A Charlotte Mason Education

I ordered this book last year off Amazon. I was so excited to receive it in the mail. Who doesn't love packages in the mail especially ones with books?! I must say I was disappointed when I read this. This book has 20 chapters and each chapter is 1 or 2 pages long! The introduction is great. The book is basically an overview (broad overview) of what your school day would look like using the Charlotte Mason Method and without any of the depth and meaning behind it. (which makes a huge difference) I personally did not come across anything in this book that can not be found at Simply Charlotte Mason. In addition, I have not referenced the book once! Simply Charlotte Mason is a wonderful site loaded with tons of free information and more at decent prices. I would recommend the Simply Charlotte Mason website for a broad overview of what a "CM" day would look like. Next, I recommend For the Children's Sake (<-links to my review of this book) and then A Charlotte Mason Companion. Of course slowly working on reading Mason's own six volume set isn't a bad idea either!

WoW! So when I went to get the link for Charlotte Mason's Homeschooling series, I seen that you can get the books individually for $1.99 on your kindle!! Score!!! I'm soooo excited! (I got a kindle as my Christmas present from my husband)

*The above picture is linked to Amazon as well as all links except For the Children's Sake. On Amazon you can view inside all books.

**This is my personal opinion about A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levison.

Late Valentine's Day Post

The boys always wake up on Valentine's Day to a surprise! It's different every year and some years are more elaborate than others. But it is always celebrated! This year was a less elaborate year but as always fun!!

I hope everyone enjoyed their Valentine's Day!

Lessons 17 - 20

Since I'm so behind on posting my weekly MFW lessons I thought it would be best to bulk catch up. I didn't take many pictures in January but I'm back on track with taking pics. for February. :)

Lesson 17 ~ Kangaroo

• read about Australia in the Rookie Read About Geography book Australia
• Australia map work with a printable worksheet and the Tag world map
• found an early reader book at the library about Kangaroos
• watched National Geographic Really Wild Animals Wonders Down Under

Lesson 18 ~ Zebra

• read about Africa in the Rookie Read About Geography book Africa
• ran out of ink that week so no printable
• Tag world map work in Africa
• found an early reader book at the library on Zebras
• watched National Geographic Really Wild Animals Swinging Safari

Lesson 19 ~ Rock

• Read books about rocks
• had a rock tray
• made a volcano with Daddy

Lesson 20 ~ Jewel

• read information about jewels

During this time Chris finished his 100 chart.

That about sums up our last few weeks in MFW.

January Reading

What we've been reading this month:

Chris -

I'm so proud of Chris. He started out reading the Blues Clues (5stories), Puppy Tales (6stories), and Ready Readers (10stories). By the end of the month he is reading Levels 3 & 4, and Nate the Great!! So he has read a little over 34 books this month! All at his own leisure. None of it was forced. I'm just so happy and proud of him!

Zack - I've been reading to Zack out of this. Zack isn't too crazy about reading. These are great stories that capture his interest and are just long enough to challenge Zack to sit through the last 2-3 pages. Me - I try to balance fiction and non fiction. I usually average two books a month unless there's a reason to read more or less. Like one book has significantly more pages than my usual, has a lot of information to digest or sometimes more if I'm having a bad health month and have to rest more.

The last three books are Amazon linked if you would like to look at them.

January Poem

My Montessori Journey had some great posts on poetry. At the beginning of the year I had great plans for poetry. However, I found I had a hard time getting the boys interest and including it in general. When I read this post I knew I wanted to give it one more try!

So I found a basket around my home not in use. Picked a Poem. Found pictures to use and created the poem sheet. Then went to Michael's and bought my items. Total spent: $2.85

We have poetry time once a week on our last day of school using the same poem for a month. The boys loved it right away and when Daddy came home they had to show him! Now poetry time isn't boring. They even ask to do it sometimes before bed in place of a book! I'm so happy about this. I enjoy poetry and felt down that I couldn't figure out how to present it in an engaging way.

One of my favorite aspects of this is that it engages every learning style. Looker, Listener, and Mover. Because of this it captures the interest of every style learner and encourages any underdeveloped learning skills all while having fun and memorizing.

I already have February and March poems picked out. I just need to get all my items together.

Lesson 16 ~ Penguin

I'm finally getting around to posting last week's work. :) Here's what we did:

Map Work: On Monday we locate the continent we are going to learn about on the globe. Then I print out a map and they color that continent red and label it. We pull out the Tag map for fun to hear what it says about that continent. Last we read the Rookie Read-About Geography book on that particular continent.

Videos: Tuesday is our class video day. I mainly have this day when we are learning about subjects that are out of our ability to experience in person at that time. We watched a video on Antarctica by National Geographic's Really Wild Animals called "Cold, Cold, South".

Books: On Tuesday we read any overview books I can find on animals living in the continent we are learning about. Then Wednesday is when I introduce the books on the particular animal that MFW wants you to concentrate on. The books are linked if you would like to explore them on Amazon. :)

Music: We did music activity #2 found in the MFW's deluxe kindergarten curriculum. The boys really enjoy this music time. Which we do on Wednesdays. So far we spend about 15 minutes doing them.

I think that wraps up our week involving MFW.

Lesson 15 ~ Elephant

It was great to get back to school! In MFW's plan there are four weeks of learning about wild animals. Since there is no section that teaches geography that I can see, I decided to incorporate the continents into the wild animal lessons. So while elephant this week we also learned about Asia! Here's what we did:

Map Work: First we located Asia on the map as a whole.

Then we labeled a few countries in Asia.

I asked one of his grandparents to buy him the leapfrog tag map set for Christmas and it is fabulous for map work. There are little kids located around the world and you can hear them say something in their language, tell you what they eat for a meal, and play music listened to in their country! I thought that was pretty neat.

Books: MFW recommends The Elephant Who Couldn't Forget which sounds cute but our library didn't have it. Their next recommendation is 17 Kings and 42 Elephants. Our library did have that book but I found it ... let's just say ... we didn't read it. :) I did find this Rookie Read-About Geography collection at our library which is fabulous! We checked out one for each continent we're learning about this month. Chris was able to read through them well while learning a few new words and retained what he read. They are on my wish list that is how much I and the boys enjoyed them. Two books we enjoyed were Grandma Elephant's In Charge by Martin Jenkins and Elephants Can Paint Too! by Katya Arnold.

Music: We finally did one of the music activities that came with the curriculum! The first activity is dancing to Mozart while balancing a bean bag on your head. The boys had fun with it and it was nice including music in our school day. I plan to do one once a week now. I looked them over and they don't take long and there is hardly any planning involved. For the bean bag I put beans in a sock and tied the sock in a knot. 2 minutes!

Worksheets: There are now 5 worksheets a week. One for each day. The last one is a story book they put together. If you don't know and want to know about MFW (kindergarten) - you start out with three worksheets and by Lesson 15 (17 weeks into) you are have 5 a week.

Videos: Amazon's Video On Demand has a National Geographic series called Really Wild Animals. Each episode is $1.99 and they have two for each continent (that we are learning about). I chose one for Asia and they watched it two times during the week. They are around 20 minutes long so it's not a lot of TV time but they get a glimpse of animals in that continent and what parts of it look like.

Well I think that about wraps up what we did with MFW curriculum.