A Charlotte Mason Inspired Education – Simplified {How we create our own Whole-hearted Homeschool Plans and a bunch of free planning downloads}

Having said that, there are a few major things that drew me to Charlotte Mason.  The first was her genuine love for the Lord and belief in His leading by the power of the Holy Spirit.   Second was her passion for children and belief that children are all created uniquely by God for a purpose – that they are born valuable people worthy of love, respect, and grace.  I also really loved her 3-fold philosophy where education encompasses so much more than just academics. 

Charlotte Mason has been a HUGE blessing to our family and her philosophies have completely revolutionized the way I look at education and the way we homeschool.  I am a big advocate for much of what Miss Mason taught and have tried hard to implement her methods into our homeschool.
Again, I’m in no way perfect and by no means do I say I’ve got it all figured out!  I have relied heavily of lots of prayer, research, and the loving guidance of Moms both in real-life and online who have helped me understand more about this wonderful philosophy.

It is my heart to simply share how we do things here in our home.  Over the past few years, I’ve learned that being able to piece together meaningful materials and books for for our family is a huge blessing.  This ability has saved me so much money and made our homeschool so much more flexible, living, delight-directed, and meaningful!

When it comes to implementing aspects of Charlotte’s philosophy, a firm understanding of her ideas and methods is important.  I highly recommend investing in (or borrowing) some good Charlotte Mason books if you are just starting out or wanting to learn more.  Her original volumes are the best place to start…

Some of my other favorites include: A Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola (probably my top fave), A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levison (super easy read that gives a great primer of the CM Philosophy), For the Children’s Sake by S. Schaeffer Macaulay.  Also, you can access and read much of Charlotte’s original homeschooling series right here.

Simply Charlotte Mason walks you through the ‘how’ of organizing your plans but leaves plenty of room for flexibility, which is what I needed and what I found so helpful, especially when I had no idea where to start.

I love this very simple article, What Is the Charlotte Mason Method?  It is a great place to start when you are hoping to start building your own Living Books, CM-style homeschool plan or program, or if you have no idea who Charlotte Mason is!  

SCM also offers a ton of resources to help you build a family-centered learning plan.  This is the Curriculum Guide  I have used to help organize our year(s).  I love that there is flexibility and there is a huge portion of the ‘curriculum’ (or reading choices) that are family or group work, as I’ve mentioned above.  This is quite different from Ambleside which gives an individual year and era for every student by grade.  I found this VERY overwhelming and almost impossible for our family.

The SCM plans are gentle and easy to follow and you don’t have to purchase their history programs or really anything from their page – you can (we did and love everything we’ve ever purchased) but you don’t have to.

THESE overview charts are also a fantastic starting place when you begin planning your Charlotte Mason homeschool.  They give an easy to view peek at what your Family Learning might look like and what you might want to plug in.

I’ve learned organizing a great Charlotte Mason-inspired homeschool plan is simply a process of filling in spaces.  I look at all the ‘subjects’ and then I fill in the spaces with high quality living books and conversational, engaging materials and resources.

Family-based Learning and Studies (things we do together as a family):

Bible

Scripture Memory

History 

Geography

Science/Nature Study

Poetry

Hymn Study

Literature

Habit and Character Development

Music and Composer Study

Art, Artist and Picture Study

Handicrafts
Foreign Language (sometimes, but not really… but you sort of should)

Individual Studies (each child is assigned their own work at an appropriate level):

Language Arts (copywork, grammar, dictation/spelling, literature, oral and written narration)

Reading (either learning to read or individual reading with narration)

Math

Notebooking

If the above list looks overwhelming to you, I promise – it’s not that bad.

For us, almost everything in the Family-based Learning section is READING.  Just reading lots and lots of wonderful living books about each topic and encouraging family narration.

Easy, right?  *smile*  Follow me here…

Thoughts on how to fill in the spaces:

Once you have decided on a time period, you can either purchase a package from Simply Charlotte Mason (or another similar idea) or you can do your own thing and piece together your own history read-alouds based on that era.  You can find and use TONS of historical living books lists online, which are usually classified by time period.  I compiled a list RIGHT HERE as well.

