Analysis Paralysis 2: Charlotte Mason

Overwhelmed with what is available out there, I'm going to attempt to create my own Eclectic Homeschool curriculum, taking the best of each method and trying to create my own system.  It is important for me that the final "method" that I use is cohesive and aimed at the goal of encouraging my kids to develop as complete human beings.  It should be tailor made for their invidual personalitities, while taking into account what skills they will need to live in this world.  So I introduce the Analysis Paralysis series- a closer look at what has already been done, and what I'm going to pull from it for our program. 


Charlotte Mason, you had me at Living Books.  I am a reader.  I have been a reader since childhood.  I could easily spend an entire day reading a novel from cover to cover.  I still could, if not for my pesky children wanting to be fed.  It is imperative to me that, if at all possible, my children learn to read well, and love doing it.

The advice offered for choosing books on the Ambleside Online website is fantastic.  This website is a free Charlotte Mason curriculum, based on her living books concept.  It includes excellent booklists, arranged by age/grade which include all of the classics, rather than the flash-in-the-pan children's books available at the local bookstore.

For children Eliot's age and below, here's what they recommend:

Text should be literary to prepare children for the challenging books they'll be using for school, and cultivate a delight in beautiful names. Children should be discouraged from developing a taste for easy books that will undermine their capacity to read classics later. Books should be selected with the goal of decreasing dependence on pictures, and relying more on the imagination to envision pictures in the mind from the text.
Illustrations should "have a refining, elevating effect upon our coarser nature" and bring us into the "world of beauty" while helping our children develop an affinity for, an attraction to, the beautiful, the lovely, the pure, the refining--because "education is concerned to teach him what pictures to delight in."
Stories should have the noble, beautiful, inspiring kind of living ideas that CM espoused, including "the great human relationships, relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and friend and neighbour, to 'cause' and country and kind, to the past and the present."

  However, for pre-school children, they also state that being out in nature is more important than reading, and I tend to agree.

The downside of this curriculum is that it is essntially a booklist.  There is no phonics program math program, foreign language, etc.  All of that needs to come form elsewhere.

To keep:  The booklist.  These are books that should be on our shelves.  "Fun" books should come from the library, and go back there when we're done with them.



*Update*  The more I delve into the booklists of Ambleside Online, the more I love it.  This may very well become the "base" around which our curriculum is designed.  However, Charlotte Mason's method of study is recommended for children 6 years and up, though they do have a year 0 for 4-5 year olds to start on.  Her recommendation for younger children?  Nature, nature, nature!  Yes ma'am!