Piney Woods Homeschool

How do you do school with a little one without sitting still doing worksheets or other traditional schoolwork? You can focus more on handicrafts, learning to do useful things with your hands like finger crochet, or on games (marbles is a good one for developing the hands).  Teach your child to play a simple card game like Go Fish or simple board games or dominoes.  With my dd, when we started going outside more it was a struggle for both of us, but now she loves it and will go out in the rain to dig in the mud! I was a child who read early and read constantly throughout childhood, and it was not a good thing overall.  I put limits on how much time my dd can spend reading now that she reads alone, and during this past year I’ve cut back on time spent reading to the kids in favor of time spent *doing*.  They get so much more out of the doing than the reading, truly. When we "do school", that includes sewing, cooking, cleaning, drawing (we use...

Here are a few thoughts about teaching reading using Charlotte Mason’s methods. We started out using Throgmartin’s "Teach a Child to Read with Children’s Books" and Beechick’s little reading guide , because I wasn’t confident about doing the "CM way" without a more concrete plan.  Throgmartin’s book has some similarity with CM’s methods, and Beechick’s does too, but each also deviates from her recommendations in significant ways.  For some children that won’t matter, but for others it may so *if* you use one or both of those resources you might also get very familiar with CM’s recommendations first and adjust as needed. After just a few lessons, I switched to a straight CM reading plan (with some help from a group of moms who are working on documenting it), which is actually very easy to do.  Pick something fairly easy to read, not necessarily with easy words but with just a few words.  That’s the important thing.   Make your little cards ...