Basically, in History you are going to read, read, read, and read some more.  Living Books all about historical events, biographies, historical fiction, wonderful, engaging non-fiction titles, whatever makes the time period come alive!

Bible – I often get asked how we ‘do’ Bible.  Well, we just read God’s Word!  We don’t use elaborate bible curriculum at all.  We read scriptures together, we use living Children’s Bibles and have used Storybook Bibles when the kids were little.

We also use Bible Road Trip which is free and focuses on simply reading God’s word (chronologically) and Notebooking about what you are learning.

Scripture Memory – This does not have to be complicated AT ALL.  We’re using the Hide ‘Em In your Heart CDs this year, but you can simply find verses that have special meaning to you or are age-appropriate for your children and plug them in as you go.  Also, check out the Scripture Memory Box idea as well as Scripture Memory page on SCM, we’ve used both and love them.

Science/Nature Study – Focus on Nature Study in earlier years.  This should be so natural and easy!  Children have a natural awe of nature.  Read as many wonderful living books as you can that focus on the natural world.   Get outside and fall in love with God’s creation.  Observe, touch, ask questions.  Get excited about learning new plants, animals, trees, birds… you name it!  There are some good Nature Study resources listed here, and of course, I love NaturExplorers!

But, honestly?  You can totally do Nature Study for nearly free.  Grab piles of great living books from the library, go on a few meaningful Nature Walks every week, and have your children keep a simple Nature Journal.  (Check out some of the stuff we do for Nature Studies right here.)

Poetry –  So, for poetry, we just read poetry.  I know, I know… sounds complicated.  Honestly, I’ve invested in about 15 really good poetry books (most are just children’s collections) and we read through them together.  Maybe a poem per day or some weeks we will read maybe 3 poems in that week.  I can be very simple.  You can do poet studies if you like, but it isn’t really necessary in my opinion, especially in the younger years.  Reading and enjoying great age-appropriate poems is the idea here!  Find a great poem book and jump in!  There and TONS available for free at the library as well.

We have also found doing some poetry memorization to be so fun and very beneficial.  There are loads of short, fun poems that work great for this. This year we are memorizing many of Christina Rossetti’s poems.






Hymn Study – It’s a good idea to just start with the hymns you know or are familiar with.  I started this way and just did little google searches to find a very brief history of the hymn, shared that with the kids, and we tried to sing the hymn together.  Very simple.  This year we purchased Hymns for a Kid’s Heart, which has been a nice resource.  There are also some suggestions for hymns to learn right here.

Another option is just singing fun songs together.  For some people, hymns are really not their ‘thing’.  So, there are loads of fun scripture based or ‘sunday school’ style songs that kids love!  We sing lots of the tunes from Hide ‘Em in your Heart!

Literature – Oh, this is the fun part where you just get to go crazy and pick all kinds of awesome living books (picture books, novels, short stories, etc.) to read with the kids!  There are countless living book lists out there that you can use, including the one from SCM.  You can choose to have your titles flow into other aspects of your study (ie: historical fiction that goes with your time period), or just read books for the fun of reading them!

The focus here is good quality, living books.  We have used a TON of audio books from the library and listened to them in the car.  There are hundreds of wonderful classics available on audio book!

Habits and Character Development – You can do several things here.  Some people use God’s word and work through various aspects of Godly behavior and right living (ie: the Fruits of the Spirit) with their children.  Others use books like Laying Down the Rails or The Book of Virtues.  We use combination.  I like some of the suggestions here as well.

Music and Composer Study – Our family loves music so there is almost always music playing (usually worship).  We are also all learning instruments at home, which lends itself to a lot of discovery (and noise!).   At this stage, we do not do lessons outside the home.  We are using a program call Yousician for Piano, Ukulele, and Guitar.

For Composer Study, we simply choose one or two composers per year.  We read their biographies (there are many living book biographies about the well known composers), and we listen to their music.  We keep it pretty simple.

