This weekly schedule has been working out well for us for quite a while.
Monday
Fifth Grader
I've added a few things to our line-up from Mater Amabilis and Ambleside Online. I'm going to use AO's composer and artist studies again, because we miss them from last year.
Mater Amabilis and Ambleside Online are free Charlotte Mason curricula.
http://www.amblesideonline.org/
Here's what we did today.
Bible
Action Bible Anytime Devotions
The Action Bible
Language Arts
McGuffey Reader
Queen's Language Lessons for the Elementary Child
Literature
D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
Ancient History
The Ch'-I-lin Purse
Geography
A Long Walk to Water
Art
He worked with polymer clay.
I listened to this older podcast from A Delectable Education. It went into detail explaining how Charlotte Mason taught mapping/mapwork. It honestly sounds a lot like the Trail Guide Geography Series.
https://www.adelectableeducation.com/2018/12/episode-151-mapping/
"The Fox and the Grapes: A Mini Unit Study" - a blog post from www.diyhomeschooler.com
https://diyhomeschooler.com/the-fox-and-the-grapes-a-mini-unit/
I thought these were interesting step-by-step instructions on how to teach grammar, writing and spelling using literature (without a curriculum).
This is what we did this year for art and music appreciation: Ambleside Online's artist and composer studies. These are free Charlotte Mason artist and composer studies online, grouped by school year and term.
Ambleside Online has a rotation schedule for both artist and composer studies. Each school year is divided into three terms, with one artist and one composer studied in each term. For this school year, we studied the art of Duerer, Caravaggio and Delacroix. For composers, we listened to the music of Beethoven, Vivaldi and Chopin.
What we did...
For composer study, I would just find the week and composer on Ambleside Online's website and click on the next song in the list. If we were supposed to listen to Chopin's Nocturne in E-Flat, I would click the link (which leads to Youtube) and play the music for my student while he sketched or colored with markers. We listened to one piece of music each week.
For artist study, I did the same thing. I went onto Ambleside's website, found the term and artist and clicked on the next painting. I would usually magnify each painting and we would look at details like brushstrokes, how well the artist painted hands, how accurate the animals looked, etc. My son decided that Caravaggio wasn't very good at painting horses, so we discussed that and other things he noticed. We did an artist study maybe once a week.
Did we like AO's artist and composer studies?
YES!! My son particularly enjoyed the artist studies. Listening to Chopin and Vivaldi as he was sketching/drawing was also a very pleasant way to do art.
Ambleside Online's artist and composer studies are simple, free and an enjoyable way to cover art and music appreciation.
Here is a link from Ambleside Online's website. They have concise summaries of each of the six books in Charlotte Mason's original series.
Here is a link for all six books: https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMM/Summaries.html
I learned a bit reading through the chapter summaries of Home Education: https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMM/Summary1.html
A link to buy her series: https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMM/ModernEnglish.html
Here is a link to Ambleside Online's main page: https://www.amblesideonline.org/CMM/ModernEnglish.html
Karen Andreola is one of the educational pioneers who reintroduced the homeschool world to Charlotte Mason. I just stumbled onto her website this evening and really enjoyed reading about how Karen and her husband Dean tracked down copies of Charlotte Mason's writings in England and found a publisher to have them brought back into print in the 1980s.
https://charlottemason.com/our-story-charlotte-mason-comes-to-america/
Her description of the Charlotte Mason method is also worth reading:
I have never used these, but I recently stumbled across them and they look interesting. There seems to be an explosion of Charlotte Mason materials in the last couple of years!
Podcasts
I've been enjoying some homeschool podcasts these last couple of weeks. I don't usually listen to podcasts, but these have been interesting and inspiring.
One podcast has been A Delectable Education. Here are the episodes by topic: https://www.adelectableeducation.com/episodes/ The podcasts center on using the Charlotte Mason method in your homeschool.
The second podcast I listened to is from Simply Charlotte Mason. https://simplycharlottemason.com/audio-video-podcast/ I didn't really learn anything listening to this podcast, but it would be a good homeschool beginner podcast. The speaker also keeps some of the podcasts very short, so it's easy to listen to in the car while you're waiting to pick up your kid from sports, etc. (Well, that's when I was listening to it.)
Blogs
Since I'm on a roll listening to podcasts, I've been following rabbit trails on several blogs lately, too. This one has a ton of Charlotte Mason information and even I (after homeschooling for 15 years) was learning things from it: https://sabbathmoodhomeschool.com/
I like this blog, also. http://joyouslessons.blogspot.com/
And, one last blog. https://lettersfromnebby.wordpress.com/ The very first post on this blog was a response to Susan Wise Bauer's podcast that I was listening to last week.
I just stumbled on this: Under the Home, a free Charlotte Mason curriculum for grades K-5.
I only clicked around the website for a few minutes, but I spent some time looking at the music selections and really liked what I saw.
Link to the Fort Worth Zoo's Website Tickets are about $22 adult, $18 for children. There's a half-price Wednesday, but it was extr...
