I have to confess that I have a new fix. First, let me say that I really love teaching my children at home. I enjoy every aspect of teaching them and would not trade it for anything in the world. I know there is no better place for them than right here with me….all day long.

I’m always looking for ways to incorporate interesting videos, books, tv shows, and such into our learning. Sometimes I happen upon these things without really searching. Such was the case last night. We don’t watch tv much but lately we’ve had it on for March Madness. I was flipping to see if there were any games on when I came across the Discovery Channel. There I found a show called How It’s Made and was hooked when I heard them explaining how panty hose were made. I left it on and for the next hour, I learned the process of making panty hose, toilets, RVs, styrofoam packaging, pottery, hard candy, decorative candles and erasers. Oh….My…..Goodness. It was so neat! I made a mental note to set the DVR to record this show when it comes on so that we can use it for science. If you haven’t seen the show, you owe it to yourself to sit down and watch it. In fact, I’m going to do just that. The current episode will show how to make prepared mustard, violins, nuts and bolts, and toilet paper. Pretty soon, I’ll know how everything is made!

In teaching our children at home, we use a mixture of the classical and Charlotte Mason models. This has proven  quite effective for us and learning is exciting.  Below you will find a reworded summary of the 20 Charlotte Mason Principles.

(See a parallel with the original text here: http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/20Principles.html)

1. Children are born persons - they are not blank
slates or embyonic oysters who have the potential of
becoming persons. They already are persons.

2. Although children are born with a sin nature,
they are neither all bad, nor all good. Children from
all walks of life and backgrounds may make choices for
good or evil.

3. The concepts of authority and obedience are true
for all people whether they accept it or not.
Submission to authority is necessary for any society
or group or family to run smoothly.

4. Authority is not a license to abuse children, or
to play upon their emotions or other desires, and adults
are not free to limit a child’s education or use fear,
love, power of suggestion, or their own influence over
a child to make a child learn.

5. The only means a teacher may use to educate children
are the child’s natural environment, the training of good
habits and exposure to living ideas and concepts. This is
what CM’s motto “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline,
a life” means.

6. “Education is an atmosphere” doesn’t mean that
we should create an artificial environment for children,
but that we use the opportunities in the environment
he already lives in to educate him. Children learn from
real things in the real world

7. “Education is a discipline” means that we train a
child to have good habits and self-control.

8. “Education is a life” means that education should apply
to body, soul and spirit. The mind needs ideas of all kinds,
so the child’s curriculum should be varied and generous
with many subjects included.

9. The child’s mind is not a blank slate, or a bucket
to be filled. It is a living thing and needs knowledge
to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food,
the mind is designed to digest knowledge and needs no
special training or exercises to make it ready to learn.

10. Herbart’s philosophy that the mind is like an empty
stage waiting for bits of information to be inserted puts
too much responsibility on the teacher to prepare detailed
lessons that the children, for all the teacher’s effort,
don’t learn from anyway.

11. Instead, we believe that childrens’ minds are capable
of digesting real knowledge, so we provide a rich, generous
curriculum that exposes children to many interesting, living
ideas and concepts.

12. “Education is the science of relations” means that
children have minds capable of making their own connections
with knowledge and experiences, so we make sure the child
learns about nature, science and art, knows how to make
things, reads many living books and that they are physically fit.

13. In devising a curriculum, we provide a vast amount
of ideas to ensure that the mind has enough brain food,
knowledge about a variety of things to prevent boredom, and
subjects are taught with high-quality literary language
since that is what a child’s attention responds to best.

14. Since one doesn’t really “own” knowledge until he
can express it, children are required to narrate, or tell
back (or write down), what they have read or heard.

15. Children must narrate after one reading or hearing.
Children naturally have good focus of attention, but
allowing a second reading makes them lazy and weakens
their ability to pay attention the first time. Teachers
summarizing and asking comprehension questions are other
ways of giving children a second chance and making the
need to focus the first time less urgent. By getting
it the first time, less time is wasted on repeated readings,
and more time is available during school hours for more
knowledge. A child educated this way learns more than
children using other methods, and this is true for all
children regardless of their IQ or background.

16. Children have two guides to help them in their
moral and intellectual growth - “the way of the will,
” and “the way of reason.”

17. Children must learn the difference between “I want”
and “I will.” They must learn to distract their thoughts
when tempted to do what they may want but know is not right,
and think of something else, or do something else,
interesting enough to occupy their mind. After a short
diversion, their mind will be refreshed and able to will
with renewed strength.

18. Children must learn not to lean too heavily on
their own reasoning. Reasoning is good for logically
demonstrating mathematical truth, but unreliable when
judging ideas because our reasoning will justify all
kinds of erroneous ideas if we really want to believe them.

19. Knowing that reason is not to be trusted as the final
authority in forming opinions, children must learn that
their greatest responsibility is choosing which ideas to
accept or reject. Good habits of behavior and lots of
knowledge will provide the discipline and experience to
help them do this.

20. We teach children that all truths are God’s truths,
and that secular subjects are just as divine as religious
ones. Children don’t go back and forth between two worlds
when they focus on God and then their school subjects;
there is unity among both because both are of God and,
whatever children study or do, God is always with them.

~ 2004 Leslie Noelani Laurio

*used with permission*

I receive the epistula from Veritas Press every month. In it this month, was a nice article about the importance of reading. What I didn’t expect was the statistics included from a survey done by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m including it below: