From my Commonplace: Learning to Pray (or learning to do anything, really)

"Prayer and music have always gone together in the Christian church, and making another musical illustration may help us find ways of making Paul's prayers our own.  When children begin to learn a musical instrument, or to sing, the teacher often plays alongside them.  The children hear the music from the teacher mixed in with the sounds they are making, and this encourages them to work together, to copy the teacher and make the same noises.  It will take time, of course; and often the noise of youthful music-making is some way from being pleasant to listen to on its own, or even with a teacher. But as children grow in confidence, they move step by step towards the day when they can play without the teacher there, and may even in due course become teachers themselves." (p.113-114)

 

~NT Wright, thoughts on learning how to pray from Paul's prayer in 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians

 

I love this analogy on so many levels.

 

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On My Nightstand This Week:

Devotional: 1 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: The Supper of the Lamb (Capon)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: Consider This (Glass)

                                                          Personal Choice: The Dean's Watch (Goudge)

Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

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Parents and Children: A Review

So, I told you here that I would try to share a bit with you about my summer reading.  I told you about Mere Motherhood already.  Today, I'd love to tell you a bit about Parents and Children.

 

Parents and Children is Charlotte Mason's second volume.  I picked it up this summer because it was one of the remaining two hold-outs of her six-volume series that I had not read yet.  (Volume 5, Formation of Character, is now the last hold-out.  Hopefully sometime in the next year I'll be able to get to that one, so that I can say that I've read them all. J  I started reading the Volumes in 2011, I think.  Take heart, dear Mama feeling intimidated by those six volumes.  Slow and steady wins the race!)   It is really a series of stand-alone essays, each somewhat distinct from the others.   That said, there is still a definite theme that runs through all of them and a 'big picture' idea that I am taking away.

 

What is that idea, you may ask?  Very simply this:  Parental responsibility is to provide the child with nourishing, vital, ideas and train him in good habits – and to do this in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.  That last bit is so key.  We have the responsibility to plant the seeds, to keep the soil well-watered, to nurture the plants along – but we can't make them grow.  Ultimately, it is the grace of God poured out over the hearts of our children that will bring the growth.  Charlotte Mason puts it this way:

 

"The object of lessons should be in the main, twofold: to train a child in certain mental habits, as attention, accuracy, promptness, etc. and to nourish him with ideas which may bear fruit in his life…

 

Every habit has its beginning.  The beginning is the idea which comes with a stir and takes possession of us….

 

…the fact that God the Holy Spirit is Himself the Supreme Educator dealing with each of us severally in the things we call sacred and those we call secular.  We lay ourselves open to the spiritual impact of ideas, whether these be conveyed by the printed page, the human voice, or whether they reach us without visible sign."  (p.229-230)

 

In Mere Motherhood, Cindy Rollins expressed a very similar idea this way:

 

"You can't fight your children into the Kingdom. You can pray for them, and you can tell them stories, and you can love them."  (p.130)

 

In so doing, Charlotte Mason tells in at the closing of her book, we do much to advance the Kingdom of Christ.

From My Commonplace: On Divine Appointments

"When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you.  So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?  If you confront insult or antagonism, you first impulse will be to respond in kind.  But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it."  (p. 124)

 

~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

 

(Another must-read for your list, by the way.  I've really hit a gold-mine in my reading choices these days.)

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On My Nightstand This Week:

Devotional: 1 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: The Supper of the Lamb (Capon)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: Consider This (Glass)

                                                          Personal Choice: The Dean's Watch (Goudge)

Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

Click Here for more Words

 

 

Fall 2016 Morning Basket Plans

So, our school year is now pretty well underway and running pretty smoothly…so I thought I'd share what we're doing over the next few posts.

 

Morning Basket Plans

Co-op Plans

Individual Lessons for First, Secondish-Third, and Fifth Grade

Putting all the Pieces Together: Our Daily, Weekly, and Yearly Rhythm

 

Today, let's talk Morning Basket.

 

We are still starting our school day with a Morning Walk.  I cannot begin to tell you what a huge difference this has made in our home.  Even on mornings where people wake up cranky and breakfast is kind of a disaster (yes, we have those days in our house, please tell me you do sometimes too?) – this hits the reset button.  We come back to the couch to begin our time together refreshed and ready.

