The Beginning of our Journey

We began contemplating homeschooling our two children when our eldest daughter was almost four. We started attending a new church near where we lived in Tallebudgera, Queensland, having moved interstate from Karratha, Western Australia. With two little ones attending Sunday school, I had several mothers coming up to me and asking where we planned to send our daughter for kindergarten. To us, it seemed like a very strange question, we felt that our child needed more time with us at home, you know, to do some more growing.

When we got home, I looked up the age a child is normally sent to school in our state and it was four years old for kindergarten, which, in my opinion, seemed too young. I mean, my daughter was spending her days in unstructured play: dressing up her dollies, arranging furniture in her dollhouses, making play dough cakes and pastries, swimming in the pool, swinging in her swing in the backyard, jumping on the trampoline, learning to ride her bike with training wheels, creating ridiculous amounts of art (I still have several boxes full of her early childhood sketchbooks); you know, all the things a young child does. Attending kindergarten hadn't even crossed my mind at the time. I was still co-sleeping with her and my two-year-old son, for goodness sake. I just could not fathom leaving her with trained individuals I knew nothing about, for several hours at a time. If I found the idea traumatizing, how much more for my child? I imagined dropping her off to be looked after and taught by strangers and I experienced a surge of anxiety. I had this sick feeling in my gut that I could not ignore. The whole idea, to me, just felt so...wrong.

Arriving home that Sunday, I sat down and had a conversation with my husband after lunch. I felt quite troubled at the thought of sending our children to kindy. It wasn't a very long conversation as he felt the same way and we both decided that our children would skip kindergarten and prep and that we were going to keep them at home with us for the time being. Eventually we made the commitment to homeschool our children.

I began researching homeschooling soon afterwards. My husband was homeschooled for most of his academic life and with parents who were themselves educators both in Australia and at international schools who were very encouraging, it was quite an easy decision for us. It was quite overwhelming wading through so much information online. I had no idea there were so many different methods of home-educating a child. As someone who is a product of institutionalized schooling, my mind was opened to the endless possibilities of ways of learning (here's one example from a blog that gives a comprehensive overview of the varied methodologies: https://crazyhomeschoollife.com/an-overview-of-homeschool-methods/ ). After many hours of reading, I soon found a philosophy of education that has changed the way we live and how we parent our children.

Charlotte Mason (1842 -1923) was a Christian British educator and philosopher who understood that a child is a whole person with keen intellectual power, a strong sense of morality and piercing spiritual perception (Parents and Children, chapter 24). She says,

"A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present -- present now at this very moment -- not to be educed after many years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator."

She created a method of education that encompassed rich literature, music, art, nature and life. Living books; those written by experts who love and have genuine passion for their subject, in beautiful and engaging literary language, the kind that sparks interest and resonates with the reader; is the main tool for her method. Miss Mason says,

"The current textbooks of the schoolroom must needs be scrapped and replaced by literature, that is, by books into the writing of which the writer has put his heart as well as a highly trained mind." (The Story of Charlotte Mason, page 175)

Pictured: The Little Miss upon finishing her first official year of homeschooling, Karratha WA, 2019

At its core, a Charlotte Mason education is a literature-based education and I really LOVED that! Being a bibliophile myself, it was really meant to be. I read so many beautiful literary works from childhood not because it was required reading at school but because I found my uncle's wall of literature in my grandmother's sewing studio in the basement of her house. It was my introduction to the wonderful world of incredible ideas, far away places, unforgettable characters, amazing adventures--right at my fingertips, experienced and imbibed one page at a time. Of course, when I realized that there existed a way of educating my children using literature, I knew in my soul that we had found a perfect match.

Pictured: Master Z upon finishing his unofficial year of homeschooling, Karratha WA, 2019

This way of learning resonated so strongly with me that I jumped in, whole-heartedly, and spent several days reading about Charlotte Mason and her methodology in practice which involves the art of narration (the process of absorbing or comprehending an idea from a book and telling it back using one's own words), ways of conducting artist and composer study, nature study, copy work, recitation, and habit-training. I also had to find a phonics and arithmetic curriculum as well as a foreign language resource. It took me a while to get my head around her amazing (and effective) ideas. We decided on using the Ambleside Online curriculum (https://www.amblesideonline.org/) because of their emphasis on excellence and authenticity and also because the titles in their booklists are of the highest standard.

According to Miss Mason,

"As for literature - to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find." (A Philosophy of Education)

So I began acquiring all the books we needed for Year 1, a most pleasurable activity to say the least.

When The Little Miss turned six, we started our journey in homeschooling, guided by the living ideas of a late 18th century English lady, whose philosophy has touched the everyday lives of so many families across the world today. Our daughter is now nine and this year will be our fourth year of home education.