Piney Woods Homeschool

When we read the Uncle Remus stories in Year 0, I pick and choose the stories we read so as to be sure to read the most familiar tales and to avoid some of the more unsettling stories.  I do like to use the original Joel Chandler Harris version, despite the dialect, because Julius Lester omits the Uncle Remus frame story in his version and I think that part of the story is important. If you are not familiar with these stories, you might want to read about why they are important . This is the list of tales I read during the preschool years: Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy Wonderful Tar-Baby Story Why Mr. Possum Loves Peace How Mr. Rabbit was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox Story of the Deluge Mr. Fox Tackles Old Man Tarrypin Mr. Rabbit Grossly Deceives Mr. Fox Mr. Fox is Again Victimized Mr. Fox Goes a-Hunting But Mr. Rabbit Bags the Game Old Mr. Rabbit, He’s a Good Fisherman Mr. Rabbit Finds His Match at Last Mr. Rabbit Meets His Match Again Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear H...

Charlotte Mason has much to say about the power of developing constructive habits.  The science behind this idea was known somewhat even in her time and is confirmed now as we more fully understand the formation of neural pathways.  Sometimes, students of Mason make almost an idol out of habits, believing that if once they can form effective habits in their children the difficulties are over. Charlotte Mason made a point of insisting that habits are not our most important or sole focus. “The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody [who takes time to gently guide a child exploring], and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline.” Charlotte Mason  Volume 1 p. 192 Discussing all of her thoughts on habit training would require more than this single post, so we will pass on to another area of focus after just this one more note.   Mason encourages us t...

Providing young children with ample opportunity for exploring the world and using their senses may be a key component of the preschool years, but along with that comes the  need for free play. Certainly, as mentioned in the previous post, children benefit from some guidance as they explore the world, some assistance in learning to use their senses, but just a little. “The notion of supplementing Nature from the cradle is a dangerous one. A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to leave children as much as may be to Nature, and "to a higher Power than Nature itself."” CM Volume 1 p. 186 Charlotte Mason believed children must be fairly free to do as they choose during these years. “Nature will look after him and give him promptings of desire to know many things; and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in t...

If we choose to counter popular culture by delaying formal academics until first grade, then what do we do during all the years before then?  The next few posts will touch on a few key areas. Charlotte Mason says that “wider training of the senses” is a mother’s “primary duty.”  To begin with, this simply means allowing the child opportunities to use his senses, to explore his world. “But it is possible that the child's marvellous power of obtaining knowledge by means of his senses may be undervalued; that the field may be too circumscribed; and that, during the first six or seven years in which he might have become intimately acquainted with the properties and history of every natural object within his reach, he has obtained, exact ideas, it is true––can distinguish a rhomboid from a pentagon, a primary from a secondary colour, has learned to see so truly that he can copy what he sees in folded paper or woven straw,––but this at the expense of much of that rea...

Sending a child to first grade without having had several years of formal or semi-formal academic instruction almost, these days, amounts to parental neglect as far as most parents or schools see it.  Middle class parents routinely consider two or three day preschool for academic preparation even when a parent stays home to care for children, and barring that, the at-home parent expects to begin lessons of some sort by age two or three. Charlotte Mason discouraged formal lessons before the age of six, for developmental reasons.  Prior to that age, she believed, children's brains required freedom to choose their learning opportunities, within boundaries.  Young children have so much learning to do simply to satisfy the demands of their own brains and bodies that imposing additional learning burdens, even if they are fun, would be too much strain as well as limiting the opportunities for the learning they naturally need. “His nerve centres and brain power have been...

Lately, culture here in America has encouraged parents to send their young children to formal programs for preschool and kindergarten.  People assume that trained professionals need to prepare children for school. Charlotte Mason says parents must direct and instruct rather than defer to professional educators. “It seems to me that we live in an age of pedagogy; that we of the teaching profession are inclined to take too much upon ourselves, and that parents are ready to yield the responsibility of direction, as well as of actual instruction, more than is wholesome for the children.”  CM Volume 1 p. 169 She also suggests that parents must learn educational principles and decide how to apply them in their own home, rather than trying to replicate in the home what the schools are doing. “Though every mother should be a Kindergartnerin, in the sense in which Froebel would employ the term, it does not follow that every nursery should be a regularly organised Kinder...

Have you ever felt pressured to send a child to a preschool or Mother’s Day Out because if you didn’t, your child would somehow be less? Ever worried that if you didn’t make sure your child mastered identifying shapes and colors, letters and numbers, counting, reading, or some other subject before kindergarten that your child would start school at a disadvantage? Have you been concerned that keeping your child at home with you would warp the child’s personality, creating a clingy child afraid to venture out? Our culture today tells us that young children must have professional educators to shape and mold them, or at the least have formal instruction, before they can be ready for the rest of their school career. Even homeschoolers often find these arguments convincing.  But are they true?  What do young children need to prepare them for learning and life? Charlotte Mason lived during the Victorian era, when these same pressures came to bear on parents. ...

