Charlotte Mason All The Way: Part 1

I am happy to announce that we are now officially going full time with Charlotte Mason methods, and it really is GREAT!  Like I have said before, we have always leaned toward a CM style of learning without even knowing it, but now we have gone all in.  I purchased planning your Charlotte Mason Education over at simply Charlotte Mason.com and I sat down and planned out my entire new school year in two days!! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants some help planning their year.

I have devoted the past couple months to reorganizing my homeschool from the inside out.  I knew some changes had to be made before our new school year began and I decided to put all of my time and energy into making it happen. I started by reading some books.

I had mentioned before that I was reading For the Children’s Sake. This is the book that changed everything for me.  After reading this book, I knew that I wanted to give my children a CM education.  If you are interested in CM and want to learn more, this is a great book to get you started.

Then I read A Charlotte Mason Education. This book went into details about the basic subjects that Charlotte Mason taught, such as, narration, copywork, dictation, Book of Centuries, etc.   The author, a homeschooling mom, shows you how to teach these subjects to your own kids.  This book paved the way for me to SEE that the CM way of teaching would work in MY homeschool.  I remember reading this book in bed at night, and every other page stopping just to tell my husband what I had read.  It was that good.

In addition to reading For the Children’s Sake, I have also read The Well Trained Mind. Now, I know what you are thinking…”Why did you read The Well Trained Mind if you are going all in with a CM education style?  Well, the truth is that I have always wanted to read the book, and before I planned out my new year I figured now was the time to read it.    I wanted to know the specifics of a classical education and make sure I was making the right choices in my kids education.  I have to say that there are several aspects of classical education that I like,  and some of them I will incorporate into our studies.  I really enjoyed reading this book even though it was a bit intimidating at times.  I actually had to read parts of the book two and three times, over the course of several weeks, just to digest everything.  However, having read the book, I am convinced that CM is the way to go for our family, with a little bit of classical education added in here and there.  I will go into the specifics of that in a later post:)

Did I say I’ve been a little busy lately?

This year is really a turning point in my homeschool.  I have a much clearer picture of where my kids are headed for the first time since I started homeschooling (5 years ago).  Here are a few places I have found that helped me out…

I am totally addicted to the Simply Charlotte Mason website/blog/forum.  I just LOVE the ladies over there!  I have learned sooo much from them.  They are ALWAYS there to help with any and all questions I have.

Another blog that I have enjoyed reading and learned so much from is Higher Up and Further In.  I spent hours reading this beautiful blog, and it answered a lot of questions I had about how to incorporate CM methods.  This blog has been invaluable to me.

It’s getting late around here…so I will continue with all my CM talk in my next post.  I will list all of the CM subjects we are covering and our weekly schedule.

I have so much more free time now that my entire school year is planned out, so there will much more time for me to blog again!