Charlotte Mason recommended three terms to align with the natural rhythms of the year and the church calendar, such as Michaelmas, Easter, and Pentecost. This structure allowed for intense periods of focused work followed by extended breaks, which helped students avoid burnout and provided time for family, travel, and personal pursuits.
The habit of attention is central to Charlotte Mason's philosophy because it enables children to fully utilize their natural gifts. She believed that cultivating this habit through focused, intense periods of learning, followed by breaks, allows students to achieve their full potential and develop mental discipline.
Charlotte Mason's schedule balances intense learning in the morning with open-ended, creative activities in the afternoon. Morning lessons are short and varied to prevent mental fatigue, while afternoons are reserved for pursuits like nature study, handicrafts, and music, allowing children to process what they've learned and engage in self-directed activities.
Extended breaks between school terms allow students to rest, pursue personal interests, and engage in family activities like travel or house projects. These breaks also prevent forgetfulness and provide a clear mental separation between terms, helping students return to school refreshed and ready to focus.
Parents can balance school schedules by planning term breaks around family needs, such as travel or seasonal work, and scheduling appointments or extracurricular activities during these breaks. Flexibility is key, and parents can adjust term lengths or start times to accommodate their family's unique rhythms and commitments.
Afternoon occupations in Charlotte Mason's schedule provide a mental break from morning lessons and allow children to engage in creative, open-ended activities like nature study, handicrafts, and music. These activities help children process their morning learning and develop skills in a less structured, more self-directed environment.
Having a fixed start and end time for school each day establishes a routine that helps children develop the habit of attention and reduces resistance to lessons. It also ensures that children have ample free time in the afternoons for creative pursuits and rest, which are essential for their overall development.
Parents can help children manage free time by encouraging them to pursue worthy activities like reading, handicrafts, or outdoor exploration. Removing distractions like screens and providing opportunities for creative play can also help children develop the ability to engage in meaningful, self-directed activities.
Morning lessons should be short, varied, and focused to prevent mental fatigue. Charlotte Mason recommended no more than three reading and narration subjects per day, spread out with breaks in between. This approach helps children maintain focus and ensures that each subject receives adequate attention.
Charlotte Mason's approach emphasizes intense, focused learning periods followed by extended breaks, whereas modern practices often favor year-round schooling with shorter breaks. Her method prioritizes the habit of attention, mental rest, and the development of self-directed skills, which contrasts with the more continuous, structured approach of modern education.
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We will have a wide array of workshops ready to address your pressing teaching concerns and lesson demonstrations to show what they look like in real life. I know you will not regret taking this opportunity to learn and grow. And remember, you will have three months in which to watch, rewatch, and absorb what we have prepared for you.
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I'm Emily Kaiser, and I'm here with her mom, Liz Gattrill. And Nicole Williams. And Happy New Year, you guys. This is our first episode of 2025. I don't think I ever thought I'd live long enough to say that number. It seems so, so crazy. Back in the 60s, there was an awful song about in the year 2525, and I'm thinking, wow, we're getting closer. Here we are. Aww.
Well, one thing about us homeschoolers is that we like our freedom. And we're going to kind of talk around that a little bit today. Some states have particular laws that we have to abide by. But on the whole, we want to make decisions that we think are best for us and our family.
And this is never more true than when we start talking about our schedule of our days and our years. One example in my own life was just that we like to travel in the fall. We like to go back home and visit family who were, you know, 2,500 miles away. Fall was our favorite time to do that. And so we started school early so that we could take off a couple of weeks in the fall.
I have a dear friend who tried to take off a week with her kids in the fall and was threatened with court because she was in public school and that was not going to be allowed. I also bristled when I saw the school bus go by at 630 in the morning.
