A Charlotte Mason Education, A Basic Tutorial

I. Read Miss Mason's books. If you can't read the entire six volume set before beginning (and I say that tongue in cheek, because of course you can't! Okay, some people can. But most of us find Charlotte Mason after our children are born), then read volume 6. While she wrote volume 6 for high school, she also wrote it as an attempt to formulate and summarize her philosophy of education, so there is much there for the parents of younger children, too. It's also the last book she wrote and several decades separate it from her first book. That's a link to the book online. I suggest you copy and paste it to your word processing file, adjust the format to suit you, and print out a week's worth of pages to read at a time (you decide what that is). That way you can write in the margins, scribble, underline, and spill your coffee on it, all nicely contained in a peechee folder.

If you can't read the entire book, read the first section, from page 23 to page 233- this is where Miss Mason goes over her 20 principles and fleshes out what she means. Keep in mind what my smart friend Donna-Jean has said about these books- they seem harder than they are, but that is because we are used to reading an entire chapter that might have a 99 to 1 fluff to ideas ratio. We are accustomed to wrapping up the meaty, important ideas in a huge envelope of puff pastry. This means we don't have to think very hard. Miss Mason didn't do fluff. Nearly every sentence has an idea worth thinking through. Her writings are densely packed with information and ideas. You can also rummage about a bit at the above link and find Leslie Noelani's paraphrased version. It's good, and if that's what you need to do, that's what you need. But you would learn more by paraphrasing it yourself.

Next, look around at home and see what books you have on hand that you would enjoy using. Descend upon your local library like a locust on the Egyptians. Inflict depredations upon your friends' personal libraries.

Once you know your resources, decide which period of history you want to study. If your children are 5 or 6 it doesn't matter much, just pick one and do stories about the people who made things happen. If they're ready for more formalized studies, pick what seems good to you. There are good reasons to plan to study history chronologically, and there are legitimate reasons to do things otherwise at times. You decide. You can also plan to buy other books, but if you assess your resources first you are less likely to duplicate.

I suggest that you then go look at the AmblesideOnline schedule and use it as a template to build your own year (assuming that you don't want to use AO. I use AO, but you don't have to).

By that, I mean look at the subject headings. We have history. Plug in a book you choose for history. Make sure it is of high literary quality. This is another area where the AO list can be useful even to those who do not use AO- click on the links to the books and read a page or two here and there. Make sure that what you decide to use isn't twaddly and oversimplified. Don't overdo it. Just because you own 300 books on the Viking era is no reason to read all of them. Pick one or two well written texts and control yourself (I preach to myself here).


AO includes biographies, so choose two or three biographies of people who were important to the time period you've decided to study. (perhaps a Childhood of Famous Americans or one of Diane Stanley's interesting books, if you have a younger child, something more substantial for an older child).

We have Baldwin's Famous Stories and we might use that, or you might pick up an old Childcraft, one titled Pioneers and Patriots, or something similar, and read through that.

Ao lists poetry- so get a nice poetry anthology for children (I like the older Childcrafts for this, too- before 1965 or so, but others will certainly do). You can pick a poet who wrote during the time period you are studying, and for a child about 8 and older, this is probably what you should do if possible.


Pick one or two titles of supplementary reading for literature. Look at the overall booklist on AO (including free reading), or look at a book like Honey for a Child's Heart for a good list.

For younger children pick any nice fairy tale anthology and read one fairy tale every three weeks or so. If you are not comfortable with magic, pick folk tales such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, The Gingerbread Man, The Little Red Hen, The Three Little Pigs, and The Three Sillies (this has other names). Plan to toss in a handful of oral retellings of your childhood.

And that's about it, follow along, roughly, the AO schedule or one of the older PNEU schedules on the AO blog, but plug in your own book titles. Go to the Contemplator website to find a good group of folk songs to sing, pick three hymns to learn over the next 12 weeks, and pick a composer and an artist who matches your time period. Plan the Bible stories you wish to cover.

Plan to learn to identify three to five new things of nature over the next few weeks, birds, wildflowers, rocks, trees, constellations, etc.

Pick your math curriculum. Pick a new skill to learn. It might be anything, cross stitching, carving soap, leatherwork, calligraphy, cake decorating...

Get some stick it notes for bookmarks. On the bookmarks write down which days of the week you wish to read those books (we do Old Testament three days a week, and New Testament two days a week, for instance). Set your timer and read aloud (or have your children read) for a set period of time. This would be about 10-15 minutes for the youngest children, about 40 minutes for the oldest children. Then have five to ten minutes for narrations. You keep that stick-it note in the book so that if you miss a few days you can just pick up where you left off without stressing over unchecked schedules in your planner.

And if I might insert a suggestion- excepting the historical connections, do not try too hard to otherwise correlate the books one with another in a unit study approach. Charlotte Mason really isn't a unit study. In fact, she didn't care for them much. She thought that children should have a _wide_ variety of material to stir their interest and keep it sharp. She felt that too much of a muchness would sort of dull their interest. If everything they study for weeks at a time is all about apples or Robinson Crusoe (two hilarious examples CM used), they rather quickly tire of it.

The idea with a CM education is that the parent/teacher spreads the banquet, and then does less so that the student can do more- the student discovers and builds her own connections with the material. This is lovely to see. Sometimes we moms want to do more because we feel like with the CM method 'we aren't _doing_ anything.' Well, I've learned that this is really as it should be- we are not the ones who are supposed to be doing the most work, our children are. So spread a wide, wide banquet before your children, letting them read different books that are not related or apparently connected to one another (exceptions were made for historical period- Charlotte did like the students to read biographies of people from the historical event studied, and also literature and poetry of that historical period, although she made a big exception for the earliest years).

While I make no claims for this as a perfect program, it's a good solid basic introduction to an attempt at a Charlotte Mason education using what you have on hand as much as possible.