Read Along: For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

I'll be hosting a read along of Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's book, For the Children's Sake on Substack. My first post will be in early June and will cover the Introduction and Chapter 1.

Whether you are a parent, home educator, a teacher, a grandparent, an aunty or uncle, or you have a heart for children, this book will show you how to extend learning to every facet of life. Good and true ideas may be found in many different contexts and this balanced and practical view of education and life will be beneficial whatever your background or beliefs.

For more details see here.

Charlotte Mason on Religious Education

I started blogging through Charlotte Mason’s School Education (Volume 3 of The Original Home Schooling series) in 2014 and got as far as Chapter XII. I’ve been reading it again this year with an online group and using this opportunity to start writing about it again.

So here are some thought on a few of the topics in Chapter XIII, 'Some Unconsidered Aspects of Religious Education.' 

The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt, 1851

In this chapter Mason touches on a few of the more practical principles which seemed to her to be essential in order to bring children up in ‘the nurture and admonition of the Lord.’

She starts with the principle of authority and the fact that most of us who have authority over someone are aware that we, too, are acting under a higher authority. 

We can’t let ourselves off the hook with “Do as I say, not as I do.” It’s hypocritical to require our children to be under authority if we reject it in our own lives.

When Mason wrote this volume in the early 1900’s, the exercise of authority was believed to have a stifling effect on individual personality. In our age of individualism that belief is even more firmly entrenched. Anything that smacks of authority is seen as detrimental to the growth of personality.

If we take the example of good and just government, we see its role as defending liberty. Laws are in place to restrain or punish those who interfere with the rights of others and to endorse those who do what is right. 

Proper authority doesn’t oppose the development of an individual unless that person is on a morally wrong track. It’s wrong thinking to equate harshness, punishment and force with the idea of proper authority. This kind of authority doesn’t punish but prevents us from doing wrong. The penalties that follow us through life are the natural consequences of broken law. Proper authority is preventative and helps to keep us from severer penalties later on.

Mason next considers the laying down of habit in the religious life and her first concern is the thought life. 

‘...every act and attitude is begotten of a thought, however unaware we be of thinking.’

A child needs to be guided into true, happy thinking; that ‘God should be in all their thoughts.’

With little children, devotional living (using everyday circumstances to teach into their lives) is something we can do to help instill and reinforce these habits of the thought life. Nature gives us an ideal opportunity for this and we have many instances in the Gospels where Jesus himself used the natural world to illustrate and teach - ‘Look at the birds of the air...’ 

‘To keep a child in this habit of the thought of God - so that to lose it, for even a little while, is like coming home after an absence and finding his mother out - is a very delicate part of a parent’s work.’

Reverent Attitudes - Mason believed that ‘the form gives birth to the feeling’ and that our aversion to ‘mere forms’ and the feeling that it’s ‘best to leave the child to the natural expression of his own emotions’ may be wrong. That children should be taught how to be reverent - to show/feel deep and solemn respect - is something worthwhile to consider now when spiritual instruction has a tendency to be dumbed down. Children given twaddle and cartoon characters won’t develop habits of attention and real devotion. Turning everything into fun or entertainment won’t deliver inspiring ideas in spiritual things - and a single great idea can change the course of a life.

Regularity in Devotions - this was an opportunity for our reading group to share how we each went about laying down habits and it reinforced the fact that each family is different in how they go about this in their homes or even at different stages of family life.

Idealism can produce unrealistic expectations but family devotions doesn’t have to be complicated or look a certain way. It can be something simple such as praying together, reading the Bible aloud, some sort of devotional reading, listening to/singing a hymn together, or a child might ask a question and you take it from there; taking advantage of seasons such as Advent or Easter to introduce a time of devotions together.

Families are sometimes messy. Dads aren’t always around or some family members may be antagonistic to spiritual things but God will honour your efforts to pass on your faith to your children. We don’t have to wait for ideal circumstances - they may never come. As Deuteronomy 6 shows us, there are endless opportunities throughout the day and untold ways to impress these things of the heart upon our children:

‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.’ 