So Charlotte Mason actually has some really valuable rhythms that she suggests to families or did to the families of the Parents Union School that we should take into consideration. So today we want to talk about the particulars of those scheduling suggestions and why she encouraged them so that you can try to find balance in your home with
um, with these considerations in mind. Particularly around the topic of balancing your time and our school time. Our school time. Yeah. Yeah. And not just our school time, just in the morning or this week, but through the year, through the year, even those rhythms. Yeah. And I think we should say at the outset, cause it's,
I don't know if accused is the right word, but people often attribute us to being Charlotte Mason purists. And we are, but we might not mean the same thing that you mean about that. We want to understand why Charlotte Mason did something. And if that is a universal truth that applies to people throughout time or if that was a particular situation. I think what we're going to find today is we're talking about...
Yes, it does apply to her particular situation. And we don't have those same circumstances. But we can still take the...
principle or the wisdom behind it and realize, oh, this is how we can find balance with our modern life that doesn't have some of the things that they had. Right. Exactly. So on that note, let's start with the yearly schedule that she kind of had set up. So we see at the top of the programs that she sent out to her students, parents, families that were using her programs of work. We see these
these months at the top. This should be done, the autumn term should be done from September to December. Well, first of all, that's four months. And we know that she had 11 weeks and a 12th week, which was exams. So they weren't doing the whole of September and December. Right. So there was some flexibility there. The winter term ran from January to March, but we have read that
where if Easter came early, then that term was squashed a little bit. The work was still done. There was time to do that, but it was important to get that break in before Easter. And the spring term ran from May to July. So a couple things that come to mind when you look at that is one, I don't want to do school in July. Okay, let's just set that aside for a second. We also don't live in temperate England. Right. And also you see like whole
whole months off there. And I think- Particularly April. Yeah. And I think that that is something, like you just said, we're not living in that time in history. Why did Charlotte Mason do that?
Well, maybe we should talk about why she might have done that. Liz and I both have recently read Surprised by Oxford, a memoir of a Canadian woman who goes to Oxford for graduate school. And they have much shorter terms, but still three. And they were tied to the church calendar, right? So there's Michaelmas term, which starts in October around Michaelmas. And so on through the other two terms were tied to Easter and Pentecost, like when these terms happen. So I think that was a natural rhythm from the earliest period.
Western educational institutions. But also at her time, boarding school was very common, right? And you'd have students who were away from home for that time, but then they would travel back. They needed a good long bit to be with their family. That's not the same for most of us homeschooling. Some of us wish maybe. Right.
That we could do that on particularly stressful days. And travel was not as instantaneous as it could be. You know, you would maybe leave school and have to take a train across the country or maybe a ship if you were in some of the colonies. Colonies, yes. Yeah. But we also hear her talk of other problems.
Things that were done during that time, like trips, vacations. I don't know what they called it. Holiday. They called it holiday. And still in Europe, it is very common to take an entire month in the summer and go on holiday somewhere else. Right. That also sounds very enticing, by the way. Yeah, for sure. I tried it one summer and it was lovely. But overall, the rhythm that we see here are these intense periods of schoolwork followed by a long vacation.
Break. Right. Right. And we have 52 weeks in the year. If we follow the 12 weeks, three terms, that's 36 weeks. That leaves us.
16 weeks of vacation. And I think instead of putting those all four months off in between terms, if we spread those out and do a longer in-between term break, we have less forgetfulness of our students from one term to the next, even one school year to the next. Right. So we're really intensely doing school. And we know. We know. School is hard. It's hard to get everything done. We
We feel like a chicken. We feel a little overwhelmed. Cut off. Yeah. Running around constantly. Exactly. But then you have your term exam and that's the end of that work. It is done. And we even see that like she would give the next term's work to
Yeah, maybe it picked up right where you left off, but it was separate. It was not going to show, work from the first term wasn't going to show up on exam for the second term. Like it was separate. And if you didn't get through that work, you were to jump in where that new term work was. So there was a clear break in the sand there. And so on those month long breaks or however long we decide to take in our family, right? There is a lot of freedom there.
that our kids can pursue interests that they haven't been able to pursue. Right, because there's not time. Right. This is something that we struggle with as homeschool families. You know, our kids really interested in airplanes and we want to devote their education to it. But wait, we have things we need to learn. There is a time for that when they can do a more...
