Charlotte Mason Afterschooling

Afterschooling means to supplement a school based education with explicit home learning in the afternoons and weekends.

 My five year old daughter and I started a new unit of Charlotte Mason inspired work a few weeks ago. It has been a lovely experience. She can already read and write, and she adores math, so I've been using MyHomeschool's Kindy Lite as a base to extend her while spending quality time together.

So far she has fallen in love with Blinky Bill stories, we have finished The House on Pooh Corner as a read aloud, she is two chapters in to a Billie B Brown chapter books as her 'own choice' and we've brought out the Waldorf Math Gnomes her big sister made during lockdown homeschooling to make mental math more fun. The best of all is the formal introduction of the nature journal. MyHomeschool and Simply Charlotte Mason podcasts have been a great source of information with setting these up and its made us more aware of the plants in our own yard.

Since she can write well on her own she hates tracing handwriting sheets so I tossed those and switched to old fashioned dictation which has been much better. When attempting to do the included copywork designed for a child just learning their letters, she was unsettled, defiant and fidgety. When I dialled up the difficulty to Year 3 level she wrote half a page of text then gave her own narrations. The Australian animal mini books are a firm favourite and I love the inclusion of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson and A.A. Milne.

I am very happy with this program. We don't do everything included as she attends school so we pick and choose what would serve her growing mind which she does not get in a classroom. As with all Charlotte Mason inspired curriculum, the lessons are 5 - 20 minutes long and I find it a great resource to supplement our current public school situation. As she grows up we will know more about what kind of education she needs to thrive but in the mean time these mini-homeschool afternoons are creating the greatest memories.

December 2024 ~ we completed our favourite parts of the MyHomeschool program and enjoyed our nature journalling, read alouds, poetry and animal minibooks the most.

This post first appeared on my Wordpress.