Charlotte Mason writes with a snippet of information here and another related one there, but not necesarilly together. As I read through her chapter about The Out-of-Door Life For Children, I just had to take notes and rearrange her ideas. Here’s what I came up with:

“Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.“ page 42

WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO OUT THERE? (method)

1. “Our wise mother, arrived, first sends the children to let off their spirits in a wild scamper, with cry, halloo and hullaballoo, and any extravagance that comes into their young heads. There is no distinction between big and little; the latter love to follow in the wake of their elders….and do according to their little might.”
2. “By and by the others come back to their mother, and, while wits are fresh and eyes keen, she sends them off on an exploring expedition” In the book follows a delightful description of what *might* occur. Obviously we will write our own stories, depending on where we are. The essence is that the children observe a scene and relate as much information as they can. “This is an exercise that delights children, and may be endlessly varied, carried on in the spirit of a game, and yet with the exactness and carefulness of a lesson.”
   Another similar technique, which should be employed less frequently due to the fatiguing strain of attention it requires is “picture-painting”. The children look attentively at a landscape, and then shut their eyes and describe what they see. If anything is blurred, they can look again (before they start telling).
3. Just Being  - the children should be left to themselves, to make acquaintance with creation. “This is, truly, a delightful thing to watch: the mother reads her book or knits her sock, checking all attempts to make talk; the child stares up into a tree, or down into a flower - doing nothing, thinking of nothing; or leads a bird’s life among the branches, or capers about in aimless ecstasy; - quite foolish, irrational doings, but, all the time, a fashioning is going on” 
   HOWEVER….”There is one thing the mother will allow herself to do as interpreter between Nature and the child, but that not oftener thanonce a week or once a month, and with look and gesture of delight rather than with flow of improving words - she will point out to the child some touch of especial loveliness in the colouring or grouping in the landscape or in the heavens. One other thing she will do, but very rarely, and with tender filial reverence…..she will point to some lovely flower or gracious tree,not only as beautiful work, but a beautiful thought of God, in which we may believe He finds continual pleasure, and which He is pleased to see His human children rejoice in. Such a seed of sympathy with the Divine thought sown in the heart of the child is worth many of the sermons the man may listen to hereafter, much of the “divinity” he may read.”)
4. Luncheon - wholesome nourishing fare. 
5. Naps for littlies, noisy games for big kids. Miss Mason suggests dancing and singing, chasing and racing, skipping, swimming, boating, badminton, climbing, tennis, cricket, rounders (the latter games and activities for older children). 
6. Other possibilities:
   *scouting (sounds like a grown-up version of hide-n-seek)
   * bird stalking (there needs to be no greed of collecting - the eye must be satisfied with seeing)
7. Writing
   * calendar (note discoveries so they can be looked for again a year later)
   * creation journal (just keep one! When you are out-of-doors on a daily basis, it is no trouble at all to add a page a day.)

WHAT IN THE WORLD FOR? (reason)

• for health’s sake - children need unvitiated unimpoverished country air!!
• to use the five senses, which is just how a child learns, storing up concrete experiences from which to be able to make abstractions later on.
• as mental training (It is “all play to the children, but the mother is doing invaluable work; she is training their powers of observation and expression, increasing their vocabulary and their range of ideas by giving them the name and the uses of an object at the right moment, - when they ask “What is it?” and “What is it for?”, And she is training her children in truthful habits, by making them careful to see the fact and to state it exactly, without omission or exaggeration.”)
• to learn a reverence for life
• to make for personal well-being (”a love of Nature, implanted as early that it will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health and good humour. “I have seen,” says the same writer, “the young man of fierce passions and uncontrollable daring expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring forest….I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure, and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells and fossils, flowers and seaweeds, keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow.”)
• as a store of memories for old age (”think what a delightful possession for old age and middle life is a series of piuctures imaged, feature by feature, in the sunny glow of a child’s mind! The miserable thing about the childish recollections of most persons is that they are blurred, distorted, incomplete….and the reason is, not that the old scenes are forgotten, but that they were never fully seen. At the time, there was no more than a hazy impression that such and such objects were present, and naturally, after a lapse of years, those features can rarely be recalled of which the child was not cognisant when he saw them before him.”)