self-directed approach. Yeah. We have an episode, number 82. This is a Q&A episode we did a long time ago, but we address this topic and there actually is quite a bit written down in the Charlotte Mason Digital Collection about what
were worthy. And no, it's not time to be working on your phonics and your math, right? And keeping those off, that there was a specific purpose for those term breaks. So we'll just direct your attention to episode 82 if you want to find out more about that. Absolutely. In our home, I put off a lot of our house projects have to happen on Tuesdays.
term breaks because I don't have time to tackle that during the term. And so I need a bit longer of a break. But what you're saying is basically we don't have work hanging over our heads. It's not like when I was in school and you'd go for Christmas break, maybe two weeks if you were lucky, depending on how the dates fell. And no, I've still got homework I have to do or I'm going to have exams coming up in a couple of weeks once we go back. And that isn't the case. So it truly is a break. Right. So what is the problem with
doing school year round though because this kind of sounds that way but that isn't what you're saying right? Right. I think the principle here is that you need to balance an intense period of work with a break. Right. And so if you truly are doing year round school like you do school
every single week or every single month of the year, and maybe that allows you the freedom to take off a week here or there, you don't have that stop between terms as much unless you intentionally build that in. And we're not saying you need to follow her terms and just do September to December and January to March or whatever and go into July. Of course not. But to have that principle of...
We do a term of work, and then we have a long enough break in that transition between those two times. Right.
So one of the things that is prime in Charlotte Mason's philosophy of education is the habit of attention and that children cannot learn and do their best unless they have that habit of attention. So when we are doing this intense term of work where this is what we're doing, we are truly schooling, and then we have the break. So anytime you're running a sprint like that, you have to have a break. A rest, yes. Right. And so if we don't do that and we do school just –
all the time, taking breaks here and there, we're never fostering that habit of intense work and attention. It kind of reminds me of that Cal Newport book, Deep Work, that we are coaching our children to learn how to do this in their own lives. Mm-hmm.
I can just speak from experience. We actually do take an extended break between term one and term two every year because my husband loads trucks at UPS. It's our only non-self-employed job. That is an insane time for them. It's just been our rhythm since our kids were tiny that life looked different in that season.
But that means I do have to go into June a little bit. And that's fine. I don't start till September. I'm from Michigan. And it seems just cruel and unusual to have to start at the first week of August. August is summer. And I should be at the beach. Yeah.
But I'll often just do two weeks at Easter because I don't want to keep going longer when everybody else is out of school and going to the pool and we want to join our friends. But what I have found is I need like a good chunk of time to get back into. Like I had a week for projects and then the next week was
You know, the kids were still off, but I was turning my attention to term two or three, whatever it was. But what I started doing is actually prepping for that first week of our new term and our last week of real like full work the previous term. And now I have actually a full break and don't have that. I know I've already prepped like all I've pre-read. I've got my little notes done.
I've got our books lined up and materials on our carts that we're going to need. And that just is a natural rhythm I do through the term. So I just keep doing that that last week instead of just not having any prep to do. And it has saved my term break. So that's just a little tip if that makes it easier for you.
So we did something similar to that too, because when I took that idea that Charlotte Mason would shrink her term, the winter term, sometimes it kind of gave me permission to do it. And I've been saying forever that I really think that if we took the program of work, the work that Charlotte Mason assigned to the students,
we could easily get it done in a term. Oh, yeah. And then she also shrunk the term once in a while. So we would shrink our last term. Same. We do that too. Yeah, because I wanted to make sure we had more summer. So what we're saying here is that we sometimes have longer breaks.
Because we have an American holiday. Yeah. That kind of can mess with that first term, Thanksgiving. And then we had other times we had shorter breaks. Our terms didn't always last a full 12 weeks. So we did adjust the schedule. But I will tell you, the first year that I took the whole month of December off, at that time I was homeschooling my siblings.