DD#2 and I have been planning her school year for this coming year, which will begin for her no later than August (just after she turns 6).  Although she would be old enough to officially begin formal school this year, so that we could start AO Year 1 , I think she will benefit from a more gentle and relaxed year of working on skills before starting in on the more difficult work of Year 1. To that end, we’ve planned out a year’s schedule with books that are not on the AO list.  I expect this schedule to be adjusted as we go along and see what works and what doesn’t.  We may end up beginning Year 1 in January, or we may wait until our new school year begins next summer.  Officially she is going to be in first grade this year, but the material we’re using I’m calling Year 0.5. Here is our booklist for this year, keeping in mind that this list reflects where we are and the materials we have around, not necessarily the best list that could possibl...

If you are planning to do a kindergarten year with a five-year-old, I hope you’ll study up first on CM’s recommendations so you can plan a wonderful K year that meets your goals in a CM-friendly way.  I don’t say this because I think there’s some rule that says we all must follow CM’s recommendations but because I have always found her recommendations to be wise and useful, and I am sure that these (related to the years before formal school begins at age 6 or later) are also wise and useful and so are worth keeping in mind. If you want to study up, I’d recommend starting with these two links: A Formidable List of Attainments for a Child of Six–For Five-Year-Olds or Six-Year-Olds? This is my attempt to catalogue what CM says in Volume 1 about children under six.  The first part focuses on the List of Attainments, but read all the way through.  One important part: "Charlotte Mason did not intend for children under the age of six to be free to pl...

[This post at the moment is something of a rough draft.  I welcome your comments as I revise it.] "A Formidable List of Attainments for a Child of Six" is described as a reprint of a curriculum outline from a CM school in the 1890′s; it was printed in the Summer 1993 Parents Review published by Karen Andreola.  Here is the list : "To recite, beautifully, six easy poems and hymns. To recite, perfectly and beautifully, a parable and a psalm. To add and subtract numbers up to ten, with dominoes or counters. To read-what, and how much, will depend on what we are told of the child; children vary much in their power of reading. To copy in print-hand from a book. To know the points of the compass with relation to their own home, where the sun rises and sets, and the way the wind blows. To describe the boundaries of their own home. To describe any lake, river, pond, island within easy reach. To tell quite accurately (however shortly) Three stories from ...

The early years with Charlotte Mason require a bit of a different focus than most of us are used to. Instead of academic goals, we focus on the "many relations waiting to be established; relations with places far and near, with the wide universe, with the past of history, with the social economics of the present, with the earth they live on and all its delightful progeny of beast and bird, plant and tree; with the sweet human affinities they entered into at birth; with their own country and other countries, and, above all, with that most sublime of human relationships–their relation to God." (Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, Volume 6, pp. 72-73) The rest will come! This may even sound like a huge task, but in reality we accomplish this through simple activities and interactions–no scope and sequence is necessary. The most important Year 0 goal, according to Charlotte Mason, is time spent outside. ". . .[T]he chief function of the child–his business in the...

In Volume 1 (titled "Home Education") of her six-volume series, Charlotte Mason talks about the kindergarten, which at the time was a new concept.  She discusses this new approach to educating small children in terms of its educational value and then in terms of its philosophical value.  She had concerns about both.  In this post I’d like to look at her second area of concern, the philosophical underpinnings of the kindergarten. CM criticizes the "garden" concept as setting up a false analogy–children are not flowers and the sort of care effective with plants does not work well for children.  "The outcome of any thought is necessarily moulded by that thought, and to have a cultivated garden as the ground-plan of our educational thought, either means nothing at all, which it would be wronging the Master to suppose, or it means undue interference with the spontaneous development of a human being."  Vol 1, p. 189 I believe she is saying that ...

There is an update here . The early years with Charlotte Mason require a bit of a different focus than most of us are used to.  Instead of academic goals, we focus on the "many relations waiting to be established; relations with places far and near, with the wide universe, with the past of history, with the social economics of the present, with the earth they live on and all its delightful progeny of beast and bird, plant and tree; with the sweet human affinities they entered into at birth; with their own country and other countries, and, above all, with that most sublime of human relationships–their relation to God." (Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, Volume 6, pp. 72-73)  The rest will come!  I do know that even this sounds like a lot, but I think the key is that they will get these relations through the living books we’re reading and the time (lots and lots of time) spent outside.  We don’t have to plan out a scope and sequence! T...