Dipping into Charlotte Mason, Need Help

Posted by Coral on June 16, 2008

Lately I have been reading a little about Charlotte Mason and her methods. I think some of it is very cool! Now, you know that I cannot do the whole, “find all the books and make my own lesson plan” thing. We have to have our family, and especially Mommy chill times. Sonlight uses “living books” like Charlotte suggests anyway. So I feel I can still take advantage of some of her ideas without all that work.

I am interested in at least 3 of of her methods:

1.Nature journaling– I would really like to do this with my girl. We are a family who loves nature (hiking being one of our main family outings). Journaling would fit into our family life very well. However I do think that my children need more of a science education than just this, especially as they get older. We will continue with Sonlight’s program which is a lot of fun, and gets us outdoors also. 

I am running into a little problem though. I am far from proficient in nature and science studies. Science was never one of my strong subjects . Can anyone suggest some resources that will help me define plant and animal types. I don’t want to have to buy a million books, one for every time we have a question. I plan on visiting our local rangers station. Hopefully they can help some .

We have started just a little journaling. Here the girl are drawing pictures of baby pine cones they found in the backyard (from what kind of pine tree I do not know):

 

 

2. Narration– Since Sonlight doesn’t really have any tests (which I love by the way, I hate tests ), narr. has proved to be very helpful in finding out just what they have and haven’t learned. My first attempt at this was with our Bible lesson about John baptizing Jesus. Here’s  P’s narration  of what happened in the story:File Attachment: P’s Narr..jpg (296 KB). I don’t know if we are doing this exactly right, but it is helpful anyway.

3. Short Lessons– Great idea. P is a dawdler . P also hates to leave things undone, she’s a very orderly child. So all I have to do is set the timer. Then I tell her that if she is not done by the time the timer goes off she will have to stop; move on to the next subject; and finish later. I have never seen her move so fast and still do a good job on the task. This keeps her from wasting time, her’s and mine.

If anyone has any suggestions on ways I can improve in these areas(keeping in mind, I don’t want a huge work load), please give them to me. I am also interested in any new ideas,(new to me at least). Just looking for some help.