They had come out of public school. I had my kids and we took that month off. I was shocked at the level of support
Like application. They were ready to apply themselves coming back in January like they had never been before. And I realized this is why this is the value of my kids start. I don't even have to remind them or maybe it's just a habit now that they like know when school's coming up, they'll start going, oh, you know, next week we start school. We got to start getting up on time and making sure our chores are done. And I love that that's coming from them because they have absorbed this rhythm in our family all these years. Right.
So really what we're saying is it comes down to balance, which is why we're talking about this topic during this season. Balancing the time for a whole year, like thinking not just about next week, but what a whole big picture. You know, take out a calendar and actually, you know, when you need to go visit your mother or vacations and you want to remodel the kitchen, when would be the best time and all that kind of stuff. And then plan to have those three terms within those days.
Yeah, I think that one of the struggles we have, probably the biggest struggle we have, homeschooling, is trying to balance this work-life, like the homeschool aspect versus the life. And we hear this all the time from people who are like, I can't keep a timetable. I can't do this because there's all the other things that come up or I have to do. And what I think you're saying, Mom, is to be intentional about those. We often are just reacting to the crisis of the moment.
And instead kind of plan for some crises like, OK, I'm going to even if something happens, maybe like, OK, well, you know, we're almost done with term one and I'm going to have five weeks off. I'm going to tackle the whatever closet where the shelving just collapsed or whatever it is that has never happened. But it could happen to me in my home. I haven't.
So just planning some of those things or like a big house project that you have. And then I find that that helps me focus and stop being anxious. Like I know there's a time coming for that and it's not too far away. Like 12 weeks goes by quick. Yeah. Especially when you know you're going to have that break. Yeah. That's what helped me. And I liked looking forward to a season where I could be very spontaneous with friends, have different hospitality opportunities. You know, like...
I really want to make a nice gourmet meal for three or four couples or something like that. You can do it. Or your girls want to have tea parties for their friends. Have at it, guys. We're not doing school right now. Plus, for me, it was a time to get a grip for the next term. Like teaching my kids how to make bread or cookies or things like that and having them help me stock things in the freezer so we weren't always...
you know, ordering pizza out when we ran out of time. When we were in school time and that period of our day was more cramped. So let's talk about some other things that we maybe save up for school breaks. Like we've mentioned house projects and maybe cooking and meal prep or travel. Yeah.
Travel. How about even just... Doctor appointments. Oh, that's a great one because... I do try to schedule our dentist and our yearly checks. Obviously, there are certain things that come up, but we always have our standing appointments during term breaks. Right. Your kids want friends to have sleepovers, right?
Special parties, you know, things like that. Field trips. Schedule that. Yeah. And that might don't, you know, it doesn't have to be some like long trip away to go to a big site. It could be I just want to go visit the museum downtown. Right. And I could do that on term break instead of during. Or special hikes that are going to take all day or you don't want to worry about when you get back or whatever. Right. Mm hmm.
I hope we can really see that flow of the year, you know, instead of it being like, I'm trying to do all the things all the time. Instead, this is the time I do this and this is the time I do that. And it is very flexible. Like we've just mentioned, we shift things around. And in a previous episode, we talked to Michelle Riesgraf about her schedule and how she has to
Take advantage of the seasons when they are not harvesting and aren't processing chickens and doing all of that stuff to work her school in. So we're all going to have different scenarios for our home, what those rhythms look like. If you have not had a chance already to listen to our interview with Michelle, please do not miss it. If I could tell you to listen to one episode this season so far, that would be it. It's number 287.