 

Our Morning Basket lasts 30-45 minutes at the moment, and runs somewhat like this:

 

Morning Prayer

Bible – Reading, Narration, Discussion

Singing: Hymn or Psalm

Read-Aloud from our Rotation with Narration and Discussion

Singing: Folksong or Latin Song

Swedish Drill

 

Here are the Resources I'm using for each of those categories this fall:

 

Morning Prayer:

I use parts of the Morning Prayer service from The Trinity Mission – a nicely organized, user-friendly resource based on The Book of Common Prayer.

 

Bible:

Joshua and Judges with the commentary by J. Paterson-Smyth.  Just a note on those: these were the actual commentaries Charlotte Mason recommended for use in her schools.  He was a product of his times (Victorian) and denomination (Church of Ireland, I think), and so there are places where I disagree with him.  This is not a resource to use blindly.  That said, thoughtfully using excerpts and discussion prompts has given us a lot of food for thought and brought these familiar Bible stories alive in a new way.  So they have been a good resource for us.  If you decide to try them, do be sure to read through the lessons ahead of time and decide how you want to handle them.

 

Hymns and Psalms:

We are mostly following the AmblesideOnline Hymn rotation, although I shuffled a couple around – so the hymns we will actually be learning (one per month) are: Jesus, The Very Thought of Thee; Jesus Lover of My Soul; Be Still My Soul; and Take My Life and Let It Be.  On alternate days, we are continuing to sing our way through Psalm 119 from the Book of Psalms for Worship.

 

Read-Aloud Rotation:

Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) – the actual text.  We started this last year, and then in the craziness of moving this spring it got set aside.  We are starting again from the beginning since it had been 6 months+ since we last touched it.

 

Taming of the Shrew is our Shakespeare pick this fall.  We had a great time with Twelfth Night during our summer term, so our children are excited to give the Bard another go.  We started off with Lamb's retelling in Tales from Shakespeare, a film version, and making little wooden character people, and now are beginning the real thing.

 

Child's History of Art: Sculpture  (Hillyer) - I finally scored a fairly reasonably priced copy of this out-of-print gem.  I decided to skip over the painting section since we have learned about a lot of painters through doing picture study, but we are looking forward to expanding our knowledge of art by reading slowly through the sections on sculpture and architecture.

 

Parables from Nature (Gatty) – We've read through this book once already when Michelle was working her way through AO Years 1-3, where it is scheduled, and now have started over again for the sake of the younger two.  Michelle is enjoying giving it a second listen though – fun to see what she remembers from these stories, and how different aspects of them stand out to her now.

 

Trial and Triumph (Hannula) – I had originally wanted to keep this book as it is scheduled – stories of famous people from church history tied in with each year's other history reading across AO Years 1-6.  But this is also a book that needs to be read aloud because it has a little more of an anti-Catholic slant to it than I care for, so it requires a bit of editing and discussion. It got to be too much to be reading from three separate places with three separate students in three separate years.  That said…I didn't want to ditch these stories completely, so our compromise was moving it to a morning basket read.  We do pull out our timelines at add each person we read about, which helps them orient themselves to what other historical events were taking place around the same time, so it works out.

 

Elementary Geography (Charlotte Mason)  - We started slowly working our way through this book last year, and are continuing it into this year, taking time for hands-on exploration and application where appropriate.

 

In the read-aloud rotation, we shoot for reading a short section from Shakespeare and Pilgrim's Progress every week since these are ongoing stories and I don't want too long to elapse between each reading.  The others have more self-contained chapters, so we loop through them more slowly on the other days, hitting each about once every other week.

 

Singing, Again:

For folksongs, we are following the AmblesideOnline rotations.  On alternate days we sing Latin songs from Memoria Press' Lingua Angelica.  This fall, we are hoping to learn Angus Dei, Sanctus, and Veni, Veni Emmanuel (during Advent of course!).

 

Swedish Drill:

Hooray for my lovely friend Dawn for making Drill accessible for us regular folks.  I am pretty much following the outline of exercises and routines she is sharing over at Afterthoughts.  My kids have been loving this!  It also provides a bit of a movement break between our morning basket time on the couch and moving to the rest of our school day.

 

Other 'group' things that don't fit into Morning Basket or Co-op Time:

In addition to our 'formal' group studies, we continue our habit of reading a family free-read literature choice at bedtime.  My husband leads the Evening Prayer service from the Trinity Mission (portions of it anyway) at supper, usually using the New Testament Scripture reading since we are currently studying the Old Testament during our school time.   We just planted our first garden, which is our 'family project' for now….and when the cold, early-dark, winter evenings set in I'm hoping to spend some time with handicrafts.  

