🤗 Sending lots of hugs!

I'm so sorry for your loss. 🤗

Hi! I created guides for most of the books by Dorothy Mills. We loved them at our house. 🙂 The guides follow the main principles of a Charlotte Mason education, but with some additional writing elements to it. It probably feels like a cross between CM and classical to many. Each chapter includes narration suggestions and many other chapters have suggestions for additional reading, primary sources, Great Ideas Discussions and writing assignments. Here is a link to my website, which takes you to my Bookstore: A Mind in the Light Scroll down just a bit on the page for Classical Lessons for The Middle Ages and the PDF sample will be here. I linked you here, because the sample I added allows you to see more of it than the previews available at Lulu. 🙂

I'm so sorry for you loss. My thoughts are with you, your son and your family.

I just wanted to offer my deepest sympathies. I agree with previous posters...minimal school is all that is needed for now.

I was curious if these are the ones that you mean: The Great Ideas Program? I have 3 of the books that are on the left in the photo of this link. I've looked at them but have not made use of them yet. 🙂 HathiTrust has a full view file of one of these: The Development of Political Theory and Government, in case anyone else wants to see it.

I'm hoping to finish at least one complete guide per year. I may be able to increase that in the next year or two, since my older daughter is in college now and my younger daughter will be in a couple of years. I will sadly be finished with homeschooling then and will have more time to commit to writing them.

Here is the Facebook Page. There is also a private group with the Facebook Page, which is easy to join if you want additional conversations. 🙂 And here is the Instagram Page. I'll check my email and get back to you soon to answer any questions you might have.

I'd be happy to link you to the Facebook and Instagram pages. It may help give you a better sense of how well the curriculum is liked or not. 🙂 I'm not sure if anyone here uses it. It is still a work in progress, so only Year One is complete. Although, there are separate guides for other subjects and years and there is a great deal of flexibility with the guides as well.

We love it-meaning me, the teacher, loves teaching this way and both of my daughters loved learning this way. It truly is a mutual love! For me, the CM approach to writing/language arts teaches children to first value their own voice (original, non-influenced thoughts), which I think plays a huge role in how well they write later. This is why the oral narration method used in the early years is so important. It not only allows them to find that voice, but allows them to work on how to organize that voice into a way which best communicates their knowledge and perspective with others. Oral narrations allow children to immediately (while the knowledge is at its height in memory) transfer what they've learned into an organized communication of it (with their own unique inner perspectives) attached. My daughters (one in high school and one in college) write well now not only because the technical/structural aspects to writing are in place, but because they are confident that they can find something of value to say about any topic. And, agreeing with previous posters, it is so important to not be hung up on the idea that oral narrations are simply about repeating in some loose fashion what they've just heard read to them (or later read themselves). A stream-of-consciousness type approach to oral narration is not ideal and should not be encouraged (with the exception of very young children, children very new to oral narration or children with specific issues with oral narration -and even then this would only be temporarily allowed). While oral narration is open in the sense that children are allowed to share the base of what was learned and then hone in on particular points of interest, it is not informal in the sense that there are not specific structural requirements to meet. This is, of course, referring to children who have had a couple years of practice. If started with a 5 year old, then some of this structure would be in place by 7 or 8. They are structured in the sense that a general base of what was learned is to be shared (so a child can't get away with a narration which shares the idea that there was some mean king doing bad things to the common people-more details would be needed), but the emphasis might be different for one child vs. another. One child might focus more on why the king did these things while another might focus on what effect these things had on the people. A good teacher can follow up narrations with pointed questions, allowing the child a moment to reflect on their particular emphasis and consider another angle. Narration prompts really begin to reflect this stretch in thinking as the child matures. Like all the various aspects to a complete CM language arts approach (copywork, commonplace books, dictation), narration is meant to adapt and change as the child matures. And do we have to adapt these methods to fit our modern times? Absolutely. As my children mature, I incorporate modern methods to their written work. They must learn how to write a formal paper and this requires work on the thesis, formatting, citations, etc. But, once I begin to add these aspects, I already have an accomplished writer on my hands-one who knows how to learn and how to think. Writing is an extension of what we know and how we think, so they are necessary components. My older daughter is an English/Communications major in college, so it has served her very well. She is an honors student and writes beautifully. My younger daughter, a more technical and science-oriented girl, also writes very well and writes creatively almost daily.

I thought I'd share back what I've learned. If you already own and have used either of these books, then I'm sure you already know whether you had to "edit on the fly" or not, but for those of you who did not own either book or have not seen these books I've included what I've learned below. Memoria Press replied that their edition of Edward Eggleston's Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans had been edited and that "offensive language was removed". Beautiful Feet Books also replied that they "did update and edit the language" in their edition of A Child's First Book of American History by Earl Schenck Miers.

LULU is 35% off of print books, photo books and calendars.

Thanks Chelli, I'll probably just do that. 🙂

I could really use some help with this question. I have already looked everywhere I knew possible to find out more information about these books. I only need to know if they have been edited. I would like to avoid purchasing a book just on the hope that it has been edited. I can already find these books in the public domain as an unedited version, so I don't really want to buy them just to discover they were not edited. Does that make sense? I've also looked at the actual websites (Memoria Press and Beautiful Feet Books) and neither one states explicitly that they were edited. I would really appreciate any help! Thank you! 🙂

Trying this once more...:)