In Which Tom Learns His Lesson

 by Anne White 

In English, a sentence stretches from left to right…A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements…Think of [the] main clause as the locomotive that pulls all of the cars that follow…If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later…[but] this variation works only when most sentences branch to the right, a pattern that creates meaning, momentum, and literary power. (Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer) 

Every sentence speaks of someone or of something, and tells us something about that of which it speaks…In our sentence we speak of 'Tom.' We say about him that he 'has learned his lesson.' The thing we speak of is often called the SUBJECT, which just means that which we talk about. (Charlotte Mason, Home Education) 

Listen.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story; it is polemic; it is opinion. (Neil Gaiman, introduction to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)

 Listen. I will tell you a story about stories.

In high school we were handed a book of classic short stories. We handled that book objectively, tightly, scientifically, trying to identify the exact bacteria on the lens of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Rocking Horse Winner.” We mapped the rising action, the climax, the denouement; wrote up our lab reports; got our marks.

In university, we had a course on The Short Story that took the opposite, subjective, biblio-therapeutic approach. If “Young Goodman Brown” or “Bartleby the Scrivener” reminded us of our boyfriends, landlords, weird uncles, that's what the story meant. Well, as Neil Gaiman says, if a reader tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

However, as every sentence speaks of someone or of something, so does every story. A good story deserves more than the reader’s subjective reaction. It is, though, about more than stuffing a square peg of character, voice, polemic, opinion, into a round hole of rising action, saying that's "all the story is about." Writing professor George Saunders has expanded on the idea of “someone”:

… perhaps the most radical idea of all [is] that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind. (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)

Saunders also says that, as we read a particular story by Tolstoy,

we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives. (same)

So, what is a better way to read, to write, or to teach novels, plays, stories? We go back to what Charlotte told us about sentences: they speak of someone, they speak of something that happens. We follow someone around as they swim in a pond in the rain, or drive through a blizzard, or surreptitiously slip a book into their pocket. As musical compositions begin with a theme and then introduce variations, so do stories. You thought the wolf was going to blow the brick house down, but surprise, you’re wrong. And here is the kicker: the story, as we receive it, is not only about the decisions made by the characters, but also by the author.

As apprentice writers, we watch for the ways the words themselves, the shapes of the sentences, the parallels and variations build suspense, fear, relief, delight. As readers, we are allowed to let them disappear, but only so that we can make even more discoveries (beyond weird uncles); so that we can begin living it. 

Start with subjects. Continue with verbs. If it worked for Tom, it can still work for us.

Language Arts on the Fly

by Leslie Laurio

Language arts are probably the easiest part of educating with Charlotte Mason's methods. It's so deceptively simple that I've graduated three students who are proficient in language skills without ever purchasing a Language Arts program or cracking open a spelling book. In fact, one of my graduates went on to major in English at college and was the subject of a doctoral thesis on CM's language arts acquisition.

What's the secret? It's this: you learn to read by reading, and you learn to write by writing. Or, to amplify it a bit, you learn to read and comprehend and know what words look like by reading, and you learn to write and spell and punctuate by using those things as you write, and sometimes by noticing your own mistakes and mentally correcting them.

But what does that look like?

 It might look like you're not doing much in the way of language arts. :-) But there's more learning going on with CM's methods than meets the eye. The details will probably look a little different from one home to the next, but here's how we did it.

In the early preschool years, I read picture books to my kids. We did lots and lots of reading.

When they "started school" at age six or seven, they started daily copywork. I would write a word or two on a sheet of elementary-lined paper, and the child would copy it underneath. In some cases, the child would trace it first and then try to write it. Tracing was always more fun with a colored pencil or highlighter! Choosing a word to write was pretty straightforward: "You liked the Peter Rabbit story we read today where he sees the white cat twitching its tail; would you like to write 'Peter' today?" My son might say, "Can I write 'white cat' instead?" So I would write "white cat" lightly in pencil on a sheet of lined paper and he would trace it, and then copy it. Sometimes the child had definite ideas of his own about what to write. One child wanted to write "Happy Birthday" every day for the two weeks before his birthday. Another child wrote her own name a lot. One child went through a cowboy phase and wanted to write "horse" every day, so I let him. Usually there would be little doodles of horses or something, and those are articles of "schoolwork" that I still cherish (along with one son's written narrations which were always bordered with stick figures dueling with lightsabers . . )

Later, when copying a single word became too easy, we moved on to short sentences, which I would write on lined paper for the child to copy underneath. It was always easy to come up with something, either from something going on in real life, or from something we had been reading: "Balto is a good dog," or "I am seven years old." "Polly is my pet horse." I usually just came up with something relevant off the top of my head, or sometimes the child already knew what he wanted to write: "I want to write, '"Molly is our new cat!'"

