Charlotte Mason Homeschool Cottage

It’s my 21st anniversary today! And to celebrate and remind myself – yes, it really is summer somewhere  (just not where I am), I am having a Special Summer Sale on my Insects – A Unit Study using Charlotte Mason Methods and More ebook! I am doing my best to finish my next one – Nature Study, Nature Journaling, and Poetry – but life has gotten in the way these past two months. (So for all those who signed up for my newsletter and have entered for the drawing of a free copy, I apologize for the delay – I haven’t forgotten. It’s coming soon!)

Anyone, who hasn’t entered yet for the chance to win a free copy of Nature Study, Nature Journaling, and Poetry, you still have time due to my overscheduled life these past two months! Just sign up for Katie’s Homeschool Cottage Newsletter !

Now, for the Sale! For a limited time, maybe until I start seeing signs of summer in the Northeast, you can purchase Insects: A Unit Study using the Charlotte Mason Method and More for $6.50. (I think you have at least a week or two, maybe more. We have had nothing but rain and have been barely into the 70’s most days.)

Here is what you get in this 82 page unit with suggestions for preschool through high school:

• Lists of Living Book suggestions that can be found free online,(these are the ones I have used in my lesson plans I have done for you), the library, or purchased through an online store like Amazon.   In these economically challenging times, I have tried to make this a complete unit study where you do not have to purchase anything else unless you want to -  all of the materials can be found for free.
• These Living Book titles include Charlotte Mason style literature, quality non-fiction resources, poetry selections and anthologies, and activity books. A brief description is also included for each title with a suggested age range.
• 4 Weeks of daily lesson plans for you to follow (does not include math and history and is not a complete English course)
• Each day contains A Reading Selection from Charlotte Mason style literature from which your child can orally narrate and write down on the provided notebooking pages. There are even sections in the unit that give you direction and suggestions on how to use Ms. Mason’s methods with the lesson plan for your younger, middle, and upper children.
• Each daily lesson plan is divided into two separate plans, one for elementary and one for middle and high school that overlap in places for group activities. You can pick and choose what you want each of your children to do individually or as a whole family. I have just given you options to choose from to allow older children to explore and learn independently at times when it is most suitable. This gives you the time to sit and read with the younger children, while the older children are going into the subject matter in a greater depth, but still allowing everyone to work and learn together at times.
• 22 Copywork selections are provided, consisting of  more simple ones for the younger children and longer and more complex ones for the older children – paragraphs from suggested living book titles and poetry.
• 16 different notebooking pages – all different, some labeled and decorated, some unlabeled, some specifically for taking on a nature walk to document your day.
• Lists of online resources and links to online activities, movie clips, activity ideas, manipulatives, insect flash cards from simple to entomological classification, cute preschool crafts and more hands-on crafts for the older children, quality on-line resource information in a fun format and also technical information for the older children including how insects affect their daily lives and our agriculture, science, and medicine.
• Lists of Hands-on activity suggestions for you to do with simple materials with your children in a science experiment format, just have fun applying what we know format, full lapbooks, or get outdoors and explore. You’ll be amazed at what you can find yourself doing and enjoying bugs!
• Each piece of copywork for that week’s lesson comes with a daily focus skill on either a grammar application for them to take notice while doing their copywork, vocabulary or spelling word review, or a literary element discussion, or a combination of these. You will be so happy to see your child recognizing these skills in good writing as they copy these pieces everyday in preparation for dictation at the end of the week.
• There is a suggested activity to do after the reading, narrating, and copywork is completed. You can choose to do the activity or skip it if you don’t have time, save it for another day for another activity you wish to skip, or replace it with a whole new one from our Activity Suggestions list.
• At the end of the week there is a nature study type activity, most outside, some inside in case the weather does not want to cooperate. You’ll find yourself virtually dissecting an insect or skimming a pond and examining insects before they morph into something that looks like a totally different bug. Nature Journal pages are provided to take with you on some of your outings for a more relaxed and exploratory experience.
• We have provided the opportunity to include a short poetry study in this unit. From reading some aloud or examining some literary elements in poetry to learning how to write a specific form of poetry and combining it with an art project.
• There are a few writing suggestions included in the lesson plans to practice writing a fable based on the insect theme, and modeling and writing a personal narrative.

This unit study is designed to allow you to use the daily lesson plans as they are, use some parts and not others, move parts around if you want, or exchange pieces that are in the plan with other ideas you like from the lists provided for you. It’s that EASY. You get to customize your plans to fit your child’s needs.

AND, there is so much here, you can keep going after 4 weeks or you can use this unit year after year and still not use everything in this unit. I have given you two different kinds of blank lesson planning forms to use so you can make your own plans in the way feel most comfortable.

There are suggestions and directions to guide you in using Charlotte Mason’s methods in your homeschool and how to use those methods when studying Insects with this unit study.

I hope you will enjoy the time spent together with these quality readings and activities with your family and really digging into homeschooling the Charlotte Mason Way without the worries and stress of pulling materials together!

