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Just wanted to share my new website here...

Kfamily

By Kfamily,
in General Education Discussion Board

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Kfamily

Kfamily

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It looks really beautiful and professional.  Would you mind sharing what sets your CM website apart from some of the others out there?  <--  That is a friendly, conversational question, not a snarky one!  I'm curious what your "spin" is, as I love all things inspired by CM!

 

Thank you, especially because I've never created or built a website before and I'm definitely not tech-savvy. :) Fortunately, website builders tend to be more user-friendly these days. :) But, I do still have a lot to learn-both with technology and with creating a curriculum-and I'm not afraid to share that.

 

I would say that Charlotte Mason's ideas are very central to my own ideas, but that I do not have any trouble making some of her ideas more modern, adjusting some of the more well-known tenets (or maybe redefining them) and incorporating great ideas from other educators, particularly classical.

 

My ideas and beliefs about education and children have been building for a long time. My degree is in elementary education, I've taught at a private Montessori school, I've homeschooled my own two daughters from the very beginning ( and my oldest is entering college now) and I've read and studied about education all along. I've been drawn to Charlotte Mason's ideas for a long time now. Even when I drifted away a little for a year here or a year there, I've never really lost the connection between her ideas and my own.

 

I think what matters the most to me about educating children is the basic premise that all children have a mind and a soul which is very much interconnected. If we can realize that educating children isn't just about teaching a set of basic skills such as math, writing, grammar, and understand that it's also about the way they see and respond to the world and how their education shapes their very core being, then we drop our focus on just the surface concepts and begin to include a  focus on depth too. It is a much harder way to teach. It requires a much harder environment to maintain. I don't say this lightly. But, I truly believe that while a longer, harder road, it rewards with a richness that is hard to quantify.

 

My curriculum focuses on creating an environment where children are given challenge but not frustration, are given structure but have a great deal of freedom of expression and are given knowledge but with their own thoughts and ideas connected with it.

 

I hope this helps. :)

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Monica_in_Switzerland

Monica_in_Switzerland

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Thank you, especially because I've never created or built a website before and I'm definitely not tech-savvy. :) Fortunately, website builders tend to be more user-friendly these days. :) But, I do still have a lot to learn-both with technology and with creating a curriculum-and I'm not afraid to share that.

 

I would say that Charlotte Mason's ideas are very central to my own ideas, but that I do not have any trouble making some of her ideas more modern, adjusting some of the more well-known tenets (or maybe redefining them) and incorporating great ideas from other educators, particularly classical.

 

My ideas and beliefs about education and children have been building for a long time. My degree is in elementary education, I've taught at a private Montessori school, I've homeschooled my own two daughters from the very beginning ( and my oldest is entering college now) and I've read and studied about education all along. I've been drawn to Charlotte Mason's ideas for a long time now. Even when I drifted away a little for a year here or a year there, I've never really lost the connection between her ideas and my own.

 

I think what matters the most to me about educating children is the basic premise that all children have a mind and a soul which is very much interconnected. If we can realize that educating children isn't just about teaching a set of basic skills such as math, writing, grammar, and understand that it's also about the way they see and respond to the world and how their education shapes their very core being, then we drop our focus on just the surface concepts and begin to include a  focus on depth too. It is a much harder way to teach. It requires a much harder environment to maintain. I don't say this lightly. But, I truly believe that while a longer, harder road, it rewards with a richness that is hard to quantify.

 

My curriculum focuses on creating an environment where children are given challenge but not frustration, are given structure but have a great deal of freedom of expression and are given knowledge but with their own thoughts and ideas connected with it.

 

I hope this helps. :)

 

A beautiful philosophy!

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TKDmom

TKDmom

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I just found this today! :001_wub:  It's lovely. I already sent you an email asking for samples, and now I want to sit down and spend an afternoon chatting with you.  :001_smile: I've always enjoyed your posts here on the forums.

 

I am drawn to CM over and over again, but its not something I've managed to implement on my own, and I don't like the emphases in other readily-available CM curriculum. As I have read over the book lists, I love that there are some of my kids' favorite modern books there, as well as older classics. Maybe it's almost February and I'm bored with what we're doing (or more accurately not doing), but I'm going to sit down and look at what parts of your curriculum I can incorporate into our days right now.

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Kfamily

Kfamily

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Wow, very nice! Is there any kind of schedule to go with the curriculum??

 

 

Thank you!

 

I took advantage of my switch from a blog to a website to update my booklists. I have Year One complete, but because I switched out some books for science I'll need to update it before publishing it. There will be a complete schedule by week with it.

 

The guides themselves (except for Classical Lessons for A Child's History of the World) have reading schedules.

 

I tend to do this a little differently from other curricula available in that I write the schedules last. I tend to put a ton of work into making sure that the books line up properly and that the work distribution is spread as evenly throughout the year as possible. This means that I have to write the schedules after I've written the lesson plans. I might be able to offer tentative reading schedules, but they would definitely be subject to change after all the lesson plans for all of the subject areas are complete.

 

Next on my publishing list:

 

Complete Year One

 

From Fairy to Fantasy Syllabus

 

and Classical Lessons for... Renaissance and Reformation Times (D. Mills), Norse Myths, 16th-18th Century History, Age of Fable, Tree in the Trail, Ivanhoe and The Wonders of Physics.

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