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audreycat
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| Posted: June 07 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged
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Hi! My name is Amy and I am a fairly new homeschooling mom of five (DD10, DS7, DS5, DD4 and DD18mo.) We have just finished our 2nd year of homeschooling, using a boxed curriculum. I have been following these boards for awhile and have always been drawn to CM (the first homeschooling book I ever read was Real Learning!).
I feel like I have am starting to have an understanding of the methods in a CM curriculum, but am confused about what specific books to use with my 6th grader. If anyone has any advice about switching midstream to CM I would really appreciate it! My daughter has never done narrations, dictation, etc. and I have to admit I am a little nervous about requiring these things from her, when she is used to a more "workbook-y" approach.
I am looking forward to getting to know everyone better!
Amy
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Mackfam
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| Posted: June 07 2012 at 4:26pm | IP Logged
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Hi Amy!  I'm so glad you're here!!
audreycat wrote:
| I feel like I have am starting to have an understanding of the methods in a CM curriculum, but am confused about what specific books to use with my 6th grader. |
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I think I'd start with history, since in a CM education, history is a pivot for the entire curriculum. So what period of history will she be studying next year? That's probably the first question to tackle, and then from there, you can find living books for her to read from that period.
Other subjects you may want to consider filing in would be:
GEOGRAPHY
SCIENCE
MATH
NATURAL HISTORY
SCIENCE (a specific discipline like Physical Science or Astronomy)
A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
RELIGION
FINE ARTS (these are not studied every single day, usually we just hit these once a week, and spread them out across the week)
POETRY
SHAKESPEARE
PICTURE STUDY USING ART PIECES
COMPOSER STUDY
Now, that looks like a lot, but don't allow it to be daunting. I listed it so that maybe it could be a good starting point for you. Those are topics, now you get to fill in some specifics.
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This is an exercise I used to do and it really helped me get my planning underway:
1) Using a wall in your hallway (or you can use a big sheet of poster paper), put a post-it note on the wall in a horizontal row, and on each post-it write one of those topics above until you have a row of post-its going down your hall listing every TOPIC you want to do this year.
2) Get a little more specific and list it on your post-it....ie. what are you going to study for science this year? Not sure? Ask your dd what she'd like to study? Or what hasn't she studied yet?
3) Now start gathering book ideas from various sources:
Search here - 4Real is a fantastic resource for books!
Get some books about books
4) Add a post-it every time you find a book possibility. If you find a good review and it mentions things like the book makes a good read aloud, or there is some mature subject matter, make note of that on your post-it.
5) Choose books that are rich in terms of the narrative choice of language and rich in content. Some folks like to make use of accompanying activity guides, resource guides, inquiry guides for essays based on particular books....and those could be nice, but I don't use them. All you really need is the book, and the child to narrate. So, no need to be overwhelmed in how much extra stuff you need. You don't *NEED* any of it. It's all extra. Choose a couple if that kind of thing fits your style naturally.
5) After you've done some hunting, and have a good set of post-its under each heading, you can start whittling down.
6) Get some things on paper now. At this point, you ought to have a pretty good working booklist for the year! Time to dance the happy dance of booklist-building-delight! 
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To get started, you might consider looking at Ambleside Online Year 3.5. It was built to be a transitional booklist year, and I think it could be a help to you as you get started in CM. You may have to bump some of the reading choices for your 6th grade dd, so do take a look at Year 4 or Year 5, but do be aware that the schedule for these two years really takes off and is rigorous. It's a good place to start though, and you know your dd best, so choose a year that you think most likely reflects her abilities. I like *most* of their recommendations and find their suggestions and schedules to be rigorous and deep. And....there is nothing wrong with a 6th grader following Year 4 selections! AO is a big jump from where you may have been, and easing in would be better than overwhelming. Another alternative is considering Year 5 or 6, and lightening up some of the (quantity, not quality!!) of reading. Make sure you add in good, living books for Religion, and if you can, add in history choices that reflect saints that lived during that period of history.