When we moved up to slightly longer sentences, I started taking things from real print. This was never difficult, since we're homeschooling with real books and always surrounded with text. I would pick up a book, usually one we were using for school that day, open to what we had just read, and scan the text for a suitable sentence -- something in the general vicinity of the length I wanted without any complicated spellings (no foreign names, or regional dialect) or complicated punctuation. If the book would lay flat, the child could copy straight from the book. If not, I would still write it out by hand for him to copy. But since copywork at this point was still straightforward sentences, it was quick and easy for me to write it out -- it took all of maybe 90 seconds.

Sometimes I put more thought and organization into it. One year I collected Bible verses from the Children's Bible we were using and we used those, starting from the shortest verse and working our way to the longest. I picked out specific verses I wanted my children to internalize, about God's love and mercy, and verses about kindness, that sort of thing -- never verses chosen to chastise the child for some besetting sin. (Years later, I came across that list of verses, and they are currently posted on on the AO forum.)

Later, some of my children chose their own copywork. One transcribed entire chapters from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Two of my sons transcribed George Washington's Rules of Civility -- we used a modernized copy because I wanted them copying correct spelling, not quaint antiquated English (but my daughter, who is currently doing that, insisted on using the original). I remind the child to try to copy word by word, not letter by letter, since seeing the word as a whole is what teaches spelling. I have a collection of quotable quotes about books and reading that I collected from the internet and saved in a document, and if any of my sons didn't have anything specific to write, they could use one of those.

As each child got older, his (or her) copywork increased in length, but never took longer than ten minutes unless the child just liked writing.

Around the time copywork started getting to a point where I thought the child could write a sentence or two on his own, we started written narrations. My first child did one written narration a week (because he loved to write, took a lot of time and care on his one narration, and was doing a lot of writing on his own outside of school). With the others, I think we started with a couple a week, then once a day, and settled at two half page narrations a day around seventh grade. Whatever wasn't written was narrated orally. In high school (around 10th grade), I started assigning written essays -- I collected SAT-type essay questions from the internet, printed them and cut them out, and the child would draw one from the collection, and that would be his writing assignment that day.

Around the time written narrations started, we also added studied dictation. My general method: open a book, pick a sentence. Hand child the book to study, when he's ready, I read the sentence out loud and he writes it. Boom, we're done.

We started dictations slow and easy: "Learn this sentence so you can write it without looking." It might be only four words long. After that seemed too easy, I made it tricky: "Learn this short paragraph with three sentences; you'll need to be able to write one of them without looking." My youngest is in the middle of this process now, and as I scan our school reading for an appropriate dictation passage, I'm starting to look for passages with quotation marks and semi-colons. Today's dictation was taken from Northanger Abbey, the chapter we read this morning. I never choose something she can't do, and she almost never makes a mistake. If she was making mistakes, I would back off and choose sentences with fewer complicated spellings, less punctuation, shorter length -- the point is for her to succeed, not to catch her in a mistake. The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and she much prefers this to copywork (we don't do copywork on the days we do dictation, it's either one or the other). She's always happy when it's a Dictation day and not a Copywork day.

Does that sound too easy? It actually is that easy -- in fact, it seems so self-evident that I feel redundant even writing it out. I find language arts to be the quickest, simplest, most painless part of a CM education. There's nothing to buy, no complicated curriculum to follow, no lists of vocabulary or spelling words to memorize, no contrived creative writing assignments -- the whole thing takes 5 or 10 minutes a day, and writing has never become a dreaded, tedious chore. In fact, most of my children's writing happens outside of school. With the skills they practice painlessly during school, they take off in their own time and write their own stories or plays or songs. I believe in making as little work and fuss as possible, and language arts is an area where simpler is truly better.

All the things I wanted to say, Part Four (last one!)

by Anne White

How do you keep resources and time organized in the upper years?

