{Read the first installment here} It is imperative, Mason knew, for children to be nourished by story – nourished in mind and heart. Only living stories satisfy their appetite for life, for living, and their books must be living, to feed the soul. This feeding is our duty, she says, : “Here a little, there a little – whence… Read More Vision for Children, Second Installment
Last week I had the joy of returning to the Charlotte Mason Institutes national conference. This annual event is something we look forward to all year long; it is a highlight of our year, a time of refreshment, friendship building, and learning. This year, I had the great honor of being asked to address the 300 attendees on the… Read More Vision for Children, First Installment
{Yesterday we honored fathers, and in honor of a very special father,my son-in-law, Emily’s husband, and more importantly, Jonah’s and soon-to-arrive new baby’s father, we are pleased to share his reflections on the importance of the strong characters in our stories.} Most readers have encountered a story that seems to have everything going for it.… Read More Characters Welcome
When my children were small, a sure-fire way to drive their daddy crazy was to chant, especially on long car trips. If you sit quietly at any playground and listen, you will not be able to miss some rhythmic, sing-song childish chorus, because children’s love of the cadence of language is as natural to them as breathing, which all advertisers… Read More A Minute for Poetry
Andy and Carroll Smith of the Charlotte Mason Institute interviewed us in January of 2014, you can watch the latest segment on their website here. This fifth part discusses how we started Living Books Library and some tips for beginning a lending library of your own. We hope you enjoy! Feel free to ask questions,… Read More Part V of our Video Interview with CMI
It must be true that the older you get, the more vivid the childhood memories. At this time of year, I can easily recapture all my young feelings and experiences of summer. Can anything equal that delirious thrill of exploding out of the school building doors on that last day of school? Behind me were the confines of the… Read More The Summer Stretch
There is nothing like a library book sale. Half our library consists of books we have gathered from such sales. Emily is a pro, having tactics for unearthing the best books, and our car is inevitably riding lower on the way home. Where we live in the mountains, libraries are small, attendance at sales is sparse, and selection is… Read More What Some People Do for Books
Emily and I bristle when, on a fairly frequent basis, a child in our library informs us that “fiction is fake,” or “I want to read a true book,” though we know that these ideas are not their own, but have been adopted from adults in their lives. All of us speak and believe according to the ideas we… Read More Charlotte Mason On the Reading of Novels
If you can imagine this, when I was a child, a little Golden book cost $0.25. My grandmother used to slip a quarter into her letters to our family for me, and it was a treat to go to the local “dime store”(also a phenomenon of past days) to buy a new book. Along with Christmas and… Read More A Library of Their Own
With the celebration of Mother’s Day, my thoughts naturally turn to my own mother who died a year and a half ago. The gifts a mother gives are impossible to sum up, or gratitude for them properly to e express, and, whatever the shortcomings, inadequacies, or failures our mothers have, it is indisputable that we owe them our life… Read More A Mother’s Gift