WHAT LITTLE THINGS COULD A MAMA POINT OUT? (content)

“Mothers and teachers should know about Nature. The mother cannot devote herself too much to this kind of reading, not only that she may read tit-bits to her children about matters they have come across, but that she may be able to answer their queries and direct their observation. And not only the mother, but any woman, who is likely ever to spend an hour or two in the society of children should make herself mistress of this sort of information; the children will adore her for knowing what they want to know, and who knows but she may give its bent for life to some young mind destined to do great things for the world.”

• flowers
• trees
• seasons
• living creatures
• rough classification of all the above (”For convenience in describing they should be able to name and distinguish petals, sepals and so on; and they should be encouraged to make such rough classifications as they can with their slight knowledge of both animal and vegetable forms. Plants with heart-shaped or spoon-shaped leaves, with whole or divided leaves; leaves with criss-cross veins and leaves with straight veins; bell-shaped flowers and cross-shaped flowers; flowers with three petals, with four, with five; trees which keep their leaves all the year, and trees which lose them in the autumn; creatures with a backbone and creatures without; creatures that eat grass and creatures that eat flesh, and so on. To make collections of leaves and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form, affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing of differences and resemblances.”)
• geography (a duck-pond can spark discussion on lakes; a brook can lead to rivers of the world; a hillock grows into a mountain; a reedy swamp, the rice paddies of China….)
• position of the sun
• distance
• direction
• maps (can be drawn in the sand or on paper)

I like these ideas and want to embrace them fully for my little ones as well as the older ones who missed out on this kind of early-years-experience. We’re going to do it all together, and while the time may come that the older ones need to knuckle down and apply themselves more fully to their books, there is nothing to be lost by developing this love of creation for a time now.

I made up a little rule that I could read a TJEd book one week, and then a *book of my choosing* the next week so that I actually get through the books I simply want to read as well as the ones I want to read for TJEd. I’m meant to be on to the next TJEd book, but it hasn’t arrived on my doorstep yet, so I’ve picked up an autobiography of a friend’s friend who has spent many years in Nepal. It’s proving to be an interesting read - well written, informative, insightful, with an interesting seasons metaphor running through it. I stumbled when when she suggested if you live in Nepal you are thrust into thinking about what you do with your life, what matters etc….whereas if you live in Australia (or, I suppose, New Zealand) you just live your life and don’t ask the big questions. “Speak for yourself,” I found myself  accusing her much as I had felt she was accusing me! And I realised she was speaking for herself! She needed God to take her to Nepal to make her question what matters, what’s important. While I would appreciate her not assuming I don’t ask those questions in suburban New Zealand, I accept this is *her* book, her story. In fact, by the end of the book I was no longer so concerned about that one paragraph near the beginning! 

Entitled “my seventh monsoon”, Naomi Reed documents the lessons she learns about God’s purposes and herself as she journies through the seasons of life.

I teach the children to get out all the ingredients they need BEFORE starting to bake - I’m going to do the same using the DeMilles’ ingredient list in their Recipe for Success publication.