Which brings me to one of my favourite ideas from this chapter - 

* That we make sure to prevent the separation of things sacred and things (so called) secular in the child’s mind and that we recognise that the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind. Instilling an overall sense of the presence of God in our children's lives strengthens this aim. *

Our children ultimately need to establish their own religious habits and a big part of that is for them to see that it is something we do ourselves.

Young children have a keen sense of wrongdoing and will keep their feelings turned inward. They might sulk, get passionate or be just plain naughty and have no idea that ‘there is a Saviour of the world, who has for him instant forgiveness and waiting love.’ 

I’ve observed that children sending a child to a ‘naughty chair’ as a form of punishment may encourage this bottling up of emotions and wallowing in self-pity. I’ve seen the banished child stew and come out worse than they went in. I understand that sometimes a child needs to be taken out of a situation to calm them down but I think that’s different. I had to do this with one of my sons because he had a quick temper but he knew I wasn’t punishing him. It gave him space and a way out of the temptation to lash out in anger.

Some closing thoughts:

Life can throw some difficult things at us and it’s important that we keep close to the Lord ourselves. We teach what we know so we need to make time to feed our own spirits before we can pass anything on. We are ALL under God’s authority - our children need to see this in our lives. 

Although we can’t ‘make’ our children follow God we can make it attractive for them. We can be firm about our beliefs but do so in a way that our children can always approach us. Forcing our beliefs onto our children can backfire.

The good news is that we’re not on our own. If we don’t have the wisdom we need we can ask for it.

It’s important to remember that Christianity and religious education isn’t a legalistic process where we tick the boxes but it is about a Relationship.

‘The very essence of Christianity is passionate devotion to an altogether adorable Person.’

Feed Them on Things Worth Caring For

If you are familiar at all with the writings of the 19th Century educator, Charlotte Mason, you will know that one of her signature ways of illustrating a liberal education is to compare it to that of a feast that is spread before the child.

As educators we are responsible for choosing the food for the feast. If we provide a variety of excellent food and allow the child liberty to choose what appeals to their taste, nourishment will take care of itself.

I think the feast metaphor is very apt. A child’s food preference can change over time and they can acquire a taste for things they rejected in the past. One of my sons would have lived on bread alone if I’d let him, but it wouldn’t have been a healthy diet. His tastes in food developed much more diversity as he grew, as did his intellectual tastes and appetite, because he was served nourishing food – literally and metaphorically.

The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton was published in 1922 a year before Charlotte Mason died. I read it recently and was impressed by a couple of passages that touched on education as they shared a close similarity to Mason's educational ideas.

Wharton was American but she spent much of her time in Europe (The Glimpses of the Moon was set mostly in France). During WWI she remained in Europe and established schools for children escaping from Belgium after the German occupation. She had a 'gift for languages and a deep appreciation for beauty - in art, architecture and literature': Edith Wharton | The Mount | Edith Wharton's Home

Merry Family by Jan Steen, 1688

'Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowed her.'

The Fulmers were an artistic couple living in a cramped cottage and both Susy and her husband to be, Nick Lansing, had spent time with them and their noisy family before they had considered marriage. They couldn’t understand how the Fulmer’s lived as they did - bad food and general crazy discomfort -  but they had more amusement in their company than they had with any of their rich friends and their opulent house parties.

The Lansings married some time afterwards after hatching a scheme whereby they’d live off their wedding gifts of money and accommodation but with the understanding that if either of them found a way to climb the social ladder, the other would not stand in the way but agree to a divorce. Barely a year later their plans had unravelled and out of desperation Susy agreed to look after this ‘uproarious tribe’ while their parents were in Italy.

'But in these rough young Fulmers she took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer’s bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and spoke with the voice of wisdom.

That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty. From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.'

Charlotte Mason believed that children should be given the best going on the subject - really good books; that we should try, however imperfectly, to make education a science of relationships. These thoughts from Edith Wharton on education - feed children only on things worth caring for - were an unexpected surprise to me and echoed the ideas that I've been reading in Charlotte Mason's writings.  

The tentacles of the science of relationships are far reaching.

