Secular Charlotte Mason

Living an Educational Life, as opposed to schooling or unschooling, has been at the forethought of my thoughts lately. I've come to realize *this* is really how my kids learn so much. Even when we aren't "schooling" we are doing things that enrich our lives and therefore teach us things. This weekend was a prime example. 

We had the opportunity to spend four days at the coast in our friend's beach house. As a family we all agreed that, for once, this would be a nonworking, noneducational, do only what we feel like, stricktly relaxing trip. Something we rarely do. Most of our trips are planned around activities. We had a fabulous time and all of us can't wait to do it again.  We feel so recharged and that feeling is what most of us focused on. Funny thing is, now that I have high schoolers I have to do a lot more documenting so as we do things I tend to catalog them in my head for later retrival. I have to say as I look back on this weekend, without even trying, we added hours of several transcriptable subjects. The ability to do this is because of our living an educational life. Our kids are able to transfer what they learn in our relaxed CM schooling to all their avtivities without even trying. They automatically see the relationships and act upon them. 

This weekend we truly were focused on just having an enjoyable time as a family. Yet, here is what we can document from the weekend. (This is great for those who do live in states requiring documentation.)

PE: We walked miles and miles and miles. Much of it along beaches. The rest uphill, or so it seemed. Probably totalled 3 hrs. of really working out.

Astronomy: Since there was no broadcast tv we watched 2 Nova videos on space. The kids asked a lot of really good questions and there were some lively debates. Definitely at the same level as my high school astronomy class discussions. Tide is studying astronomy right now so this was actually her request. 

Nature Studies: We seemed most drawn to watching the birds this trip. They were everywhere! All kinds. We spent hours watching them and commenting on their behaviors. We have a few things to look up now that we are home since some of the brids acted differently than we expected. I never realized birds play so much! I was also impressed with how many plants the kids could identify from our previous trips and research. Drakon noticed a field that nearly everything in it could be used to make a soup. Too bad we did miss out on the Wild Gourmet's workshop Saturday. That would have been interesting and counted toward a health credit. 

Chemistry: We watched a glass blowing session that included a full description of everything they were doing and how the glass was changing throughout the process and why. We've seen these demos before but this one was superior in the detail of explanation. We learned so much and some of us now want to try it ourselves. It's nice that this happened the year the girls are studying chemistry. We also have more research to do since some of the explanations went over our heads it was so indepth. 

All without trying! We just did what we felt at the moment while living the educational life.

You may be wondering, how is this different from unschooling. It is quite different really. Living the educational life marries the idea of schoolwork (to lay down a foundation of knowledge that the kids can later act upon) and enriching our lives in multiple ways. It's a lovely cycle that feeds upon itself. Doing nature studies for years has trained my kids to observe the natural world around them and observing the natural world fosters their interest in doing planned nature studies. Seeing the glass blowing demo got everyone thinking about chemistry again and has motivated Tide to, finally, do our basic chemistry course. Just thinking about chemistry has now gotten her thinking about the chemistry of our handicrafts and hairstyling (yes, she's a teen girl so the chemistry of hair dye is of interest) which means she now has to do that chemistry course so that she can understand the chemical formulas in the dyeing books we just ordered. She will then use what she learned about dyes to dye her own fabrics and to host a tie-dye party using indigo and natural dyes in addition to the traditional vat dyes.

Living the educational life....it is a beautiful thing!

As much as I love CM, I am also a fan of John Taylor Gotto as is my husband. JTG's theories on life and education match up much better with my rightbrainer child than CM and better reflects the entrepreneural spirit I grew up around. One of my personal goals for my girls is to figure out a way of combining the two philosopies. 

This talk is long and somewhat rambly but there are such gems of thought it's well worth listening to all the way to the end. I do think Ms. Mason would agree with JTG about some things like having a relationship with your community and nature, relationships within what you are learning and experiencing and that well educated people are never bored.

I've noticed that whenever I listen to JTG within my kids' hearing my RB child usually starts looking through books or working on some project. I suspect that something he says strikes a subconcious cord within her. 

http://www.altruists.org/static/files/Mudsill%20Theory%20-%20Jamie%20Escalante%20and%20the%20Lancaster%20Amish%20(John%20Taylor%20Gatto).mp3

My husband recently started having our entire family use Google Calendar. I was highly resistant because it is online, but today I became a convert. 

I absolutely *love* how easy it is to move items around on the schedule and the format that it prints out in is great for my list oriented visual kids. I also like that I can list chores, schoolwork and outside activities all in one place and for repeating items I just enter it once and set it up to repeat. So easy for the kids to see what they are suppose to be doing when. My husband pointed out that I could use the calendar lists to keep a record of how many hours the kids are doing schoolwork for the few classes that we are counting Carnegie hours for. All I need to do is tuck the daily lists into each child's high school organizer and count up the hours at the end of the year. Think this, combined with One Note may be just the ticket for my middlest's high school years. Wonder if I should have my son switch completely over to this rather than use his paperbased planner for spring term. 