• Sundays: so far we have not had “Family Executive Committee meetings” (ie mama and papa discuss the week together), and although hubby does not enjoy meetings so much he does a great job of presiding over them in his workplace and I’m sure he could do the same at home too. I love the concept and will be asking him to consider making this a part of our week. We don’t have individual meetings with teh chidlren either, but again, I think this is a great idea and something I’d like to incorporate into our weeks.
• Weeks: we tend to plan out further in advance than one week blocks, but we usually get a bit bogged down by about week three. I’m going to try the week-by-week thing.
• Mornings: full and brimming over round here (mostly)
• Kidschool: I balk at the term, but the concept we have embraced. I do Scripture revision and singing with the children before we even get down from the breakfast table. Then chores happen and we come together again for read-alouds (usually some poetry and something else - history, science, literature, biography) while the kids do something quietly (knit, embroider, blocks, puzzle). We then all head for the dining room table and *do something* We’ve mastered the “structure time, not content” bit!!
• Bean Counter Game: we have our own version with little bits of lego moving from one jar to another. I need to “play” it more though! Tomorrow we’ll start with tidy bedrooms and clean ears
• The Six Month Purge: we did this recently - and indeed, do it regularly - usually it stems from getting frustrated at all the *stuff* around and so I am hoping that having it as a regularly scheduled event might help avoid the angst.
• The Six Month “No”: getting rid of time clutter. For me this time it has meant saying no to turning the computer on before the children are in bed at night. Let’s see what difference it makes.
• The Six Month Inventory: I’ve probably done this about five times in total in the last decade!! Never too late to start. These six-monthly things I think will happen in spring and autumn. So some time this week, I’ll be doing an inventory of each child - it will give us something to work with in the Sunday meetings if they start too.
• The Annual Project: for the past three years our LOLers who were old enough have taken part in the University of Auckland Science Competition. They have worked exceedingly hard, dragged everyone else along in their excitement (and through the sheer hard work bits too) and have been overwhelmed to win the last two years (and place third for the one who entered for the first time this year). The enormity of these projects probalby counts! Next year’s project will be The Trip.
• The Annual Break: we have experimented with all sorts of different rhythms for our year and we’re getting good at the break bit Hubby and I try to get away for one weekend each year or so without the children. We take little weekend breaks as a family, and the last two years we have started camping for a couple of weeks at Christmas with another family too.
• Afternoons: we use our afternoons as suggested EXCEPT that the children probably just think of me being “on the computer” rather than studying (even when that’s what I’m doing) so I want to spend more time reading in the lounge where they can see me taking notes and turning pages. We get together with another family once a week, which seems to work well.
• Evenings: I’ve realised the older children who are up for about an hour more than the younger ones have defaulted in the past few weeks to watching a DVD or playing a computer game. I don’t want for them to get in the habit of just turning on such entertainment as a matter of course and so I am going to get out the board games or a special book for the bulk of their time before they head off to bed.
• Winters: we’ve just come through another winter and it meant lots of books. Sounds like we’re on track.
• Summers: we’ll be found working together in the garden, pickling veges and making jams
• The Weekly Club: we meet with the E family once a week “for the express purpose of not playing sports” (heehee, sorry lads). I have enjoyed watching the children pick up new interests off each other - it may not be a “formal” institutionalised club, but these visits serve the same purpose as far as I can see.
• The Binder: I’m in the process of (and have been all year!) making pencil rolls for each child. That’s a start! The ones who have the inclination and skills also have various journals which seem similar to the binder - creation journals, memory verse journals, poetry journals, recipe books, diaries. They are not all collated in one binder, but the record is there. I like the idea of collecting their six-monthly-goals somewhere. Maybe it could go with their reading lists and finance records.
• The Field Trip: we do take occasional trips to the beach, museums, the park……to make these even more beneficial, we could allow more time for sitting quietly together, allowing conversations to develop more.
• The Library Trip: we do this!
• The Bookshelf: oh what sweet permission - to let the little kids’ shelves be messy!!!!!!!!
  I’m not sure I can get my head round the LOL books being “not arranged by topic”. I can understand the thinking behind the suggestion, but we have so many books we’d never find them if they were all just arranged haphazardly on the shelves - we also ahve a great many bookshelves in our home! Some of them are taboo to the littlies - is this the same as devoting the top shelves to Scholar books and bottom shelves to littlies’ books? Yes, it might be, but what about the LOL books? They’re all arranged by topic - the Ancients on this shelf (nonfiction works as well as ripping good yarns and stories on tape all crammed in together), art books on that shelf, foreign languages and dictionaries here, sciencey books there, the few maths books stacked together, biographies taking up two shelves……I need to think more on this one.
• The Closet: we don’t have a lock! In fact, the closet is actually a set of open shelves in one room and a cupboard in another - and neither of them are in the same room as most of the bookshelves as the DeMilles suggest is ideal, but it’s the way it works in our house. The cupboard is full of gear that can be used while I’m reading aloud and the open shelves in the dining room are for use at ”table time”.  If I could work out how to control it better, the children would only have access to these shelves under my supervision, but this is an area of (dare I call it) rebellion? or is it just that I am not consistent enough in enforcing consequences for kids helpingthemselves to materials and leaving a mess? I like the idea of a big fat lock
• The Family Room: we have two rooms that serve as family rooms - both have big open carpetted spaces for lounging on. One has comfy couches and chairs, the other has only one comfy rocking chair (for me - heehee), but is the warmer room in winter. This room does not contain a television - but neither does it have the bookshelves. The bookshelves are (shock, horror) in the same room as the tv - I sincerely hope the DeMilles’ prophecy will not ring true for us because of this set-up: “A room with the television or a computer, even if they are turned off most of the time, will never boast a daily brood of world class education at all levels.”
