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A Review of Wanda Sanseri’s “Spell to Write and Read”
If any of you talked with me in person last summer, I likely told you that I planned to teach Samuel how to read. Well, we’re still working on that! Samuel makes progress every week in his learning, and I make progress in my teaching. I’ve been encouraged over the last couple years by moms in our Classical Conversations (CC) community who told me that reading didn’t really “click” for their younger boys until around age eight. (Also a likely time for a young boy to go through a growth spurt, I’ve heard. I can’t imagine what a growth spurt then will be like for Samuel because he’s already so…
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The Power of Habit
According to Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit, Prologue pg. xvi), the study of habit goes back centuries. Educators, psychologists, scientists, and (more recently) marketers have all studied how people change their behaviors and why they turn those behaviors into habits in the first place. As someone who has tried to change her eating and exercise habits many times (and sometimes with success) over the last ten years or so, the idea of habit interests me very much. In her book Home Education, Charlotte Mason talks about how habits form the core of a good education. While not using the word habit specifically, the Bible discusses the idea of habits.…
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Charlotte Mason vs. Neo-Classical vs. Classical (Part Three)
Welcome to part three of my series on education. Congratulations for sticking with my sometimes-scattered thoughts for so long. Here come my conclusions. First, Dorothy Sayers may be correct in saying that most children in the elementary grades like the repetition of grammar. I, however, can attest that her “ages and stages” plan does not apply to every child. I have a young boy living in my house (he shall remain nameless) who gets bored, irritable, and antsy when we try to do memory work. He wonders why we’re repeating the same things over and over again. Why aren’t we moving on, Mom? Can we do something else? We already…
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Charlotte Mason vs. Neo-Classical vs. Classical (Part Two)
You may be wondering how Charlotte Mason differs from classical education and how classical education differs from neo-classical education. I asked myself the same question not too long ago. After reading a slew of discussion forums and articles online, I came up with these working definitions. I’m going to begin with neo-classical because that’s where we’ve found ourselves the last couple years. Neo-Classical Popularized by Dorothy Sayers’ essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” neo-classical education divides the trivium (grammar, dialectic [or logic] and rhetoric), so essential to classical education, by grade levels. According to Classical Conversations (CC), which I categorize as neo-classical, students in preschool through sixth grade study grammar.…
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Charlotte Mason vs. Neo-Classical vs. Classical (Part One)
For the past few months, I’ve been doing research on different educational methods. Samuel will begin first grade this fall, so I feel like this is the first year that will really “count.” We must send an “intent to homeschool” letter to the school district, and start keeping track of some of his schoolwork. I also feel like this is the year to find out what works for him and what doesn’t as far as curriculum styles go. For the last two years, we participated in a Classical Conversations community. We love the families who are part of our group, and thank God for all the friendships we’ve made and…