Another thing I think comes into this, and I personally know some people who, for this is the case, they tend towards stretching out the school year and condensing the breaks in between terms because their kids need that routine. Oh, yes. I hear this all the time. Yes. And I hear you. It is, you know, it's a little, because it really is in our home. We still have our morning routine of through breakfast and cleanup, but after that, there's always,
open-ended. You know, I don't even enforce like, what's your plan today? You know, I let them get into whatever they want to get into as far as projects or books or topics that they want to consider more and learn more about. But yeah, we also do have a lot more behavioral things that have to get addressed, but it's great because we actually have time to do that outside of school. I worked at a Montessori preschool briefly while I was in college and that method,
My job as a classroom assistant was to really keep children from interfering with one another. They were just doing their thing, what they were supposed to do, and I was diverting. There's a place where you can hire people to do that. But...
The worst part of the day, every day was recess because there it was all open-ended and they were not being micromanaged and they were not having a teacher intervene if there was conflict. And it was conflict all the time. And I just remember thinking, we need to be training. We're doing a disservice to these children if I am constantly the one intervening and redirecting a child who wants to do something that another child already was doing. They need to learn this themselves. And so
Yes, I think that can happen in our school time. You know, everybody's doing what they should. We're following our timetable. We're doing all this. And then we get to these open-ended breaks. But that is, they're still in our home and we can train that. How else are they going to learn to manage their life when they do have free time? If we always have every single day full, you know, this is a skill in life for all of us. I can occasionally have a day off.
And the options are innumerable of what I could do and I have to pick. And it's just good for them to learn how to make the most of some time when they aren't having to sit and do lessons. Mm-hmm.
And we can still be doing stuff with them. It doesn't mean that they're just, you know, 100%... Well, that's what I was saying about baking together. Yeah, exactly. All this stuff, you know, teach your kids how to make lunch or dinner so that the next term goes nicer. We always use our summer term to work on the new chores. Like, as they're coming up and going through, like, okay, I can take on more responsibility. We do a full... We start our New Year's term or New Year's chores and...
at the end of our school year. So we have the three months or about that to practice before school happens. So it's more autopilot. They know I'm also not having to be as hands-on during the school time when we have a lot of other things I need to be focusing on. I think if you ask anybody who's listening, what is summer about? Like, what's the purpose of summer? What do you do during summer? I think you know. And maybe the hard thing is that...
We didn't grow up this way. So we're not as accustomed to what does it look like to take a month off in December? What do we do with that time? What are the standard things that every year we're going to do now? And same thing with spring. And by the way, this whole thing was shifted from...
for the southern hemisphere, you know, if she was sending her stuff. So it is seasonal this way. But just maybe that's the point is that we need to create some new routines or traditions that our family does. We have lots of Advent traditions that we do in December because we've...
always had it as a special time of year and we still do those. As the kids get older, there's a lot more projects that they do around those things. And we always are working on our garden during our term break between term two and three. Right. And those of you who struggle to fit nature study in because of little ones with naps and things like that, well, guess what? On that month off, you can really get into nature study. Yeah, for sure.
Okay, one quick question that I think that we should cover before we move on is what do you do when you think you just embrace this? It's wonderful and you realize the beauty of it or you have a life that requires you to take certain times off because of farming or whatever. And you participate then in a co-op or a school or something like that that doesn't follow that same schedule. Yeah.
Well, you might still have to stay with that, but the other four days of the week or when you don't have co-op are still free. Yeah, that's how we did it in our home. You know, we'd participate in outside classes that didn't necessarily follow our schedule. Or sports, this happens. And I personally loved it because we were off in December. My son loved basketball.
And that's a heavy basketball season. And I didn't care if we didn't get home till 11 or 12 at night from traveling because he was off school. Right. So that's a good point. This is not a sabbatical. We're not like leaving the premises. Right. You're not dropping out of life. Just doing different things. But also for me, because of my husband, it's not just my choice. I feel like we built these rhythms because of my husband's job and like...
And during that season, it could be really stressful to maintain a regular schedule for school or participation in a co-op or whatever. That's a reason for me to not join those things sometimes. You know, that is a consideration. And I haven't gotten to the point yet where the benefits of that learning community would outweigh the negatives that it would bring on our family at that time. But it might someday. And I'm free to make that choice on a year-to-year basis. Right.