• The Entertainment Room: this is *supposed* to be separate from the family room. It’s “one of those huge details that people like to ignore.” Yes, that’s me. Not ignoring, but not fully understanding. Maybe if we find this whole thing is almost-but-not-quite-working, I might consider asking hubby if the tv can be moved to the study (then only half the family would be able to watch it any given time as we wouldn’t all fit in the room, but at least it would then be with the computer!). I just don’t get why this is so important. We are discerning about how we use the television. We *could* play all our games in the family room so we are not in the same room as the tv, but I don’t understand why we need to. The comfy couches are in the lounge where the tv is. Sometimes we choose to play or read in there; sometimes we do it at the dining room table; sometimes out under the plum tree. It seems silly to only use the lounge for viewing DVDs (which we don’t do often).
• The Donation Box: we have the concept in theory - we just don’t fill the box and take the stuff away! How about we start doing it on the first Saturday of every month - that’s this week.
• The Storage Box: we’ve done this once and there wasn’t much in the boxes that we wanted to keep after a year! I do think once you’ve learnt to become more ruthless with the Donation Box, you no longer need a storage box!
• The Weekly Lesson: we haven’t started any outside lessons yet. J13 is teaching herself to play the piano and could benefit from other instruction. At this stage she is still at a level that I can provide what help she needs, but when she moves beyond my abilities, I think it’s a fantastic (and obvious) idea to look for a teacher who will use the 7 Keys. I’m not sure how to find someone like that, but prayer may bring an answer.
• The Safety Kids Class: don’t know anything about this.
• The Mom School:
• The Computer: I *like* the idea that it is an adult tool for writing. Need to talk to hubby about this. We started off trewating it this way, but recently the 6-10 year olds have started playing some “educational” games. More than the older ones ever did. Time to revisit the discussion.
• The Kitchen Table: we already discuss things during preparation and eating time. Always room for improvement though.
• The Cleaning Time: generally works OK. Could do better if I supervised better.
• The Academic “No”: I don’t think we’re in any danger of pushing any of the kids too fast too soon. That paradigm shift is complete.
• The Discipline “No”: we’re not scared of this oen - but need to work on doing it with gentlesness.
• The Yard: we’re blessed to have a goodie
• The Evening Reading List: Little Britches; Man of the Family; Mary Emma and Company; The Fields of Home; Laddie; Where the Red Fern Grows; Pollyanna; Carry on Mr Bowditch; Charlotte’s Web; Little House in the Big Woods; Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy; Trumpet of the Swan; The Cricket in Times Square
  We’ve read half of these and will read the rest. Plus we’re collating our own set of favourite books too.
• The Chores: what do you do when the kids don’t see the chores they are doing as “real”? when it doesn’t matter to them if the house is dirty or messy?
• Grandparent Mentoring: we are very fortunate to have one Grandpa living right next door, and we spend time with him nearly every single day. Just having him around is a huge blessing and ahs inspired the children in a number of ways, even without specific efforts at mentoring.
• Teaching The Model: On the tail of the six-monthly inventory would be a good time to teach this (the 7 keys and 4 phases) each year. Once it is internalised for us, we will talk more freely about ti too. I have mentioned it to the older children, but we’ve got A LOT more talking to do about it - and we need to wait until hubby has read anmd we have discussed together where we are going with it all.
• The Central Classic: the Bible is ours. We could do better at reading it together as a family.
• The Awakening: just need to wait for this to happen!
• The Interruption “Yes”: I agree it is so important to give focussed attention to the littlies when they need you. I also like the idea (gleaned from elsewhere) that if you fill them up with attention first thing, they’ll play more happily alongside you for longer wihtout needing you to watch their every move.
• The “Feminist”: in this definition there certainly is “a powerful example of challenging, fulfilling exciting feminine ambition and expertise that is literally world-changing.”
• The Core Reading List: we have these ones - Blueberries for Sal; Ferdinand the Bull; Peter Rabbit; Winnie the Pooh; Are You My Mother? The ones we don’t have - Oh, The Places You’ll Go; Emma’s Pet; The Cat in the Hat; Horton Hatches the Egg; Even If I Did Something Awful; I’ll Love You Forever; The Monster at the End of This Book
• The Degree Programme: maybe one day…..
• The Formal Ball: we barely even get dressed up to go out for dinner, let alone to a formal ball. Is this perhaps a cultural thing?
• The Assignment: we’ve only had a few Dissatisfaction moments with our eldest three so far. For one fo them, it was simply a matter of him not being ready to learn to read and so we encouraged him to find out what God was wanting to teach him through this apparent “slowness”. For the other two, I realise it’s just been a matter of knowing who your students are, what their personalities are, what they are struggling with and helping them along the path. This will obviously be an ongoing thing.
• The Mission: need to spell this out
• The Friend: sometimes I feel like I ahve too many friends-  I cannot be a good friend to them all - I have no answers to this dilemna.
• The Core Phase Curriculum: I LOVE these two paragraphs. They encapsulate what we believe. They validate our choices - and just sometimes, that’s nice.
• The Love of Learning Curriculum: I always feel inadequate in that I do not set a good enough example and do not give enough individual attention to each of the children and sometimes just get tired of them all. But apart from that, we seem to be doing most of the things mentioned on the list. 
• Spring is for Science: we sure saw this at Western Springs yesterday. Could be a good time to break open some of the science-y books too. I’ll have a look on the shelf and see what grabs me.
• Fall is for Beginnings: already decided above that autumn and spring are good times for the six-monthly-bits
• The Subscription: don’t have any, but we do buy lots of books
• The Dinner Meal: the children often take dinnertime as permission to show Dadda nad Grandpa what they have done that day. Another idea I like (not from this article) is to have a jar full of questions to pull out as conversation-starters. Might have to make one - maybe we could even do it as a family.
• The Discipline “Yes”: isn’t this the beginning?
• The Academic “Yes”: two books down, not counting how many to go!

