Who is Charlotte Mason?

A British educator (1842-1923) who dedicated her life to improving children's education. Mason was trained to be a teacher and taught for ten years, during which she began to develop her ideas for children's education. She was invited to teach and lecture at a college, and she compiled a book called Home Education for parents. She opened a training school for governesses and others working with young children. She wrote more books on education, and oversaw a network of school taught by her trained teachers. Her teaching methods for governesses, and for the children they worked with, have been used in developing a way of homeschooling.

Here are some of the aspects I use in my homeschool:

1. Treating children with respect.
2. Habit training--teaching children to pay attention, execute perfectly, kindness, obedience, truthfulness, and many more good habits.
3. Living books, which is popular with man types of homeschooling, but as defined by Charlotte Mason--books by one person who is passionate about the subject, written in a narrative style, that are alive and engaging. Textbooks sometimes meet this criteria, and "twaddle" are books that are dumbed down.
4. NArration--I read aloud to the kids, then they tell back what they have learned. For most of the subjects I have them draw pictures of something they remember and then they tell me a few lines from what we read and I write it down by their picture.
5. Short Lessons--Which I think is the key to covering many subjects in short amount of time. Elementary age kids' lessons should be 15-20 minutes so they are better able to pay full attention. The exception to this is when the kids are engrossed in a subject, such as spending 45 minutes learning about beavers this week. Who knew beavers were so interesting? Not me.
6. Copywork/Penmanship--Right now I use a highlighter to write down a poem or scripture in their notebooks, and they copy over them with a pencil. When they get older I won't use the highlighter anymore. Charlotte Mason's point was to use good literature and not to isolate the individual letters.
7. Dictation--similar to copywork, a child is given a passage to look at and learn very well, the passage is then removed and read aloud to the child who writes it down in their notebook. This teaches spelling, grammar and composition. We aren't doing this yet, and probably won't start until 4th grade.
8. Art and Music--studying the great works of artists and composers.
9.Learning math through manipulatives instead of pen and paper along. We use a program called Math-U-See.
10. Literature--poetry, shakespeare, living books, etc.
11. Bible-- one of the things that drew me to Charlotte Mason is that she is Christian and believed children should be taught the scriptures.
12. History--taught through living books, biographies, etc. and keeping a Book of Centuries, which is a timeline where kids can record events from all subjects.
13. Geography--again through living books, such as books on Marco Polo and following his travels on maps, etc.
14. Foreign Language-- Charlotte taught her kids French, we are doing Portuguese because it is the language Kurt speaks, but we have also done a lot of sign language in the past.

This gives a brief outline of the Charlotte Mason homeschool philosophy. As mentioned before I will be discussin each subject individually in the future.

Here are several websites with more information and curriculum outlines:
Ambleside Online
Milestone's Academy (LDS)
Simply Charlotte Mason
Penny Gardner (LDS)

And there are plenty of others if you care to search online.