In the same way, our morning lessons, our daily schedule has this same kind of a routine in a way. We have morning lessons. And now, again, we call that morning lessons, but there may have to be some flexibility. And when that happens, we have some principles behind it. But then we also have this period of rest.
of rest kind of, or doing other things. And again-- - A more open-ended time. - Right, so again, those morning lessons, kind of like we talked about with the term, they are intense, we are working hard, the habit of attention is like, you know, primed, but then again, with every sprint has to come a break and a stop from that, and so we shift to afternoon work. So the main thing that we have to know is that the times for the morning lessons are fixed.
So if you have a Form 1 student, grades 1 through 3, there's going to be two and a half hours of school. Max. Max. And then up to high school students, you have four hours max. Yeah. And what most people have absorbed that and what we now hear a lot of objection to is, but they have to do school in the afternoons because there's afternoon occupations. But what you're saying is it's really a different kind of work. Right. And it is.
still giving the brain a breast, right? The things that they do in the afternoon are more creative, open-ended pursuits. It's not taking in of material. And then the time of response immediately. Our afternoon is for field work. A lot of times they would do picture study or, you know, composer study, music, everything.
definitely things outside there using different parts of our brain and it is a more open-ended time we're not especially if you did the lessons in the morning you have I say to moms all the time remember even if you love love loved school that last bell of the day was just joy to you so our kids need that this is the end whether we did well or not this morning we're done mm-hmm
And that intense learning time is so important. Again, back to that idea of habit of attention and how important it is. Charlotte Mason said, it's impossible to overstate the importance of this habit of attention. It is within the reach of everyone and should be made the primary object of all mental discipline. For whatever the natural gifts of the child, it is only so far as the habit of attention is cultivated in him that he's able to make use of them.
And we see her talk about this as the reason she put forth this whole philosophy of education. Because she was looking at a classroom full of students. She was a young teacher. And she said they could not reach their full potential because they did not have the habit of attention. Right.
And we hear her talk about the schedule in the habits portion of home education. Oh, yeah. And she says it is the first principle of a well-ordered school room. Right. What are some practical considerations of how we achieve balance in this school day? So we have the big one first, the intense learning time in the morning and more open-ended along with some truly free time in the afternoons. But what else? Yeah.
I think it's really important to have a start time and an end time every day. Yeah. And to be consistent with that. Yeah. We're not going to tell you you have to start at a certain time. Right. But pick it. And just that's your block of time where your focus is school. Sure stuff happens sometimes. Especially if you've got 17 children under five, you know. Yeah.
Praying for you, if that's the case. Yeah, but you still, this is school time. And, you know, back to what you were saying about even during breaks. I mean, most families say my kids can't live without routine. Well, I'm sure you're still having breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day and going to bed. I mean, it's not like all routine's out the window. But for school, you know, just it helps the child so much.
to know there is a specific time when I must be sitting in my seat and a specific time when mom is going to say, we're done for today. Right. And when we establish those habits, you know, those routines in our homes, um,
People are they go along easier if we're always changing that up in a very arbitrary fashion. Yeah. Then there could be pushback. Well, we started at nine yesterday. Why do we have started today? Those are going to be the words out of your child's mouth. Exactly what they will say. And also to relate this back to what we said earlier about the breaks.
because a lot of moms say, but the other kids are out of school when my kids are doing school if I pick a different routine. But, you know, when you've only got two and a half or three hours in the morning, I mean, the neighbor kids await for that little bit of time. Most of them aren't even out of bed yet. So, yeah, it works fine.
One thing that we can need to strive for balance and we can take a good lesson from Charlotte Mason is how we organize those morning lessons in themselves. And if you take a listen to our episode number 264 on the timetable or to just take a look at these sample timetables that we have or read what she says about how we are to do short lessons and vary the brain activity. You know, we are working.
that is building in mental breaks for our children, even in that intense learning period, which is balance, right? We're not overloading. If you are reading and narrating for more than one lesson at a time, your brain gets fatigued. And when we look at, you know, people are like, I just can't read for that long, read out loud for that long. Well, A, your children can be doing some of the reading, but there should not be that many readings in a day. Charlotte Mason had at most three,
three subjects on any given day that would require a reading and a narration. And those were spread out through the morning. So that gives a balance right there. Absolutely.