My first port-of-call for buying books is GoodBooks. It used to be Ebay, because the books I want are often not available in NZ and I Love A Bargain, and I still go there if GoodBooks can’t help me, but I visit GoodBooks FIRST.

Why? Because they don’t charge postage, they deliver to your door, and they GIVE ALL THE PROFITS TO OXFAM…and now you can have a look at this:
Good Books Animation (only if you’d like to, of course)

I’ve noticed my children ask different questions to their schooled peer group. Or, rather, I was surprised by the questions asked by some school kids I looked after recently. Whereas my kids tend to be full of ideas (too many sometimes - heehee), the visitors kept asking me ”What am I meant to do with this?” and “What does this do?” and “What’s this for?” I was intrigued that they turned to me for their answers instead of experimenting or coming up with their own posssible solutions. I was also surprised that once they had heard one answer, they were off. I guess I’ve got used to engaging in discussion rather than just question-n-answer-format. To be really honest, I shot questions back at those visiting children’s questions to encourage their own thinking, but on that one occasion I had three really good ideas spring to mind immediately, so decided just to tell them. They only heard the first one. All I can surmise is they thought that was THE answer and so there was no need to hear any more.

This is not to say that there are no good teachers in state schools or that government schools cannot teach children to use their imaginations. It’s just an observation of some interactions with some children that made me realise the *good* my own family is getting.

 (Sidenote: This post was a discipline post. I didn’t feel like writing. Just wanted to read. But I’m really keen to establish the habit of a daily paragraph or two, so I got that done first and am now going to curl up with Peter Rabbit and a little one who has just awoken!)