Simply Charlotte Mason Conference

A couple of weeks ago I was blessed to be able to attend a SCM conference by Sonya Shafer. What a sweet, precious woman who is such a wonderful resource in learning about the CM style of education. She has many different seminars, however I attended the Books &Things Seminar (which is the one I would have chosen, given the chance)!

She started out with a quote from Miss Mason herself.

"Education is the Science of Relations; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books; for we know that our business is, not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid, as many as may be of 'Those first-born affinities, that fit our new existence to existing things' " (Preface to the Home Education series).

I love the part of the quote that stated "our business is not to teach him all about anything...". Doesn't that relieve a lot of the pressure that we, as homeschooling mothers, put on ourselves? Our role is to show them a little about a lot, in my opinion. We are to teach them how to teach themselves to become lifelong learners. Let's tickle their fancy about a lot of subjects and see what comes of it. I really liked that quote.

Sonya placed the three types of relations that we, as humans, have onto a chart:

Relation to God
Relation to Man
Relation to Universe

Then under each of those three she placed the school subjects that we study:

God: Bible
Man (past and present men): History, Literature, Morals and Economics, Citizenship,
Composition, Languages, Art
Universe (God's creation): Science, Geography, Math, Physical Development/Handicrafts

I love seeing these laid out in this way. Each subject is taught as a relation to one of the three things. I've just never thought of that in this way. This was the conclusion of her introduction (haha!). I'll post Session 1 in another post. Hope you're enjoying it!

Jill