And if we stick to a schedule like that, it carries us through. Charlotte Mason said, if the student is to get two or three hours intact in the afternoon, because she thought that was very important, right? She will owe it to her mother's firmness as much as to her good management. In the first place, that the school tasks should be done and done well in the assigned time should be a most fixed law. Yeah.
But young people will maintain that it is impossible. But let the mother insist. She will thereby cultivate the habit of attention. So this is the thing that's important. This is like the fixed law, right? We have to have these number of hours of school time. We call them morning lessons, but...
If you've got to shift that. Yeah, formal lessons. Right. Then that's fine. But then. And really, I mean, yeah, if school gets drawn out all day and doesn't stick to those hours, we lose the opportunity to have that open-ended time and to have some truly free time, the two to three hours, Charlotte makes me saying, that really we owe to our children. We do. Right? Right.
And they can, and I mean, this is another place where her principles are really self-correcting. If our child dawdles over a lesson and we have to move on and they didn't complete their recitation or their handwriting or their math lesson or whatever, we can take their time. And then they see that correlation like, oh, so I'm not going to get the time that I think of as just mine, right? Because I, you know, and it is a natural consequence in the true sense of the word.
It also is important to remember that our kids process some of what they have read in the morning or learned about in the morning during those afternoon times. So it is like a really instrumental part of their lessons, their term of work. It's a duty. We owe it to our children to give that. Right. So what kinds of things should we not allow in our schedule during the term when it
you know, when we're trying to do lessons. How I was able to find this balance for our home, because there's just all these other things that we're trying to work their way in, was really limiting how many things I would allow that we're running around type things in the afternoons. Like, how much in the way of sports are we going to allow? You know, we mentioned doing appointments and term breaks when we could, but maybe sometimes that's not possible. So
when am I going to allow appointments? Some people have therapies that have to be happening all the time. Exactly, right. Lessons. And this is one of the things I think, again, with this flexibility is that you have therapies maybe that have to happen. Your child, you can't teach them piano. They've got to go to a piano teacher. This is important to your family. How many things can be important to your family
You can't do everything. Right. Yeah. What are the things that you say, yes, this is a deal breaker. We're going to do this. You know, and I think we're hopefully I've actually heard several people from all different kinds of educational like homeschooling, but also people who had their kids in public school.
who have been caught up in our kind of cultural ideas that we need to have our children involved in all of the things because otherwise they're going to miss out and they may have this hidden potential to be an NFL star, you know, or something like that. And so I would say the vast majority, almost everyone I'm hearing talk about now say, I regret those years.
You know, just the strain it put on our family and also the strain it put on my kid and a lot of knee injuries and other things that like children were not supposed to be doing that much conditioning in a structured way to do a sport the way that people are doing.
implementing that today. Free play is a different thing than doing soccer drills or whatever. Right. And if you're always carting kids into the van every afternoon to run around town, when is that child that really loves piano going to have time, unbroken time, to sit and practice? And I had a wise friend that told me many years ago, three days in a row at home, you just cannot believe what an amazing difference that makes. Even if you have to be out two afternoons, you
You know, to have three actually there and quiet
Yeah, that was great advice when you gave it to me. I took it and I held on to it. I still do. I don't even have kids anymore. I still have that habit of, no, I was out all day yesterday. I'm not going anywhere. I start to be resentful if there's some other thing that comes up that I have to do. For our family, we basically just say yes to the activities that are really already things that would be in a Charlotte Mason curriculum. So for us right now, that is just music. Right.
is the only in our nature club those are our two things with friends we do go out to church community group and that's a time for our church and fellowship which is technically not part of charlotte mason's um curriculum but definitely the culture at of of but your kids do sports you you play pickleball as a family and lots of different things you know it's not not
that are dictated. They have to be here at this time and play these games. Read that great book that was on the PEC this year, The Anxious Generation. He has a whole lot to say about how we over-organize. It's also him, yes, and who's not even a Christian man who is saying, we're seeing the effects of this lifestyle on our children's mental health, which is in crisis right now.
