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3ringcircus
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I'm interested in Charlotte Mason, and intrigued by Classical, but both of those seem to have a lot of discussion-based learning. It's very difficult to engage my eldest in a two-way conversation. He barely answers questions. Often, he's completely in his own world. You can read to him, and he'll get engaged. He can answer questions w/ a fixed answer (i.e. what color is the chair?), but he's not one to elaborate. He's super into science. If there's a subject that intrigues him, he will spend months obsessing over it. It takes over his whole world, though.
He is learning at his own steady pace in his K class at a private Christian preschool, but I won't be able to find such a place once he finishes this year. I think the combination of natural peer pressure and a wonderful, sensitive teacher has helped a lot. But, when I try to work w/ him on his limited homework, it's like pulling teeth, and we both are miserable.
Am I limited to mostly unschooling? I refuse to take my bright, inquisitive boy, and make both him and myself miserable. I think some structure in the day will be nice for him, actually, but for his entire life, the more things come to a confrontation, the more he shuts down. It's not a manipulative thing, it's more of an emotional distress. Who can learn efficiently in that kind of environment? I suspect that the more "schoolish" his environment is, the less he will be able to relax and learn.
Any thoughts?
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CrunchyMom
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I think that it sounds "normal" for Kindergarten age boy. I don't find that 5 year old boys in general elaborate on much upon request.
I think that narration (Charlotte Mason) is effective because it is a bit like giving a fixed answer--simply telling back the story. But even then I don't expect elaborate narrations from a 5 year old.
I find unschooling to be an effective way of learning in these early years, but I'm not sure you are limited in any philosophical way from how you describe your son. The discussion aspects of a Charlotte Mason education can be slowly introduced and gently modified, and he will likely change a good deal in the next couple of years as he matures.
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Betsy
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When my now 9yo was in K he was the same way! Sounds very normal for a boys that age, especially one that is interested in math/science!
We have used CM for his entire schooling. Narration's for this child are not as easy with my other children. BUT, expressing him self verbally is one of his weekest skills. I look at it this way, by using CM I am gently helping him work on his weeknesses to help him to be a well rounded student. 
Speaking for my own personal education, it's easy to only focus on what we are good at. For math/science oriented kids it SO easy to praise them for that and let the rest slide, like what happened to me.
I can guarantee that you will need to put on your blinders and not compare this child to a child where talking and verbal communication come easy/naturally, but I can also guarantee that a Charlotte Mason Education will help this child develop his verbal skills significantly past where he naturally wants to stay! 
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3ringcircus
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Betsy wrote:
When my now 9yo was in K he was the same way! Sounds very normal for a boys that age, especially one that is interested in math/science!
We have used CM for his entire schooling. Narration's for this child are not as easy with my other children. BUT, expressing him self verbally is one of his weekest skills. I look at it this way, by using CM I am gently helping him work on his weeknesses to help him to be a well rounded student.
Speaking for my own personal education, it's easy to only focus on what we are good at. For math/science oriented kids it SO easy to praise them for that and let the rest slide, like what happened to me.
I can guarantee that you will need to put on your blinders and not compare this child to a child where talking and verbal communication come easy/naturally, but I can also guarantee that a Charlotte Mason Education will help this child develop his verbal skills significantly past where he naturally wants to stay!
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Good point. I definitely don't want to focus on his strengths and ignore all else. I think he will learn to love living books.
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kristinannie
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I would say that most boys that age would fight you on homework, especially workbooks. I think it is hard for kids that age to spend all day (or even half a day) at school and then come home to do homework. Things will be easier when you homeschool. Out seatwork for K takes about 45 min.
I do a mix of Classical and CM. I am leaning more toward CM for most subjects though. Workbooks are not a lot of fun for my 5 year old son. We do a lot of reading aloud. While I encourage narration, I don't require formal narrations yet. I model narrations and I ask open ended questions. After a few monnths, I am really impressed with how his narrating has matured.