What methods do you use to communicate daily tasks/coursework to your kids; esp. your teens?

Here are the Visual Spatial Resources that I know about....if you have others, please share!  ~ Cori

http://wonderinthewoods.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/visual-spatial-resources/

Masterly Inactivity is an often misunderstood but very helpful parenting and homeschooling technique.  This is Masterly Inactivity as I understand it.   Happy Summer, Cori

http://wonderinthewoods.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/masterly-inactivity/

I realize that Lee Binz is not secular, but at least this month, she seems to be writing about many of the issues I usually end up addressing when mentoring other homeschoolers. This article sums up nicely my take on the DISADVANTAGES of having a teaching degree. I firmly believe that the key to great homeschooling is great PARENTING, not great teaching. Whenever I have academic issues with my kids it is almost always because of some parenting issue, not homeschooling or teaching issues. Most people do not realize that homeschooling your own kids is NOTHING like teaching other people's kids in a classroom!   (I've done both and there is a huge difference.) 

javascript:mox(); Read this brief article if you worry about whether you are qualified to teach your own kids. 

I no longer do learning centers as my kids are getting older but this blog has some nice pictures of learning centers for your  inspiration:  http://dontneednoeducation.blogspot.com/2010/03/learning-centers.html . If you have any pictures of learning centers that you would like to share send them in and I will post them for you. 

We used learning centers even before we started homeschooling. When my kids were in that explorative preschooler stage we had centers all around the house. Our centers included "creation station" an art/craft oriented center, science, math, geography (much like the one in the picture only we also had blank map posters), "post office" for writing exploration, a listening center for audio books (English & Spanish) we even had a games center that featured our educational games. I rarely had all these centers going at the same time. Instead I would rotate them depending on what we were studying and/or what the kids were interested in. The post office and creation station often centered around seasonal stuff. Postcards in the summer, Christmas cards in Dec., Valentine's cards in Feb., etc. Esp. in summer the science and creation station centers included nature based items. 

Why learning centers you may ask? Well, for us there were three main reasons. 1. It was easy for me to do since I had a lot of experience making them via student teaching, 2. my kids had worthwhile activities to do even if I had a multi-day migraine (much better than just watching tv all day every day) and 3. one of my kids required a huge amount of daily stimulation at that age. Learning centers were such a success at our house that when my youngest was preschool age my elder daughter created her own learning centers to "do preschool" with the youngest. I think it was one of the best years of their sisterhood and my youngest learned just as much as she would have at a formal preschool only this one was free and I didn't have to teach it! And, yes, I have used learning centers in our homeschooling life; esp. for math and science exploration. 

I could recommend books for creating your own learning centers but you really don't need them. Here is the thought process I used when creating ours.

1. Decide on your subject, theme or topic. Is is just a general science exploration center or will it be focused on a specific topic such as oceanography?

2. Decide where the center will be and what "furniture" you will need for it. Will you need a row of bins, a file size box, a wall for visual aides, or just a table? 

3. Decide how many children you want ant the learning center at one time as that will affect how much space you will need for the center (yes, even with just your own family this is important to determine ahead of time). Audio centers tend to be for individuals where-as a game center would require at least two children. Most of our centers were for 1-2 children at a time since we were cramped for space. 

4. Decide what materials you will need and begin gathering those. How much you need will be determined by your goals and the space you have set aside for the center. I always start with what I already own or can borrow and then add in materials that I had to buy. Your theme will determine what you need. Most science centers will need to include items such as magnifying glasses of various sorts (we really like jeweler's loops, which I may have spelled wrong), rulers in both standard and metric for measuring, a scale if you have one, and so on. I would often include one of our pets as part of our science center. I remember having our Betta fish in the center during our oceanography unit and our frog during the life cycles unit. I would also keep related videos and books there and the kids could take those out of the center to watch or read them. 

5. Explain very clearly to your children exactly how you want them to use and clean up the centers. I use to keep a little sign at each center stating how many kids were allowed at one time, how long they should spend at the center (either a maximum or minimum amount, whichever is appropriate). Also, explain that the items in the centers stay in the centers and don't belong all over the house (at first this can be hard for little ones but they'll catch on quickly). 

6. If you think you will use the center again store it in one of those office file boxes, clearly marked, as they are easy to stack in a closet when not in use (I have to admit this is an idea I got from my kids' preschool). 

I really like this blog, Jimmie's Collage.  While she is not secular she has a lot of great ideas that anyone can use in their homeschool.  In her latest post she talks about having flexibility with homeschool curriculum and how she goes about changing it.  She also gives summaries year by year in the 2nd link.  ~ Cori

http://jimmiescollage.com/2010/04/flexibility-in-homeschool-curriculum/

http://www.squidoo.com/jimmies-curriculum