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Now, I know I didn't really help you pick out specific books, but I will!! I wanted to give you this little exercise to do first! I think when a family begins to move earnestly toward a CM education, they may still believe that 6th grade has a set curriculum no matter the philosophy. In a CM education, the curriculum and books become so much richer, and choices so much wider. Don't allow this to overwhelm you, but rejoice in the gift of it! We can help you narrow down! What I hoped to do was to give you a sense of how broad your question is, and help you start walking it in toward details, a little at a time!
Give us some direction: topics, period of history, what she'll study for science - and then I think we might be able to point you in some good directions! You can do this, Amy! And WELCOME!!!!
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Becky Parker
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Jen, I think you should teach a class, or at least write a book on homeschooling with the CM method! I know there are books out there, but your advice is always so practical.
Welcome Amy! I don't have anything to add but I just want to assure you that children are generally very happy to learn the CM way. There's a "normalcy" to it that makes learning part of life, as apposed to "that time of day when we open our workbooks". That's not to say we don't have a specific time that we do school work, but the CM methodology will flow into all areas of the day. It is truly teaching your children to learn, and to love to learn.
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audreycat
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Thank you so much for the advice and encouragement ladies! Yes Becky, thiat is what I want for my children, to love to learn! This is something that is missing right now in our "school". They love to learn outside of "school" though=)
Jen, you should write a book, your advice was so helpful. I like what I see at AO. I do need to read more books about books, I think that is the part I am missing. I am imaganing a two stream history approach wih my daughter next year. She will be finishing up the 2nd half of American history, but she hasn't had any ancient history. She is signed up for a co-op for science, using Apologia Science, and she is going to continue with Latin. Everthing else is up in the air!
I am so enjoying reading many of the older posts here! There is so much wisdom! Thank you!
Amy
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SuzanneG
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Amy~
Following up on Jen's Ambleside comments and reference.....the YEARS for AO do NOT correspond necessarily with American GRADE LEVELS. An 11-yo-6th grader wouldn't necessarily be using Ambleside Year 6. That would be a very advanced 11 yo!
My daughter is going to be in 6th grade next year, and I'd say she will be doing an equivalent of Year 4 work.
Would you want to "choose a subject" and you can toss out examples or books you may have on your shelf and then we can help with how you would use that book? Sometimes that's helpful....to just "start with one book" and go from there.
Or maybe pick a subject that you are completely clueless about how to use a living book with.....
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mariB
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Becky, I agree. Jenn should teach a class and/or write a book. Planning school and using her wise advice!
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Jenn
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Amy, I'm so glad you asked this question! I am in the same boat, I have a 6th grader, as well as 3rd and 1st next year, and we are playing with switching from St. Thomas Aquinas Academy to CM this year, but am unsure how, and nervous about doing so. I started making lists of books, but it ended up looking much more like a continuation of what we did under STAA than CM.
I'm still unsure how grammar, and composition really happen with CM. He hasn't done narration, and i need him to be able to write. I had thought of doing Excellence in Writing with him, but I guess that isn't really doing living books. Can anyone help me see how language arts works when switching mid stream?
thanks so much!
Jen
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Mackfam
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| Posted: June 27 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged
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Well, I missed some of the responses on this thread...thank you all so very much for your kind words!
Jenn wrote:
I have a 6th grader, as well as 3rd and 1st next year, and we are playing with switching from St. Thomas Aquinas Academy to CM this year, but am unsure how, and nervous about doing so. I started making lists of books, but it ended up looking much more like a continuation of what we did under STAA than CM.
I'm still unsure how grammar, and composition really happen with CM. He hasn't done narration, and i need him to be able to write. I had thought of doing Excellence in Writing with him, but I guess that isn't really doing living books. Can anyone help me see how language arts works when switching mid stream? |
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Sure!
In a CM education, your 6th grader would probably need to spend the year working on:
** Learning how to narrate and then building narrations. **IF** oral narrations take off and are going really well, then about mid-year I'd start asking for one written narration a week. There is nothing magical or complicated about a written narration - it is simply an oral narration....written down. It's stepping into writing, and it allows the student to write about that which they know.
