." "Oh, narration's too hard." And if you put a lot of pressure on your kid to tell you about it, it's going to be very hard. It really helps if you just explain it to them like I explained it to you. Hey, you know that show you just watched on TV last night? What happened? Oh, well, you just narrated. I want you to do the same thing when I read you this paragraph. No pressure, right? Start small, and I have a whole class on narration, so I won't spend a ton of time on it. But it is such a foundational principle because they're going to narrate everything to you.
So starting out first, it might just be, you know, reading a fable or fairy tale or something like that. And then them telling you back but as they get older, they're going to narrate every subject, every piece of art, you look at every piece of music you listen to every nature walk. Here's the thing that happens. I should warn you. If you use this approach, when your kids are teenagers and adults, they will narrate everything to you. I have my college kids. Calling me to narrate. They don't know that's what they're doing and they don't say that. They're like, "oh my goodness, mom, you know, this happened in class today. Oh, I read this in my book." And you know, it becomes a habit. They really do want to narrate everything to you. And my kids, "I went to my friend's house this weekend." "Oh, what happened?" You know, four hours later, after my eyes have glazed over, he has finished telling me what happened at his friend's house. Because he just wants to talk, which I'm so grateful for. Really, I am. My 13 year old boy wants to tell me all this stuff. But it becomes a way of life. I learn something, I talk about it. It doesn't have to be this high pressured kind of situation.
All right, Charlotte Mason says, "One thing we know at any rate, no teaching and no information is processed as knowledge in anyone's mind until his own brain can actively, has actively assimilated it, translated it, Rearranged it and absorbed it so that it becomes a part of the person and shows up like food that the body takes in as part of the living organism. Therefore, teaching, lecturing, dramatizing, no matter how brilliant or coherent, does no good until the student becomes an active participant and goes to work on it in his mind. In other words, self education is the only possible education." So, this is what narration is doing. They're taking it in, either by you reading it to them, or you listening to a piece of music, or them reading it for themselves, or doing some kind of experiment for themselves.
They're translating it, figuring out what was important, what was not important. And again, that's the piece, depends on their personalities. They rearrange it in a way that makes sense, they absorb it, it becomes part of who you are. If you don't know something, you can't narrate it. So if I asked you, "okay, what was that sermon about?" And you go, "Oh, well, actually, I don't remember," then you don't know it, right? So if you can't tell someone something about something, you don't actually know it for yourselves. So if you can narrate it, your kids are absorbing that information into their mind. And like I said, as they go on in their education, they're going to make further connections to these ideas.
There have been so many times where I thought my kids were not paying attention at all. And they narrated and they said, they're like, "well, there was the guy who did that thing with the stuff." Were you even listening to anything I said? So many times where I thought they weren't listening. And then, weeks, months, even years later, something will come up and my kids will say something and I'm like, wait, you actually were paying attention that day? For example, like a year after we did this Andrew Jackson lesson, we were on a nature walk. And my son pointed and he said, "mom, look behind you. It's Andrew Jackson." I was like, oh my goodness. My son has really lost his mind, but does anyone know what was behind me? A hickory tree! That's right, Laura. There was a hickory tree, and you remember that old Andrew Jackson's nickname was Old Hickory. He never mentioned that in his narration. I didn't bring it up. It was just in the story, and then a year later, that is coming out of his mind because it was in there. It wasn't a, Let me memorize all these words for the spelling test, and then forget them on Friday afternoon, right? Or let me just memorize all this stuff for a quiz and then let it go out of my memory. That's short term memory. By narrating something, it does put it into your long term memory, which makes all these really cool connections possible. And sometimes we have no idea what connections our kids are making because they don't actually tell us. That was just one of the beautiful moments. And there's been many more like that where I get to see the connections for myself.
All right. Another important principle of the Charlotte Mason philosophy is that it's no fluff. So, like I said we don't have a bunch of workbooks for everything. We don't have a bunch of little activity things that we're doing for everything. I'm not going to make a salt dough map of Egypt. Hallelujah. If we want to, that's great. We can do that in the afternoon. If my kids super into it and they want to like come up with something and make some cool project. They can totally do that because they have more free time, which I'll talk about in a second, but I don't have to. We really are, it comes down to this foundation here, which is so simple, yet so amazingly powerful. Living books and narrating.
Living books, living ideas, which can come from other things other than books and narrating, talking about them. And the deep, beautiful connection and experiences your kids have from just those things. You don't need to have all this other stuff. She says, "Now the method I am advocating has its advantages. It multiplies time. Each school period is quadrupled in time value. And we find that we get through a surprising amount of history in a thorough way, in about the same time that most schools afford no more than a skeleton of English history only. We know that young people are enormously interested in the subject, and give concentrated attention if we give them the right books. We are aware that our own discursive talk is usually a waste of time and a strain on the scholar's attention." So let's break this down a little bit. What she's saying is the way that she approaches education, multiplies time. So she's saying her approach multiplies time. We all want more of that, right? The way that it does this is because kids are actually interested. So many of you were like, "Oh, wait, I really actually cared what was happening." "Oh, wait, don't stop, right?" "Like, ooh, I'm interested. I'm excited about this." And research has shown that when you're reading a living book that engages your mind, that's told in a narrative fashion, your body actually releases several hormones. One of them is cortisol, which is bad when you're my age, but, um, it can be good in small doses. That's our stress hormone. That's the adrenaline. That's the excitement. So you actually pay more attention to something when you have a little more cortisol and you're more interested in it. It also releases oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone. So it bonds you to the characters in the story. Like a lot of you are saying you had compassion and you felt and you had empathy for Andrew Jackson in the story, which is so cool.
So those things actually make us pay attention. So you're able to get through more than if you were trying to read that textbook all day for all different subjects and your mind's wandering and you're thinking about a million other things than actually what is happening. It takes longer to get through things. She says "they can get through more history than the schools could get of only English history alone." She also says, "that our own discursive talk is a waste of time." Now, I was kind of offended by this. I really like history. I was a history minor. And I was like, my kids really want to hear the brilliant things that I have to say about this subject. I really feel like I should talk to them about all the things I know about Andrew Jackson or whatever it is we're learning about because they will be so impressed with all of my historical knowledge. But they weren't. So, they're, the lines are wandering, they're not paying attention, I'm getting frustrated because they're not listening to me. They want to come at that meat for themselves. So my talking was just a waste of their attention.
Listen to some of the subjects that Charlotte Mason included in 5th grade. Bible. hymn study, poetry, picture study, composer study, copywork, dictation, grammar, literature, math, science, british history, french history, natural history, ancient history, latin french and german, folk songs and dances, swedish drill, sofa drawing, handicraft, shakespeare, flutarch, and nature study. Is anybody else like, "there's no way that's happening. I don't even know what half those things were that you just said, Julie." Okay. Don't worry. So when I first started taking Charlotte Mason's approach into my family, I looked at all those subjects that she taught. And I thought I had to teach all those subjects every day and school was taking till six o'clock. And I thought I was going to lose my mind. And I was like, how did Charlotte Mason go outside in the afternoons? Because this is taking us. Forever!
Here's the magic. In case any of you are like me, you don't actually do those subjects every day. You might only have one of those things once a week. So for instance, picture study takes five minutes tops once a week. Literally, it's the simplest thing ever. You look at a painting. Here, I'll show you how easy it is. I have my new Christmas Around the World packet that we just did, okay? So, you look at, you show your kids this painting. "Hey kids, study this painting." You hold it up for like a minute. And then you take it away. And you say, "hey, what do you remember about the painting?" And then they tell you. And that's literally it. So, it is so easy. Five minutes, okay? So, some of these things... Again, I don't do all these things that she said, but the point being, she covered a lot. How is she able to do that? Because of this approach, the way it multiplies time, you don't have a bunch of fluff or extra stuff that you're trying to do.
