Learn Together and Individually
Learning together as a family is a beautiful benefit of homeschooling but if you are a first-generation homeschooler, it can be a challenge to de-school yourself. If fact, if your child has never been to school, you may be the only one that needs to go through a process of de-schooling. Simply, de-schooling is an adjustment period where you shed the default settings of school ways and embrace a new way of thinking about learning.
We meet parents who are excited to embrace a new paradigm and we meet parents who are anxious about it. If you are ready to embrace a new way of structuring your homeschool, this curriculum will help you accomplish that effortlessly (well, almost effortlessly).
There are subjects that should be taught sequentially and are highly dependent on age and stage (think math). These subjects are best learned individually. However, there is a multitude of subjects that you can tackle together as a family and embracing this structure will not only help you save time but will help your family bond as you all learn together.
The Simply Charlotte Mason Curriculum has been designed to help you teach to the individual and the family. This Curriculum is an incredible set of 16 books. Each one contains a resource list, lesson plans for each day of study, helpful tips, and important prompts.
There are Three Sets of Books:
- History, Geography, and Bible (creation to current)
- Enrichment Studies (art, music, literature, and more)
- Individual Studies (language arts, math, and science)
History, Geography, and Bible (6 books)
- Genesis – Deuteronomy and Ancient Egypt
- Joshua – Malachi and Ancient Greece
- Matthew – Acts and Ancient Rome
- Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation and Epistles
- Early Modern and Epistles
- Modern Times and Epistle, Revelation
Each of the 6 books contains 180 lessons. Each lesson contains instructions for a family learning time and an additional grade-specific learning time.
The additional grade-specific learning time varies from lesson to lesson. Sometimes this section will only involve children from grades 10-12 and sometimes grades 7-12 or some other combination.
Finally, each book weaves history, geography, and the bible together throughout the lessons so you are not doing a history lesson each day, a geography lesson each day, and a bible lesson each day. Instead, each lesson contains one or maybe two areas of study.
Enrichment Studies: art, music, literature, and more…so much more! (2 books)
- Volume 1
- Volume 2
Each volume contains 180 lessons.
Each lesson guides you through several areas of study each day. Areas of study include picture study, poetry, Shakespeare, music study, nature study, hymn study, scripture memory, handicrafts, art instruction, habit training, foreign language, and read-alouds.
The Read-Aloud list is divided into three age categories: young (grades 1-4), middle (grades 5-8), and older (9-12). You can use these lists in whatever way works best for your family, depending on the ages of children in your home. Our suggestion is to not feel overly bound by the grade levels when choosing a family read-aloud. Keep in mind that it is perfectly acceptable and worthwhile to read a book from the young list to older children. You could even consider assigning the “older list” to your older children as independent reading. If you want to learn more about the benefit of reading aloud to your family, this is a very popular and fantastic resource – The Read-Aloud Family.
The daily enrichment lessons are designed to be completed in about an hour per day.
It would be an option to stretch the lessons over 2 days, meaning that each volume could be used over 2 years instead of just 1.
Individual Studies: language arts, math, science
(8 books – grade 1-8)
Each grade level contains a resource list, 180 lessons, tips, and helpful prompts. In grades 1-3, two tracks are outlined to accommodate students who begin grade 1 with different reading levels and the grade 7 and 8 books add Latin and personal development.
The planning is done for you with these lesson books. Use them to help you pull your family together to learn together as much as possible.