The one thing I am struggling to find a place for is drawing.  We enjoy drawing sessions when we have them, and I originally thought we might regroup everyone after lunch on afternoons when we don't have other activities….but that hasn't worked out as well as I hoped.  Still searching for the best place to slip this in….

 

From My Commonplace: Learning By Root

" 'Because what you memorize by heart, you take to heart,' replied Dr Nuttham simply. 'It shouldn't be called by 'rote' but by 'root', for you get at the source of text, its foundation. Once you really absorb of the text, its foundation.  Once you really absorb the words, the words become your own.  Then, and only then, can you mull them over your tongue, appreciating them as you would good wine, enjoying them as the company of a good friend.  Besides,' he added, 'we always value something for which we've had to labor."  (p.225)

 

~Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

 

 

"...remembering is the most profoundly significant thing we do in education...Remembrance includes memorizing, but it is ever-so-much more.  It is the difference between 'lightening and the lightening bug,' as Samuel Clemens used to say.  If we understand the difference between memorizing and remembrance, then it will help us choose what to memorize.  Remembrance is culture.  It is all that has come before that makes us the kind of people we are.  To not remember is to commit cultural suicide...." (p. 126)

 

~Cindy Rollins, Mere Motherhood

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My Bookbag This Week:

Devotional: 1 Thessalonians with the Paul for Everyone Commentary (NT Wright)

The Daily Office Lectionary Readings and Prayers from The Trinity Mission

 Theological: The Supper of the Lamb (Capon)

AO Book Discussion Group: Kim (Kipling)

On Education: (Between Books)

Personal Choice: (Between Books)
Poetry: TS Eliot

With my Hubby: Emma (Austen)

Family Read-Aloud Literature: Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)

 

*I am also reading Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 for a local CM book club, but these meetings are infrequent, and it is my third – or fourth? – pass through it and so I just read the brief section assigned as our meetings come up. 

 

 

 

Click Here for more Words

 

Mere Motherhood: A Review

So maybe I'm a little late to the party, as there are already a fair number of reviews for Cindy Rollins' new book floating around out there.  But late to the party or no, I'm going to throw my thoughts out there into cyberspace too.  If you haven't yet been convinced by the reviews of others that you ought to grab a copy of Mere Motherhood and read it, perhaps this one will tip you over the edge.  Because really, you should.

 

Mere Motherhood is a 'lighter' read – it is not dense or heavy.  I read it in two evenings while unable to sleep due to jet-lag after our epic West Coast trip.   Parts of it were heart-wrenching.  Other parts were laugh-out-loud funny.  And yet, even though it was an 'easy' read, it was also profound.  I came away reminded of my high calling as a mother, and yet not in a way that discouraged me or made me feel like I can't live up to some perceived standard.  I won't.  There are no perfect families, after all.  But there is grace and redemption for that.

 

This isn't a 'parenting' book in the practical sense.   It's a memoir.  Cindy tells us her story – the joys, the heartaches, the regrets, the things she doesn't regret, and what she learned along the way.  I came away from reading it convicted but encouraged, ready to face the challenges of motherhood with renewed vigor and confidence.  Maybe confidence isn't the right word – because I'm more aware than ever that I. can't. do. this.  But I know the One who holds me and my whole family in His hands.

 

I have mostly have given up reading practical parenting advice books, because mostly they just make me feel like I can't live up to the standard they set, with their lists of dos and don'ts.  Maybe that's a failing on my part.  But reading Cindy's book was different.  In reading it, I experienced for myself the power of story.   In You Are What You Love (also worth reading!), James KA Smith says this:

           

"Story isn't just the what of Christian worship; it is also the how…Our imaginations are captured poetically, not didactically.  We're hooked by stories, not bullet points. The lilt and cadence of poetry have the ability to seep down into the fine-grained regions of our imagination in a way that a dissertation never could.  The drama and characters of a novel stick with us long after the argument of a book has been forgotten." (p.106-107)

 

Stories get under our skin.  They form us – inspire us – change us, in a way that the lists of dos and don'ts can't.   Charlotte Mason was on to this idea too, which is why she encouraged the use of well-written narratives in place of textbooks as the backbone of her curriculum.   Cindy's book – her story – did for me the very thing that I hope a rich, literary education will do for my children.

 

The only drawback to Mere Motherhood: at the end, Cindy spends a couple of pages listing the titles of books that have had some kind of formative influence on her.  I've only read about half of them….

 

Good thing my sweet hubby just got me some more bookcases at Ikea, huh?