Today's episode is brought to you by A Gentle Feast. A Gentle Feast offers a complete living books curriculum, an award winning early reading program, and more tools to equip you to apply Charlotte Mason's timeless philosophy into your modern homeschool. Go to agentlefeast. com to check it out. Smooth and easy days are closer than you think.
So you're literally reading and you're narrating. So history for a young child might be 20 minutes. We're going to read for 15 minutes and then we're going to narrate, 20 minutes. We're over. We're moving on to something else. She had very short lessons. Even in high school, the longest lesson was 45 minutes long. You want to know why? Because as humans, we can't pay attention that long. Okay, I think now the average attention span for an adult in the United States is three seconds. Isn't that amazing? We're trying to make kids pay attention for 45 minutes to grammar. I mean, come on, really? I can't pay attention to grammar for 45 minutes. Nor do I want to, right? So short lessons. That is how you get through a lot of different subjects. That's how you give them this feast. So it's not just like, okay, let's just get reading and math done, and then we can be over with school. It's like, no. And you don't have to do all the things. I don't do all of these things.
But I've done them at some point during my kids educational journey. At some point, we've covered these different things. We've tried them. We've tried different things, and different languages, different, you know, Shakespeare, Plutarch, those kind of things. But I don't do them all day. I don't do them every week. They're like little seeds that we've done throughout their life. Just to provide them with this rich and generous feast of living ideas. All these different things. And you don't know (what your kids are gonna like. I have people tell me all the time, " I came from a church background) where we never sang hymns but I started doing it. We love hymns." My kids, I thought they were going to think folk songs were babyish. They love singing folk songs. We love Shakespeare. I mean, I hear this from people all the time. You don't know what your kids are going to like. You don't know what's going to have an impact on them. And so providing them with all these different kinds of things, at least a little taste of it, like you do at Thanksgiving. Just take one bite of the Brussels sprouts, right? And then your kid's like, "Oh my goodness, these are delicious," right? You just don't know. So you want to provide them with this rich feast.
When you do this, you're able to get through things much faster and have time to go outside and do different things that you like to do, which is such a wonderful feeling. All right.
A Charlotte Mason education is also full of living ideas. Like I said, living ideas come from books, but they come from lots of other things as well. So Charlotte Mason said, "education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin and God has made us so we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. So you get living ideas through talking to people. I hope you're getting some ideas today. We get them either by word or mouth or written page, scripture, word, musical symphony, but we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food." This is so key. "Probably he will reject nine tenths of the ideas we offer, as he makes use of only a small portion of his bodily food, rejecting the rest. He is an eclectic; he can choose this or that; our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety." Kind of tasting all of these different subjects here. "It's his responsibility to take what he needs. Urgency on our part annoys him. He resists forcible feeding and loathes pre digested food." Urgency! Right? Okay? "Um, come on! We only have five minutes! Why aren't you finished with your math by now? Math was supposed to be done ten minutes ago! Okay, everybody, we gotta get in the car. We gotta get in the car right now. We're going to the doctor and you gotta bring your book with you." Urgency annoys him. It annoys me, right? When people are trying to rush me around. I can't learn that way. So if our children kind of feel like we're constantly pulling and prodding them all day long, there's going to be resistance.
