Month: October 2011

The Imagination by Lori Lawing

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Up into the cherry tree  Who should climb but little me?  I held the trunk with both my hands  And looked abroad on foreign lands…   If I could find a higher tree  Farther and farther I should see,  To where the grown-up river slips           Into the sea among the ships,    To where the roads on either hand  Lead onward into fairy land,  Where all the children dine at five,  And all the playthings come alive.     In “Foreign Lands” from A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson paints a picture for us bigger people of just what is happening in the mind of the child who climbs that tree.  What’s he doing up there? He’s looking.  He’s imagining. My heart swells when I recall the early years with my children.  Stevenson is brilliant.  In his poetry he captures the beauty of childhood in verse:  the playfulness, the youthfulness, the imagination.  But he does more.  For the mother who reads it aloud, he instructs:   Listen, gentle Mother, this is how your …

Getting Ready for High School Science: Wonder and Order by Beth Pinckney

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For the last year or so on the ChildlightUSA blog, I’ve told you about my adventures with science teaching, Charlotte Mason style.  I am again teaching a group of homeschooled students, but this year those students are high schoolers studying biology.  Some of the middle schoolers who studied field biology with me last year are continuing with this year’s high school class.  Other students are new to me with this class. It is a delight and a privilege to work with these students.  As we delve more deeply into our study of living things, I am noticing as I did last year, that there are certain qualities among my CM educated students that set them apart, certain aptitudes that seem to be more developed among those students than among those that have not received a CM early education.  So, I’d like to share with those of you who have younger children, in particular, a few observations about how growing up and learning Charlotte Mason style helps to prepare children for later science studies. First, let’s …