I don't think that unschooling is a bad thing for early elementary. You might also think about unit studies. We have been doing that this year with excellent success. We have done North America and The Solar System. We are doing South America next.
Just know that you don't have to pick one particular philosphy and stick with it. You can let things evolve as your kids get older. I am leaning more and more towards CM the more I read her works and become more acquainted with the process (and I have seen such great results already). I do also plan on teachin Latin, logic and rhetoric so it is a mix.
The ladies on here are great resources! Best of luck!
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JuliaT
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I think both narrations and discussions are something that one works into, learning as they have experience. It isn't something that they do with immediate success. It takes time to nurture a child in the skill of narrating.
I do a mix of CM/Classical and I don't do that much discussing until they are in about Gr. 6. My dd just didn't know how to express herself that well in order to have a successful discussion. With maturity, though, we are able to have some really good discussions but it took time.
Narrations have been painful at times as well but it was a gradual process. CM says herself that a child should not be giving narrations until they are 6 yrs. of age. So we started out slowly and didn't give narrations for every reading.
You aren't limited to just one philosophy. You can mix and match. Take from unschooling what works with your son and do the same with CM and Classical and any other philosophy that you think might work. As your child matures, you will probably have to change things around as his skills and interests will change. Once he is 6, with a gentle introduction to narrations, you will probably be surprised as to what he can accomplish.
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Mackfam
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First, WELCOME to the board, 3ringcircus!!! 
Your 5 yo sounds like a normal little fella!!! You've gotten sound advice and ideas here on this thread from others!! And, I'm so glad the other ladies could explain that when one makes use of CM methods of narration, one begins very gently with narrations around the age of 6 (sometimes on the later end of 6 depending on the child!). A narration is not a discussion; a narration is very simply a telling back of what the child knows (from his reading) and it is not unusual for boys to narrate very, very succinctly!! It's also not unusual for narrations to be a little shaky at first - they work themselves out over time. Narrations begin to naturally morph into discussions somewhere in middle school in our home, so put your mind at ease on that score!
Our overall philosophy is Charlotte Mason which then meshes with several other educational philosophies in our home: Unschooling, Montessori, Classical, Unit Studies with an emphasis on opportunities for creativity. Quite a collection, huh?  Choosing whole, worthy, living books often means I'm choosing either "the good books" (early years) or "the great books" (upper education years) one would find in a classical, Catholic liberal education. A Catholic liberal education begins early, but does not stop at high school graduation; it continues throughout a person's life. These ideas which nurture the education of a child will (I hope and pray) allow them to take part in that "Great Conversation", and (I hope and pray) allow the children to mature into adults with the tools and ideas needed to continue learning and go out and be the "salt of the earth and the light of world" (Matt 5:13,14) This is universal - Catholic.
All that background was meant to encourage you to do just as Kristin encourages here:
Kristinanne wrote:
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You've got some great educational philosophies to look into and plenty of time to read about them. We have much in common! In our home, the educational philosophies you mention are the primary educational philosophies that provide the foundation to our days. Do you want to know where they all seem to converge in early childhood? Read, and read much.(CM, Montessori, Unschooling, Classical)
Relax and allow your child to be a child.(Unschooling, CM)
Don't force formal academics too early, but do present learning opportunities. (Unschooling, CM)
Present a learning rich environment and an atmosphere which is open to learning. (CM, Montessori, Unschooling)
Allow room for margin in the day (don't overwhelm with structure and schedules!) so that there is time to create. (CM, Unschooling, Montessori)
Do what you're already doing: pay attention to your child's cues, his natural desire to learn, and provide opportunities for that learning to happen in gentle and natural ways.(CM, Montessori, Unschooling)
Classical education emphasizes much memorization in the early years, and this idea can seem incongruous with the other items on this list, but it's actually not BECAUSE kids at this age memorize naturally! It's like breathing - so present good stuff to feed their minds --> the alphabet and the sounds of letters, hymns, prayers of the Church, local birds and bird calls, poetry, local tree names, etc.(Classical, CM, Montessori) I've tried to give a picture of how these different philosophies could mesh in a preschool/early elementary home, and they can mesh well. I know because I've joyfully lived this 4 times now. They begin to diverge in some of the methods through which the ideas are applied, but even those can complement each other in many ways. Our primary methods are Charlotte Mason's.