They also resist forcible feeding. Forcible feeding is me telling you what's important. "These are the five points you should know from this lesson. These are the seven important things about Andrew Jackson that you should remember," right? Or if I told you, "here are the 10 principles of Charlotte Mason." I'm just giving you lots of ideas here. I'm providing this piece. You're going to take what you're going to So if someone comes up to you afterwards and say, "Hey, what was that talk about?" You might tell something completely different than like Patricia is going to tell someone else because you are your own person. And you're going to take what you need. And the same thing with our children. They don't want us forcing this knowledge down their throat. Especially facts. And they loathe pre digested food. Pre digested food is like, let me read the lesson. And then I'm going to tell you what's important. I'm going to tell you the key principles. I'm going to tell you what the right answer is. And it's all coming from you as a teacher. Like a mama bird chews up the food and then spits it out into the baby's mouth. I mean, it's a gross picture, right? We don't need to be doing that. Charlotte Mason had such a high view of children. She believed you can put them in touch with these wonderful authors, with these amazing artists, with these amazing poets. And they are going to take what they need. It might not be what you think they need! As they continue to grow and change throughout their life. So, education is full of living ideas. It is so beautiful to watch our children take these ideas in, make them their own, and grow and change as a person.
It is also full of beauty. This is what has changed me the most about a Charlotte Mason education. Listening to all this beautiful music, listening to the hymns, listening to the stories, listening to the poems, listening to stories like Andrew Jackson. And I read my kids a story the other day about the Little Rock Nine, and I was like literally crying my eyes out. And they all laugh when I cry, because I cry all the time when I'm reading to them, because I have, like, I have such a big heart. Because I had compassion and empathy for the people in the story. It has changed me as a human being. I didn't grow up in a very outdoorsy family. We didn't have nature study when I was growing up in school. I didn't notice half the things.
After doing the Charlotte Mason education, I literally will pull over on the side of the road and get all my kids up and go, Oh my gosh, look at these flowers. (Oooo I wonder what bird that is) and I'm sitting on the Merlin app trying to figure out what bird this is. My kids, like, they've run off to do something else and I'm sitting here trying to figure out this bird because I'm like so, just amazed by how beautiful it is. I now stop and notice the beauty and seeing how I have changed as a human being makes me so passionate about this kind of education for my children because I can only imagine how different I would be if I would have had this all growing up as well and not just discovering this stuff in my 30s. So that is just something I appreciate so much about the style of education. It's not just facts. It's not just, did we get that workbook lesson finished for today so I can check the box. It's about filling their minds and their hearts and their soul with things that are beautiful. Charlotte Mason said, "as for this aesthetic appetency," I love that word, aesthetic appetency. We are changing our children's appetites for the things that are true and good and beautiful. She says, "it dies of initiation when beauty is not duly presented to it, beauty in words and pictures and music and tree and flower and sky. The function of the sense of beauty is to open a paradise of pleasure for us." Isn't that so beautiful? I just love that so much.
And there is my kids. This was a while ago when they were a lot younger, doing our morning time. I have found morning time to be such a great way to bring in some of this beauty. Now, Charlotte Mason didn't actually, did not do morning time. And I know a lot of people think that she did because it's tied in with a lot of people who use her approach. She had these kind of what I call beauty subjects throughout the day. I found it too hard once my kids were off doing different subjects to be like, Okay, "everybody come back to the table. We're going to look at this picture for five minutes. Or everybody come back to the table. I have a poem to read to you." That was like herding cattle all day long. If I did these things during morning time, one, it was just so much easier. It built a beautiful rhythm to our mornings. We could just wake up, instead of me chasing the kids down and trying to get them to start school or stop playing with toys so they could come to school. They started to want to come to the table because we had, I used to play beautiful music and have a candle and have a little breakfast set up. And we'd start our morning time with scripture or hymns or poems or just things that were beautiful that made us want to learn. So what do I include in morning time?
So these are some of the subjects that Charlotte Mason taught are included, but I just put them all into morning time and make things easier. My morning time only lasts 30 minutes, and it has, you know, for the past 12 years. So I think it's very tempting to add like 17 subjects on to morning time so that we make sure we have it all covered before we all go away and start our day. And then it's 11 o'clock, and we've been doing morning time for two hours, and everyone is not paying attention and is in a bad mood, and we're all hangry.