** You can probably work in dictations very gently and that's where you would build in a few simple grammar lessons along with a gentle focus on building spelling skills. Lots of great bang for the buck in a simple studied dictation.
** No composition lessons for a 6th grader. (Formal composition lessons don't begin until 8th/9th grade in a CM education - laying a good foundation with narrations is essential!)
** If needed, you can do some copywork to polish penmanship.
All of these: narrations, dictation selections, and copywork selections can come from the living reading: history, science, poetry, Shakespeare, etc. in your day.
Your 3rd grader and 1st grader would be working on copywork and oral narrations only.
That's it. It's pretty simple, but it's a little mystifying in its simplicity. No workbooks for every subject, and no formal writing programs (eek!  ). The language arts spring from the living sources in your day!
It might be helpful for you to do a little more reading to understand more of the philosophy behind the methods of CM, Jen, especially as regards language arts.
And since your question was related to language arts in a CM education, I thought I'd mention a series of posts I wrote on exactly this topic - Considering - Charlotte Mason and Our Approach to Language Arts
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Jen Mackintosh
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Grace&Chaos
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Amy and Jen, you're getting excellent advice here! I've been at the transition crossroad with my oldest. Piggy backing on Jen's last advice about concentrating on Narrations, Dictations and Copywork I would add some great advice I gleaned from Catherine Levison's book a A Charlotte Mason Education: take the summer to practice an all CM way of doing things and see how it goes. Now, I'm not suggesting that you incorporate a full year's schedule or all the subjects suggested, but maybe one topic/summer reading and practice those key items with that particular book. A small 20 minute session each day should give you some nice practice.
If by the end you're still feeling a little uneasy about switching, let me assure you there is nothing wrong with keeping some of your STAA materials. We kept some of our Kolbe suggestions and I slowly weaned my daughter from them. Assinging less from them through out the year until she was completely comfortable with oral narrations, dictation, copywork and a Book of Centuries (we started this process her 4th grade year). The next year she was ready to be full CM and her narrations now included written ones.
We are very excitedly starting seventh grade using a CM education this fall and we couldn't be more pleased  My other children have only been exposed to CM and they are thriving just as well too.
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Jenn
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Jen and Jenny,
thank you so much for your responses. I have do think I need to review Charlotte Mason ideas, I've read them int he past, but not recently, so thanks for the links! Using just narration, copy work, and diction sounds so much simpler than what we have been (unsuccessfully) doing. after reading this last night, when my son was done with his biography, I asked him to tell me about it. After a few minutes of him recounting the highlights of his book, I realized- wait we just did narration! And he loved telling me all about it. I am pretty sure when we get to the writing it down part, I will hear a lot less. :)
Jenny, thanks for the idea of gradually switching over. I think *I* am going to have a harder time not using the books than he is! In the past we have used books like "Great Men of Greece" and the study guide. I've discussed the questions with him, than had him write down the answers. would that be considered narration? I need to go read some more. I have read so much about so many different ideas, I can't recall what goes with what!
Thanks again,
yet another Jen :)
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SallyT
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I think the fundamental difference between narration and answering study questions (and we've done both), is that study questions are geared toward what someone else thinks the child should know about the reading, and that whatever he knows outside the purview of those questions is essentially ignorance. Narration, on the other hand, is more holistic: it's "tell me everything you know."
What I find is that, depending on the child, the reading, and the way the day is going, "everything you know" often includes either weird, arcane details that might not be important to any writer of study guides, but have lodged like little burrs of knowledge in the child's mind; or else a sort of sweeping "what it's about" idea that again might not line up with anyone else's study questions, but -- assuming the child really did read/hear and understand the passage, and what he says is on the same planet as that reading -- may be an equally valid way of looking at the text. Narration encourages the child to be an active reader and thinker about books in a way that study questions just don't.
