Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Charlotte Mason Method Update

The kids are settled in bed reading and I'm enjoying a bowl of popcorn to top off my evening.

We have a lighter school schedule this week due to some other commitments. I'm taking advantage of the in-between free time to continue cleaning out and replanning the course of our studies.

Last week I introduced dictation to Lulu and Blakester via the e-book, Spelling Wisdom from Simply Charlotte Mason. It went over rather well. The kids read the selection I gave them out loud, then looked it over to see if there were any words they did not know how to spell. They were able to study the paper for as many days as needed, as long as they completed the dictation part with me by Thursday. Blakester took the initiative to copy it down a couple times to practice spelling it and to work on his handwriting. Lulu just read it over. When the time for dictation came, Blakester was able to correctly write out his selection, while Lulu missed a word. As suggested, I covered up the misspelled word with a sticky note and told her to study the correctly spelled word and then rewrite it on the sticky tab when she was ready. She's been walking around muttering the word to herself to help remember it. They were given their dictation assignments yesterday to start studying, so we'll see how it goes this week.

I mentioned in a previous post the next thing I was going to add in was picture study. We chose John James Audubon to study and I was able to find free prints online at Audubon.org and picked six of them to study. I'll introduce this next week. I'm excited about starting this since the kids are on board with it.

The third thing I'll introduce is poetry study. We already read a different poem or two each day.

I'll use the Simply Charlotte Mason poetry guide and choose a poet to focus on. We'll read a short bio on that person and then concentrate on one poem a week for six weeks. This way the kids get a feel for the way that particular poet writes.

Blakester has already made it clear he does not care for his current (new) California history workbooks. When we were at the library last week we chose some living books on the missions to start reading and he can practice his narration on them. I guess for now we'll ditch the workbooks altogether!

Til tomorrow-

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