And I also would say that for afternoons and free time and worrying about, you know, fitting everything in, why don't you remove some of the obstacles that are there to your kids naturally? They don't need iPads, TVs, video stuff around. Really, they don't need it at all.
But that just taking that element away is going to give them a lot of time. And I just was at a conference and a mom said, but what do you say when they say I'm bored? I always say, wonderful. You are about to discover some really exciting things because when you're bored, you can get creative.
And I think the point of Charlotte Mason's Afternoon Occupations in helping our children see this is a worthy pursuit. This is not something that is a burden or another I have to thing. It is training our children to not be bored, to look around them, and to actually have skills to do worthy pursuits. Right. Yeah.
And even those are not like many hours. It's like from one to two according to time or something, right? Right. Well, it says that it's from one to two hours a day depending on age. And that includes so many things that can be done. So there may be a time in your day like –
With my kids, well, she says they can do them at any time of day, right? They can wake up in the morning. And in any allotment, you might split those one to two hours up. Exactly. But if things, clearly nobody had done any of these things, then I had a stop point in my day.
And it came from Charlotte Mason where she says the hour before tea time. Yeah. Where I would like that was our stopgap. Yes. Same. We do that. Yeah. And then if if things needed to still be done, they could be done at that time. We should clarify for all of you who think you have to serve tea at a certain time. That was that was the children's evening meal. Right. The adults in her culture ate a formal dinner that they had to get dressed up for.
way late at night. I don't think that's our situation. And I would also say that for some of your kids that really, you know, they may cooperate, but they don't like the forced feeling of the morning, like everything's short, quick, quick, quick. We switch to this, to that. They love the afternoon because if they're really interested in this book or this knitting project or building a fort,
They have time to do it. Right. And that's the main key is there should be lots of free time. The occupation time is a smallish part of all the free of the day. But it also should be open-ended. And if a child does get wrapped up, it's not, hey, oh, no, we've spent 30 minutes on this. You're done. They can keep working on it. We do go into a lot more detail about this in episode 258, all about afternoons, if you need to...
hear more thoughts right because there are some good things like we have some tips in that episode about when we do certain things because are we
We didn't leave it 100% open-ended. You know, there was a day of the week we did a nature walk. There was a day of the week that we broke out handicrafts. They could do them at any time they wanted to. Sure. But I made sure, you know, at least by Thursday they were getting done kind of thing. So we can, again, we can have those stopgaps like, oh, I don't see these things are being done or this is a good day for us to do a nature drawing or something like that.
Yeah. And we, again, just like planning your yearly schedule and saving projects for your term breaks, when I look at my schedule and the non-negotiables, like we will leave on Wednesdays kind of early because we live so far away from our community. So that's not a good day for this type of project. But we can easily do this thing that is a much more finite task. Yeah.
So as we close, I hope you can see that while there's a lot of flexibility in how you order your days and your years, there's also big picture principles to each season and each day. And if you keep those in mind, you can create a rhythm that works best for your particular family.
In her book, Ourselves, that was written to students, but also very practical guide for us parents, Charlotte Mason said,
as because each time we insist upon ourselves doing the next thing, we gain power in the management of that unruly Philly inclination. At first it requires attention and thought, but mind and body get into the way of doing most things. And the person whose mind has the habit of singling out the important things and doing them first saves much annoyance to himself and others. He has gained in integrity.
In the end, integrity makes for gaiety because a person who is honest about his work has time to play and is not secretly vexed by the remembrance of things left undone or ill done. See, we really are forming lives and characters. And I think this is just a reminder that what we might think of as trivial and of no significance really is of great import. Right.
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