We're using The Glimpses of the Moon instead of The Great Gatsby for Literature in AO Year 11.

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish - a Curriculum for Young children

 It has been very encouraging to see new business ventures emerge within the home education movement in recent years. Downloadable products are especially helpful to those outside of the USA who pay a premium for postage and this format lends itself well to learning another language. 

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish is a Curriculum for teaching Spanish to young children. So far the author has downloadable resources that may be used with very young children to help expose them to the language and also for Year 1. She is planning a Year 2, a program that will focus on learning to read Spanish as well as introducing copywork and dictation to learn to write Spanish and will be following the Scope and Sequence of the PNEU (scroll down) for formal lessons and for when to introduce reading and writing.  

The author recommends the lessons be woven into your days, e.g. the poetry informal lesson could be done during tea time, the challenge (replacing an English sentence with Spanish) when they wake up and so on. 

For the early years, two lessons of five minutes a week where the child learns a very short song for a month through play and exploration is suggested.

For the formal lessons for Year 1, two lessons of ten minutes each week are recommended and one ten minute lesson a week for the poetry recital. In addition, a lesson of fifteen minutes a week for song study is suggested.

Audio links to Spanish music, stories, songs, and pronunciation are given via QR codes which are very easy to link to with a mobile phone. Nature walks, poetry and Bible verses are included in each unit.

As you can see, this is a very immersive and gentle method of learning a foreign language which is very consistent with a Charlotte Mason approach.

The home page of the Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish website has a link, Expectations by Age, which has ideas on how to use the curriculum with different ages.

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish is an economical and attractive curriculum. There are some free resources to download and if you subscribe to the website you get 15% off your order.

Nature Study in Australia: The Christmas Bush & a Lakeside Holiday

Christmas Bush (Ceratopetalum gummiferum) - is an Australian native that flowers in spring. It's not the petals or 'flowers' that stand out, though. This native bush or small tree is unique in that its sepals turn a brilliant red colour after flowering. Just in time for Christmas, hence the name, Christmas bush. I took some photos at different stages over the space of about a month. A couple are magnified to better show the flowers, which are quite small.

Magnified photo of the flowers

They are quite delicate and from a distance look bushy, like the first photo I posted above

A non-magnified view

And the sepals put on their show in summer

Our pre-Christmas lakeside holiday. We took the opportunity to have an extended family holiday while everyone could get time off work etc. 16 of us & it was great.

The going down of the sun

A jog along the beach - there are magnificent beaches all around Australia & lots of empty space to enjoy

Motor boat rides and kayaking - we took our two grandchildren out on the boat. I went in the double kayak with my daughter-in-law who is 8 months pregnant & very fit! She did the steering...I also went out with my daughter, who is very swim fit & kept telling me to put a bit more effort into my paddling!  I didn't do too badly with the jogging along the beach - my son was a bit more diplomatic and told me not to worry about keeping up with him.

Aunty & Uncle on beach duty

'I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.'

John Masefield

A Charlotte Mason Highschool: In-between Years 10 & 11

Last month I wrote a post about our Year 10 studies. I'm now thinking about and making plans for Year 11 which Hails won't be starting until next year after a Christmas break. Now, for the interim, we are keeping up with cello lessons and exam preparation for her final exam in the first half of next year.

We started Novare General Biology, a new science curriculum, which I wrote about here and will continue that for the rest of the year and into next. This has inspired an interest in microscopy. We have an average, inexpensive sort of microscope but it has an attachment for a mobile phone so you may photograph what you're observing. This has been a big plus as Hails has an interest in photography and it's easy for everyone else to have a look without adjusting everything each time.

Microbehunter on YouTube has some great videos on all things related to microscopes and microscopy, including some good advice on choosing one suited to your situation (you don't need to spend a lot of money!!) and we've been watching these. He has also reviewed and highly recommends 'The Microbe Hunters,' by Paul de Kruif, a classic book on the major discoveries of the microscopic world that Ambleside Online uses for Years 8 to 11. 