If you have any questions, please email me at katieshomeschoolcottage@yahoo.com and I will be glad to answer them. If you have any topics you would like to see developed, email that to me too! I’m always looking for ideas!

Order your Insects: A Unit Study using the Charlotte Mason Method and More now before the Insect season is over!

We are offering this unit at a special introductory price of $9.95, normally offered at $14.95! Now on Sale for $6.50 as a Summer Special!

Click on the Buy Now link below the ebook picture and you will be taken to paypal to complete your purchase. Then you will have directions to automatically download your item.

 Now on Sale for Limited Time – $6.50!

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Remember, we have links to the Free Online Libraries on our website under Free Online Books and we have our own Unit Study Resource Store where you can browse the titles suggested in the unit’s Living Books list to look at their descriptions or to purchase. Just look for them under the heading Insect Unit Study and click to open that store. Thank you! We really appreciate your business! Please let us know what you think! We want to know! 

I love using  Charlotte Mason’s methods. I don’t profess to be an expert or even a “pure CM’er.” I am, though, a homeschool mom of two boys with very different learning styles, personalities, and talents. I have tried many different materials (my shelves and closets will back me up on this) and different teaching and learning methods. Now, after a number of years, I feel like we have found something that works for us. I enjoy using alot of Charlotte Mason’s ideas, techniques, and philosophies – but unless I make them my own and tweak them so they are my comfortable way of doing things or my boys’ way of learning, these methods would not work as effectively for us as they do.

So, with fair warning to all those looking for “pure Charlotte Mason”, I would like to share with you some ways that we use narration in our homeschool that may be a little different than what Charlotte Mason might have had in mind.

Last week, I wrote about oral and written narration. I also included links that suggested creative ways to use narration other than completing notebooking pages.

This week, I would like to introduce the use of timelines and end of semester (or quarter) exams and high school essays through narration.

We do not avoid all forms of tests; it just hasn’t been a goal. We learn for the enjoyment with another goal of mastery, not a letter grade on a test. We do have however, oral quizzes periodically on vocabulary words, Spanish and Latin words, and science ( for my older son using Apologia) ( he makes flash cards for himself – he and I orally quiz from those in preparation for written tests for this program.)

You are probably beginning to see we use oral narration as a major technique in our assessment and evaluation. There are times it does not apply, as in math beyond simple computation skills and math facts. But alot of the time, oral narration is such a great means to evaluate your child’s knowledge and thinking skills, while giving him the practice in organizing and expressing his thoughts in a logical and coherent manner.

Our big evaluations or assessments are usually in our history study. We include literature, history, science, math, art, and music in our history study, so our periodic assessments include alot of subjects.

Our assessment takes the form of an oral narration as we place timeline figures onto our chronological timeline. We have long rolls of butcher paper with a line drawn through the middle. The top portion focuses on the western hemisphere and the lower half focuses on the eastern hemisphere.

Around what would be quarterly, we place timeline figures for what we have studied that quarter. As we place them chronologically, we take turns orally narrating what we have learned about that person or event. When a person is done, another does his own narration and adds new information or puts the information in his own words. By the end of the year, we have had about four oral exams covering most of what we have read in almost all subject areas.

We add to this timeline every year. When we are done homeschooling, each child will have a timeline from the creation of the world to the present day. We also will have revisited each time period at least twice and added to it with more timeline figures and narrations. You can use this idea for our timeline, or you can do the same kind of review and oral narration with a Book of Centuries.

The other use of narration is for high school essay preparation. As my older son gets closer to high school, while he does his oral narration, I will ask him a question or two that requires him to use higher order thinking skills to develop his answer. The question pertains to what we have read aloud or what he has read alone, but he needs to interpret or analyze the reading to develop his answer. Sometimes the question addresses the reading and makes a comparison or contrasting statement, or asks for a cause and effect analysis of two events we have read about or two time periods we have studied.

This practice prepares my son to think about what he has read and then organize his thoughts, so he can coherently explain them. Then he can write them down after giving me his answer and we have discussed it from different angles.

This also gives us the opportunity to practice different kinds of essay formats, depending on his answer. For example, to write an answer that includes a comparison and a contrast of an event requires a different format than a paper where he describes a cause and effect.

To give you some ideas of questions to ask to get your older children orally narrating and writing more complex narrations, I’ve included some links where you can find some.

HippoCampus has different subject areas, some AP. If you click in the chapter sections and look at their discussion questions, you might get ideas for questions when reading about the same subject.

studentsfriend.com discusses use of thinking skills in the study of history and geography and looking at causal relationships among other types of questions.

constitution challenge - this site focuses on the constitution and is for grades 5-8, and poses questions in a game show format, but includes the idea of orally narrating your answers while using some higher order thinking skills.

Enjoy experimenting with the Charlotte Mason method and try out different ways to use her philosophies and ideas in your home school; you might be surprised by the results. I know I was! And, I like to think she would be pleased. My kids are and that’s what makes learning so enjoyable for us.