Charlotte Mason supplied her students with a carefully thought out timetable.  It made sure there was variety in the day, that a subject heavy in writing was followed by something different, and so on.  This also helped to keep things running smoothly when there were different ages working together,  needing the teacher's attention at different times. But since we want to encourage our students to take some responsibility for their own learning, we may decide to just give our older students a schedule or a list of things to be accomplished in the day or in the week, and let them figure out what to do when. At our house we are using a modified workbox system, where I load a row of magazine holders with the books we need for the day's school; but I also have a "teacher's binder" with lists of the chapters to be read and other ideas for the term. There are all kinds of ways to keep things on track, but which ones work best for you are going to depend on the particular needs and styles of you and your students, as well as whether you have your "courses" divided up into just a few major credits or not.  It's not hard to provide a few drawers or folders marked "Math," "Science," "Literature" and so on; but some parts of a CM education don't fit perfectly into those categories, and you may prefer to keep things a bit looser.

Cindy Rollins, longtime keeper of the Ordo Amoris blog, has a ritual called Morning Time, where all the students (and mom) get together and read things like poetry and Plutarch, do memory work, whatever works well as a group; and then they go off to do their invidual work. When I was homeschooling a middle schooler and a third/fourth grader together, we did a lot of combined readalouds and even things like science study together too; for those two years I tried to pick resources that would work for mixed grades.  Again, you may have to try things out; some students work well together, some work best with a parent, and some want to do it all on their own.

What are the possible pitfalls and problems of using CM in the upper years? What Daleks may try to exterminate your homeschool?

1.  Don't compare, don't worry about what everyone else is doing (or how well they're doing it).

2.  Don't underestimate the children, focusing on limits rather than possibilities.  One pitfall might be to overdo everything, overload and burn out; but the other might be to assume that certain subjects or books are too long, too difficult, or not relevant to today's world. Charlotte said not to drop whole subject areas just because we ourselves think they're too dry or too hard; it is important to open as many doors as we can, do as much exploring as possible.

3.  Even older kids need some variety, some surprises.  Charlotte Mason criticized people whose dinner menus were too predictable; I think she would have said the same about lessons that were always the same. Unless you have one of those students who gets severely stressed by mom's attempts to mix things up (there are some of those too), it's good to include some little twists and surprises.  Do some math or grammar orally.  Play a math game.  Spend some science periods looking through the microscope, or otherwise learning the material in a different way.  Find something different or interesting to do on Tuesday mornings or Friday afternoons--that might be when you check out nature trails, or discount times at the museum, or visit an elderly neighbour.

4.  Don't forget the whole-cookie analogy.  In our family, we tend to take a relaxed approach towards writing, including essay writing; we do use some commercial resources, but it's not very "programmed." Sometimes I've wondered if I'm shortchangiing my students by not making as big a deal of the formal, five-paragraph essay as other homeschoolers do; or by not giving them enough creative writing assignments. However, our older girls who have gone on to public high school have frequently had their papers picked out of the pile as exemplary.  And our youngest won a place in a student poetry anthology this year.  So the whole (cookie) is not made up of trying to glue a whole lot of unconnected crumbs together; the "top down" method of teaching writing largely by example seems to be just as effective.  (We use a few formal resources as they get older; it's not all osmosis; but I still think CM has given us an appreciation of what it is to learn these things naturally.)

To switch from Dr. Who to Star Trek for a minute, I like the ending of "The Undiscovered Country." Captain Kirk is heard in a voiceover saying:

Captain's Log, Stardate 9529.1: This is the final cruise of the Starship Enterprise under my command. This ship and her history will shortly become the care of another crew. To them and their posterity will we commit our future. They will continue the voyages we have begun and journey to all the undiscovered countries, boldly going where no man - where no one - has gone before.  

You are the worldshakers, the innovaters, the ground-breakers, the brave ones. You may have to fight off a few Daleks on your journey through the galaxy, but the adventure will be worth it.

And to add one thought for Christians who are listening or reading:  I heard this week from a pastor (and former homeschool mom) who has organized a series of short-term missions trips to Asia, focusing on children's ministries.  Being a person who likes order and organization, she always plans ahead as much as possible.  On this particular trip, she felt unusually un-organized; her team was much smaller than originally planned, she had fewer ideas written down, and so on.  However, she committed the trip (and her anxiety) to the Lord, and they went ahead, working in co-operation with a local church.  Can you guess what happened?  An unusually large number of children not only came for the programs, but committed their lives to Jesus Christ.  When we are weakest, He is strongest.  (Or to put it as the pastor did--when our binders are the emptiest, He has the most room to fill in the details.)  This is not to discourage planning ahead!--but rather to remind us all of God's faithfulness.  If He has called us to this journey, He can carry it out as well.