Other books for our interim time:

Economix by Michael Goodwin; Illustrated by Dan E. Burr - we've had this for a few years and my next youngest, who is studying Economics at university, recommended his younger sister read it. It's a light, fun, graphic book on the economy - how economic forces affect you and have shaped history. My husband loves watching the nightly financial news and after reading this book Hails said, 'Now I understand what they're talking about!'

War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy - this is her slow read, which isn't her usual style, but she's reading a bit most days and once she was a few chapters in she started to enjoy it. 

World War I: The Rest of the Story and How it Affects You Today by Richard J. Maybury - an interesting perspective on wars and history. This book is followed by his book on World War II which we will use next year also. 

Discretionary Reading:

Escape or Die, The Dam Busters, The Great Escape, and Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill (WWII)

We Die Alone by David Howarth (WWII)

The Venetian Affair by Helen MacInnes

Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour - a superb book, written by a Palestinian Christian

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

Raw sugar crystals

Something new that I've taken on is working with My Homeschool, an Australian Charlotte Mason Inspired homeschooling curriculum that provides a complete curriculum from Kindergarten up to Year 9 and registration assistance for Australian families all over the country. It was started in 2017 by Michelle Morrow and during this Covid year it has expanded to serve about 600 families. I've been helping to run homeschooling workshops on the Charlotte Mason method via Zoom and just love doing it! 

Nature Study in Australia: Winter

These are some of our recent nature gleanings. On a visit to a local park this very tame rabbit was having breakfast and remained totally oblivious to us and we were able to have an unplanned nature study observing him/her feeding.

 

We've used Nature Studies in Australia by William Gillies this year for studying Natural History in Australia and finished it the other week so now I'm reading The Wilderness by Amy Mack (1922) aloud. It's only 26 pages in length but it fits in nicely with the course from U of N. A free online version is available here.

 

Last week we had a walk down near the creek after quite a bit of rain. We have a waterfall that gives a spectacular display after a good amount of rain and this was the first time that these two had seen it like this. My granddaughter (who's nearly 3 yrs old) pointed to it and called it a shower. 

Here they are having a good splash in a puddle. My grandson (nearly 2 yrs of age) calls any body of water a puddle including the river we visited a couple of months ago.

Miss 15 yrs and I signed up to do the free University of Newcastle's Natural History Illustration course. Hails had already done it about 2 years ago and wanted to do it again so I joined her this time.

This is my rendition of an echidna. We usually see about one a year around our area and I sketched this from a photo as they don't hang around for very long and start to burrow if they sense people are near.

This was this week's lesson was about 'developing good observational skills and accurately recording every detail you see in front of you; looking at both positive & negative spaces, breaking down complex subjects into simplified shapes & depicting a three dimensional object on a two dimensional surface.'

This is my drawing from that:

 

And this is Hails' drawing of a fox and the stages she went through in doing it - yes, she leaves me for dead, but she is very encouraging and likes me drawing (well, trying to) with her. 

A wattle in bloom... a little earlier than usual

Some fungi after all the rain

We've seen some new birds on our birdfeeder or on the camellia trees nearby but haven't been able to identify them yet. Our lyrebird makes an appearance from time to time and today we saw a black cockatoo in a tree just up the road. and we've had our yearly sighting of an echidna.

Character, Disposition & the Formation of Habits

Reading through Charlotte Mason’s second volume, Parents and Children, I was jolted by some ideas that weren’t new to me, but came as a bit of an epiphany this time around.
Even of you are only barely familiar with Charlotte Mason (CM) and her educational ideas, you probably know that habit formation is a cornerstone of her philosophy of education.
The ‘epiphany’ passages I read in Chapter 22 of Parents & Children (A Catechism of Educational Theory) look at how habits originate and how they may be corrected.

Some of the ideas discussed in this chapter are:

• That disposition, intellect, genius, come pretty much by nature.

• That character is an achievement, the one practical achievement possible to us for ourselves and for our children.

Character is the result of conduct.
We have ‘made’ ourselves by the thoughts we have allowed ourselves to think, by the words we have spoken, and by the things we have done.
How we behave (our conduct) has its origin in the way we habitually think. We are accustomed to think in a certain way and so we also act in a certain way.
The links between thought and conduct and the origin of these habits was where I sat up and took notice.

