Sunday, June 19, 2011

"When Children Love to Learn"

I'm reading a Charlotte Mason book right now called When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy for Today. It's a collection of essays or articles by different authors tied with Charlotte Mason. So far, I'm really liking what I'm reading. It's funny how some CM things can come across as so regimented, so un-Montessori that I don't understand my pull toward incorporating some CM; this book is not one of them. I feel like I can bring in CM in a useful way to our homeschooling, without having the "prescribed" CM structure. Some of what is shared has felt soooo Montessori, from one woman's account of how she ran an after-school kind of program in her house for underprivileged kids (it indicates a certain structure that she started with, but then after a while, she gave them more choice--sound familiar?) to another part where they talk about the importance of the environment; you could've sworn this part came right out of a Montessori book!

I'm not very far into it, but if you have any interest in incorporating CM in a *gentle* way, this feels like a good book to start with. I've read so much from Ambleside Online for years--it's so highly structured and focuses still on texts from the past. This book really gives a feel, so far, for how CM doesn't need to be quite that structured--nor that old. ;)

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