Also, Amy, have you looked at Mater Amabilis, which is a Catholic CM curriculum? Though I've always been a bit more eclectic and CM-*inspired* in my approach, I've found AO very helpful for understanding the structure of a CM education (and we've used many of their titles, most of which you can find as free e-texts at The Baldwin Project), but MA's book selections are beautiful and Catholic.
We're converts to Catholicism, and the years that we were coming into the Church (we were already homeschooling, and our conversion was a slow process) were the years that we followed MA most closely. I felt as though the top of my head had been blown off: it was a kind of education I hadn't even dreamed was possible, melding the idea of a whole intellectual tradition with a living faith -- for my kids. My older children were 9 and 13 when we were actually received into the Church, and to this day I credit MA books that we read that year and the year before with their desire to be Catholic. (and I can tell you specific titles that really stand out in my memory as special and important, if you like. They were good for that middle-school demographic, in a big way!).
Anyway, as I say, we tend to be a bit eclectic in our approach, and we do use some workbooky stuff which a pure CM education would not include, but this is definitely the heart of our homeschool. So far it's been very successful -- my older kids, 18/college student and 14/9th grade -- have benefited greatly from our emphasis on living books and have developed into sophisticated readers and writers without much in the way of formal programs.
Good luck to you (and to everyone, as we're all engaged in planning)! And I agree: Jen needs to hold some kind of major webinar on planning and executing a CM education, for all the rest of us who wander in the wilderness.
Sally
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jawgee
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SallyT wrote:
| I agree: Jen needs to hold some kind of major webinar on planning and executing a CM education, for all the rest of us who wander in the wilderness. |
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And Sally, please do share those titles!! My oldest is in 5th, so we're approaching middle school years.
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SallyT
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NB: Warning, this is massively long! I'm both answering the question about book titles and describing our course set-up and daily routines. So you can decide now whether you want to read it or not!
Very important to us:
For religion, the Amy Welborn Prove It! books. I'm not sure that they're still in the curriculum for Level 3 (?), but we did a couple of them (God and Jesus, I think) as read-alouds with my then 8- and 12-year-olds, with great success, and then the kids read the other two (Church and Prayer) on their own. They're really pitched to middle-high school, but my 8/9yo was not to be left behind!
Bethlehem Books -- I can't remember now exactly what we did when, but Beorn the Proud was huge for both those kids, as were books by Barbara Willard. My daughter at that 11/12 age really liked a series that Bethlehem so far hasn't published: Barbara Willard's Mantlemass series, set during the Wars of the Roses and the ascendancy of the Tudor dynasty.
My kids at that age have also adored pretty much anything by Hilda van Stockum: The Mitchells series, the Bantry Bay series, The Winged Watchman, etc.
We also -- and this is an MA exclusive -- read and enjoyed Kathryn Faulkner's Catholic history of England, Our Lady's Dowry. This is available online, but you do have to be using MA and a member of the yahoo support group to access the link. It's not publicly available because at some point Kathryn intends to publish it in book form.
Moving into CM (from a more unschooly approach, though I'd begun by WANTING to do CM) for us coincided with moving into Catholicism, so although we did follow more or less the MA program for Levels 1a and 2 for a year or so, using the recommended history spines, my main aim was to immerse us in excellent children's literature which would give us models for personal virtue (somtimes hard-won -- I'm not a fan of stories in which children are *too* saintly!) AND, even more importantly for us, a sense of what a lived Catholic culture would look like: Catholicism in the air people breathed.
On a more general note, I still think of myself as following the basic structure of MA, with many book substitutions, depending on what's available to us and what the needs of a particular child are. Our overall course of study for any year in the elementary/middle years kind of goes like this:
History:
1. Spine text for organization's sake
2. LOTS of historical fiction
English:
1. LOTS of literature
2. daily copywork/occasional dictation (an area to improve)
3. a program for grammar for once or twice a week -- I elect to cover English grammar yearly, and we don't use the Emma Serl Language Lessons books (though we've tried them), because I seem to have really sarcastic, cynical kids (!) and they find them unbearably twee. Sadly.