CM poses the question: What is the origin of these habits of thought and act? Her answer is that it is usually inherited disposition.

‘The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered, devout, is so, on the whole, because that strain of character runs in the family.’

Inherited disposition becomes more obvious to us when we marry someone who has been brought up in a family that has a very different strain of character running through it than the one we have been brought up in.
An inherited disposition may not be apparent until circumstances force it to surface e.g. when faced with loss, success, or major change. This was something I experienced in my teen years when my parents’ marriage fell apart.
I became more inclined to be pessimistic in my thought life (this was something my Dad had difficulty with) so much so that a close friend told me at the time that my mind was ‘like a gloomy cave!’

When I read the above passages from ‘Parents & Children’ recently, it shone a light on the course my thoughts had been taking at the time. I had allowed some old patterns of thought to cloud my thinking and hijack my emotions. I was feeling that old pessimism again.
I’m always surprised at how slyly the wrong habits of thinking gain their power.
I’d been reading ‘Tapestry of Life: Devotions for the Unique Woman’ by Nancy Corbett Cole, a book my husband gave me in 1994 and which I’ve read quite a few times since. She talked about taking every thought captive and reminded me that, ‘Salvation is both instant and constant. We are instantly saved at the moment we believe, and continually saved as we let go of the old life, and live in the new.’

Oswald Chambers said that ‘Salvation is easy because it cost God so much, but the manifestation of it in my life is difficult.’ 

The habits of the old life need to be replaced by new habits. Thomas a Kempis said, 'One habit overcomes another one.' So we develop the opposite good habit to replace the one we want to get rid of.
Bad habits make us slaves but once we establish new habits they make mental tracks for us that support and enable us to go in the direction we really desire to follow.

Unhealthy habits and negative thinking also close our eyes to the love of God and create the perfect environment for disappointment & despair. Our minds become gloomy caves and we lose hope. We may think our circumstances will never change, second guess the decisions we’ve made in the past, or believe a whole lot of things conjured up by a faulty perspective.

Corrie ten Boom, a survivor of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in WWII, a woman who knew all about fear, pessimism and despair, gave this advice:

‘If we do not see as much as we need or want to see, then we must tell it to the Lord. He will heal our eyes so that we see that the love of God is far greater than anything else.’

Notebooks in a Charlotte Mason Education - Year 6

Moon Jelly Aurelia aurita - common ocean animal often washed up on beaches. There's a video about them here.

Science Notebook 

This year Moozle has recorded experiments from some of her science books e.g. Archimedes and the Door of Science; The Sea Around Us; The Elements and The Mystery of the Periodic Table. The experiment below was one she watched via video on the Periodic Table:

Archimedes and the Door of Science

 The Sea Around Us

We had a severe storm with large hailstones about a week ago so we did a study on what causes hail and watched the short video below which explains it reasonably well. The hailstones were the largest we've experienced and made a tremendous racket as they hit the roof. They were about the size of eggs and we ended up with a smashed skylight and damaged pergola.

Nature Notebook

We've been using this series of videos on basic water colour techniques by John Muir and also some by Alphonso Dunn on using ink & watercolours to get some direction and help in this area. Moozle has also been inspired by the watercolouring in A Country Diary of an Edwardian Woman. I wrote a little about that here.

The Portuguese Man O' War or Bluebottle was mentioned in the fourth chapter of The Sea Around Us and around the same time as we were reading through that chapter, we went to the beach and there were heaps of them washed up on the sand. Moozle managed to get stung twice but fortunately, the bluebottles we get here are not the tropical nasties. The stings hurt but what hurt more was the bull ant bite she got a few days later out the back! I know because I got one on the under part of my foot and it was awful!
For an introductory video on recognising bluebottles and treating their sting see here. A marine-stinger fact sheet is here.

The Portuguese Man O' War is an interesting creature. It's not a true jellyfish but a colony of four different types of animals. My nature journal entry:

Bull Ant

We started a tree study earlier this month. So, of course, the best way to do that is to get up in the tree and have a good look.

Poetry Notebook