Art, Artist, and Picture Study – Art is something that can’t always be categorized.  Many kids are always doing artsy things!  I would say having an art program is pretty helpful to ensure an official ‘art lesson’ happens once every week.  This is why we have used ARTistic Pursuits for years now.   We also LOVE Art for Kids Hub.  Their are tons of great art programs out there, but you can also just use Pinterest to find some projects if you have to watch your spending.

For Artist and Picture Study, we simply choose 2-3 artists per year, learn a little about the artist, and enjoy and discuss their art.  It’s nice to choose Artists from the time period you are covering, but not necessary.  I can usually find living books and biographies about the artist quite easily and either invest in a great book of their art or check one out from the library.  We’ve also printed color prints to pin on our kitchen cork board wall.  Again, this does not have to be complicated at all and should be fun.  I love this list.

Handicrafts –  Oh!  This is where you get to Crochet and make Friendship Bracelets all afternoon and it actually counts as ‘school’!  We don’t do handicrafts as consistently as I’d like but in 2016, I want to really try to do an intentional time of ‘handicrafting’ every week.  In the past, we have done all kinds of things for handicrafts… Rainbow Loom, Jewelry, Paper Mache, Weaving, Carving, Knitting, Sewing, etc.  Lots of great ideas right here.

Individual Learning

Individual Learning is where each child has their own ‘plan’.

This is a bit trickier to walk through as I can only speak for what we’re doing for our kids at their specific ages.  Simply Charlotte Mason does have some ideas on their site about what you might consider doing when (and how much of it!).

If you are new to the Charlotte Mason way of doing Language Arts, I would recommend checking out some articles about reading, narration, copywork, and dictation to help get you started on plugging in appropriate tasks and materials for your children.

To see our individual choices for Math, Language Arts, Reading, and Notebooking, check out this post.

Putting it all Together:

Once you’ve chosen your books and resources, you can plug them into a sort of yearly list that can be easily put into Terms and then a weekly schedule.

There are many different types of schedules Charlotte Mason homeschoolers use.  I have made my own sort of plan based on what works for us.  Here are several ideas for possible weekly schedules.  Once you have a schedule that works for you, it will be fairly simple to start plugging in your book and resources choices.

Here is a basic scheduler I use to pencil in our term for Family Learning and Individual Studies for each child.  This is a very quick overview of what our weeks will look like.  I altered it a bit (I changed the grades to a space for additional reading and then each child’s name).  You can access the download for this schedule at the bottom of THIS PAGE.

Free Downloads for Planning and Organizing  

Oh goody, here’s where I get to gift you with some (hopefully) helpful downloads that I have created for our family.  They aren’t perfect and they may not work for every family, but, since they have been working for us – I thought, why not share?!  (hug)

Here is an easy to use Family Learning Plan I created to help plan each term (3 per year, usually).  This is meant to be a basic overview and helps with doing the ‘piecing together’ I’ve talked about in this post.

So, once I’ve penciled in our year, I move to the tasks of weekly scheduling (I’m never more than a week ahead).  So here are two options of the same schedule.  The 1-Page is more condensed into 1 page (you could probably figure that out on your own, but hey…), and the 2-Page… well, it’s two pages, you know, for people who like to write bigger and give more details…  *smile*

Our Living Books Lists Print-outs (click to download)

I’m also sharing a bunch of options (in one file) for recording and planning monthly Living Book Read-alouds. This is a great way to visualize and plan what your family will be learning and reading every month.  There are separate boxes for History/Geography, Nature Study, Poetry/Art/Composer/Hymn, Bible/Habits, etc.  I find this SO helpful, especially considering the backbone of the Charlotte Mason education is, well, reading books.

Basic Reading Log (click to download)

A Monthly Nature Study Planning Page (click to download)

Dont’ forget – Check out this entire page full of various schedule ideas and options from Simply Charlotte Mason.

I truly hope this post is helpful to you as you plan your homeschool!


Blessings and much love and encouragement as you journey to learn alongside your child(ren)!

More hands-on Planning Help…