I keep morning time to 30 minutes, so we do Bible and one other thing. So every day we do Bible, we practice our memory verse, and then we do one other thing. So that keeps it to 30 minutes. Again, you don't do all these things every day. So we have hymns, we sing folk songs, we do composer study, which is really simple. You can just listen to a piece of classical music and then talk about it. Like I said, with picture study, so simple. Recitation is when kids are reading well, they read poetry, speeches, sections of plays out loud to practice public speaking. Poetry studies when you're reading a poem to them. And I'm just going to give you just a little hint here because this is so fun. James Patrick Stewart, the guy from Star Trek. He reads Shakespeare sonnets on YouTube and he has, of course, this lovely British accent. And you can listen to a Shakespeare sonnet in literally under two minutes. And you can talk about it and in five minutes, you can be done with poetry and your kids have learned, listened to wonderful Shakespeare. So that's my little tidbit freebie for you today. And then we do some kind of read aloud, fables and folktales. Those are great when your kids are young because they're short and they're easy for them to remember for narrating. And then as they got older, we added in Shakespeare and biographies to our morning times as well.
So. Again, you don't have, again, this is not a Charlotte Mason thing, but I'm just telling you what I do, because it has helped me incorporate these beauty things into our day and make sure they actually happened. So by doing them in the morning, they actually got done. If I waited till the afternoon, or if I waited to do it at some point during our day and take a break, it wouldn't happen. But for some families that works really well, and some families even do these kind of things, like at dinner time, or when dad's home, or before bed, so you need to figure out what works best for your family. But the principles are the same.
Okay, if you are interested in trying Morning Time with your kids, I have a free four week Morning Time packet called Times of Togetherness. You can scan that QR code or I'll put it in the email that goes out with the replay, but if you just want to try it and get started with it. This is for you. It has the picture study. It has the composer study. I have poems in it. I even add some extra things that aren't actually like morning time, like handicrafts and cooking and some fun activities to do with your family as well. So those could be for the afternoon, but if you just want to try morning time, you're like, I just want like something easy, open and go. I don't want to have to think about it because I haven't had enough coffee yet. This is for you. The morning time is ready for you.
All right. Um, Richard Louve wrote the book, 'The Last Child in the Woods', says "If getting our kids out in nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It is a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; but it's even better if the adult and the child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun." The reason I'm sharing this quote with you is because yes, Charlotte Mason. One of the ways that you bring in beauty through this approach is through being out in nature. It can be very simple. It can be your own backyard. It can be just appreciating nature. There have been times y'all I live in South Carolina. It is hot like 90 percent of the year here. I don't want to be outside. You can look out your window at nature. You can go to the park by your house. Like Patricia's here, you could start a garden in your own backyard, okay? We overcomplicate this, and I hear from some parents so much, like, "well I tried to do Charlotte Mason's approach, but the whole, like, nature study thing and trying to come up with the lessons I was going to do ahead of time to teach the kids while we're on the nature walk, but then we never saw any butterflies or mushrooms or whatever it was we were studying, supposed to be studying," and then they don't do it. And I love this quote, because that defeats the purpose. The purpose is to be outside and find the beauty in it, and find the joy in it. So I'm giving you all a free pass here. Like I said, Charlotte Mason Approved. I would have never thought to include Nature Study.
All right, everyone. Well, that is a wrap for day two. Some of the foundational principles of this philosophy. Hopefully that gave you a greater insight into some of the approaches that are used and some of the reasons why Charlotte Mason decided to include those in her philosophy and just how powerful and amazing they are. Isn't this such a fun way to educate? But you might be thinking, I've heard some things about this approach that I'm really not sure about. There are lots of myths and misunderstandings when it comes to Charlotte Mason philosophy. So that is what we're going to dive into tomorrow. So make sure you join me for day three, where we're talking about some of the myths and what a Charlotte Mason education is not.
Hey there, Julie Ross here. I just wanted to say thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like this show, it would mean the world to me. If you would leave a positive review in iTunes, this really does help people learn about the podcast and each month I will pick a winner to receive a free gift.
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