Enjoy this time of nurturing these early years which are filled with wonder and joy over the littlest and the simplest things. Get some books on these different philosophies and start reading, and don't be afraid to winnow out those ideas that don't translate well in a home setting. Your own family educational philosophy will start to build itself, evolve, and work itself out through your days.
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SallyT
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We're a lot like what Jen describes, with Charlotte Mason as our "umbrella philosophy," influenced by other strands of thought. My actual "method," such as it is, is only very loosely CM.
I don't do a lot of formal narrations as such, for example, because I've found that my boys, particularly, tend to shut down when asked to retell what they've just heard. So I focus more on the idea of book discussion as a natural part of our family's life. Last night at dinner, for instance, we were all engaged in a conversation about our favorite parts of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a frequently hilarious memoir by a naturalist and member of a famous literary family which I've read aloud (semi-heavily edited because it's not really a younger-children's book) to all my kids. It's not one of our school books, but then, who says you don't learn from casual bedtime read-alouds, right? Anyway, my kids' memories of this book are virtually photographic, because it's a good and funny and memorable book which happens to have a lot of nature study in it.
That kind of encapsulates our approach. I basically unschooled kindergarten (my youngest child is now 8, so we're out of that phase, sniff sniff), focusing on nurturing a love for learning, and particularly a love for good books. By eight and nine (the ages of my youngest children a girl and boy respectively), my kids are doing a gentle daily routine whose center is read-aloud time (our read-alouds cover history, geography, science, literature, and sometimes math), but which also includes some time spent on core "sitdown work" in writing (copywork, mostly) and math. My now-9yo son is a very, very kinetic kind of person, and I actually delayed even thinking of him as a kindergartener until after he was 6 -- before then, he was unwilling to do anything remotely formal-learningish at all. By 6 he was much more willing to sit down with me for at least small increments of time to work gently on reading and math.
By high school we're much more committed to formal work -- having been kind of unschooly in early life hasn't precluded my older children's having a really strong, rather traditionally-schooly/classically-oriented work ethic as middle- and high-school students. I still give them a lot of say in what and how they learn, as long as they're following a trajectory that will keep the doors open for the pursuit of higher education, but from about 12 onwards, both my older girl (now 17 and a college freshman) and boy (now a 14yo 8th-grader) have exhibited a readiness for real, committed study that I wouldn't have expected, given their resistance at earlier stages. So I think that the philosophy you espouse, or at least the dominance of a particular philosophy, may have as much to do with your child's stage of cognitive development as anything else.
That said, I think that Jen's breakdown of the way the different philosophies play out in early childhood is excellent and looks a lot like what we've done. Even when we've been "officially" unschooling, my kids have naturally memorized a lot of poetry, just because we read the same poems over and over, and rhymes are mnemonic devices. You don't have to make a point of memorizing poems, as you might if you were following a formal classical curriculum; if you're reading and enjoying poems together, your child will memorize his favorites without even thinking about it. My younger kids also could sing the Salve Regina in Latin at one and two, because we listened to it on a CD and sang it ourselves at home. As Jen suggests, you can feed those little minds with all kinds of wonderful things without having to make "educational experiences" of them -- just naturally, in the course of your daily life together, you can be laying the foundations for more deliberate and strenuous learning later on. In educationese, by the way, this would be called providing "schemata," or frameworks for reference, for processing information and understanding concepts at a more advanced stage. For example, child who intuitively knows a handful of Latin words has a frame of reference for learning more Latin, plus figuring out a wealth of English vocabulary, understanding how any language works, etc. So singing the Salve Regina is actually providing a whole set of linguistic schemata for later learning.
Have fun -- this is such a wonderful age, and it passes so quickly! Enjoy your time with your young children.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Philosophy of Education
Topic: Matching philosophy to learning style?