Science:
1. LOTS of literature and "strewn" books and magazines
2. Till now, pretty informal nature study. I'm planning to be a little more directive about nature notebooks this year with my 3rd and 4th graders.
Math:
1. Some math literature. Planning to fold in far more this year
2. a prepared math curriculum: in our case, MEP
Religion:
Rotating daily reads in
1. catechism
2. Old Testament
3. New Testament
4. saints
5. some other topic of interest (this year, Marigold Hunt's Book of Angels; in another year or so it'll be time for the Prove It books)
Foreign Language:
Here we are total schizophrenics in the early years. We've dabbled our toes in Latin, Greek, and Spanish. This year, my older kids are both pursuing German via college courses, and my husband is a fluent German speaker anyway, so I'm putting together some rather internet-based German resources (here) in the hopes that we can maybe do family German conversation over dinner.
But again, as with math and grammar, here's a place where whatever prepared curriculum is already working for you still has a place.
As for daily schedule, I've stolen Jen's marvelous Morning Basket idea and adapted it for our own purposes. In this case, it's to make sure that our days begin with prayer and then good read-aloud literature and narration, as absolute priorities. A typical day for us might look like this:
1. Daily Mass at 8 a.m. (in an ideal world . . . though we do go pretty regularly)
2. Home, breakfast, chores, some general chaos
3. Morning Basket:
a. some short prayers and hymn-singing if we've gone to Mass and done Morning Prayer afterward at church. If we haven't been to Mass, we start with Morning Prayer.
b. religion reading
c. other short readings in poetry, history, science/nature, fine arts, math literature . . . I'm sure I'm forgetting something! We typically do about four readings, trying to keep them brief -- 4-5 pages each. Sometimes shorter if they're complicated, so that kids have a chance to process and give a remotely detailed oral narration. We might end with picture study, a hands-on science experiment (usually something growing spontaneously out of our reading), or some other sort of transitional activity. Oh, foreign language is a Morning Basket activity, too. Otherwise it doesn't get done at all.
4. Table Work
Here the kids do their more independent, written work. Usually we begin with copywork to help everyone change gears and focus. This would be followed by math and any other written work. They finish this block of time with a period of independent reading. This year my 4th-grader will be doing more of his core coursework via independent reading and, for the first time, some written narrations.
5. Lunch Basket: more literature to eat lunch by. Usually a rotation of historical novels, fairy tales, and Shakespeare. Some read-alouds by me, some audiobooks.
That's it for my younger kids (currently grades 3/4). I have a rising 9th grader who works almost entirely independently and takes outside classes as well, so I'm not really including him in this mix. But it's a basic model I can see working for these two, even as I start to "uncombine" them as my 4th grader verges into middle school, for a long time to come.
(more about our upcoming year, with a visual schedule here)
I am sorry that this turned out to be so long, but I thought it might be helpful to see sketches of both how various subjects might be set up, and then how a day might go, if you're even leaning toward or transitioning into a more CM approach. I hope it's useful!
Sally
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audreycat
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Thank you again for the advice ladies!
Sally, I have heard of MA, and I really like what I see. I am trying to decide between AO and MA...I think for this first year I want something to guide me, although I will be making substitions based on what DD has already done.
I am curious why someone would pick one over the other...I think I personally want to choose MA because it's Catholic.
I had another question...how does one handle narrations with a large family, where we all might be reading the same books. Do I have the 2nd and 6th grader both give narrations for each book we read together, or do I alternate?
I am so blessed to have found this site! The knowledge here is invaluable!
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SallyT
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I think that's exactly it: MA is a *Catholic* Charlotte Mason program. I actually found it via our homeschool group's website before I had ever heard of AO.
We have done massive amounts of substitutions, essentially making up our own program year by year, borrowing from both MA and AO, and choosing Baldwin Project e-texts that suit us. Last year I also borrowed AO's structure of alternating weeks -- one set of readings for even weeks, one set for odd.
Personally, how I handle narrations is to choose one child to be the main narrator for a given passage, but letting other kids "tell me more" once the first narrator is finished.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: starting CM with 6th grader
