Jul. 26, 2009 - Hints on Child Training
Category • Book Reviews
I just finshed reading Hints on Child Training by Clay Trumbull, the great-grandfather of Elisabeth Elliot. I wanted to evaluate how closely his recommendations meshed with those of Charlotte Mason. In many respects, the two authors come from the same perspective. Both encourage us to respect the personhood of the child, to train rather than break the will, and to value the role of imagination in the child's life, just to mention a few places where the two are in agreement.
However, there are significant areas of disagreement as well. Trumbull mentions habit formation but never focuses on this key Mason element. Trumbull also assumes a level of parental control that differs from Mason--he suggests that playmates need to be carefully screened for suitability, where Mason recommends gently training the child to choose suitable playmates for himself so as not to push him toward unsuitable ones merely by forbidding them. Similarly, Trumbull's suggestions for choosing reading material do not reflect a love of literature in the way Mason's do and completely fail to acknowledge the importance of feeding the child a mental diet of great ideas.
If you are already familiar with Mason's recommendations for child training, Trumbull's book can be useful to flesh out some of her advice and to highlight some areas she omits or glosses over. If you are not already familiar enough with Mason's recommendations to recognize areas where the two differ, I suggest you start by reading Mason, specifically Volume 2 and then Volume 1 if your children are young or Volume 6 if they are older.
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Mar. 13, 2008 - Grace Based Parenting
Category • Book Reviews
Tim Kimmel's Grace Based Parenting details an approach to parenting that meshes nicely with Charlotte Mason's philosophy. Kimmel's approach, like CM's, holds out high expectations for children but expects parents to help children meet those expectations with graceful guidance rather than brute force. I see no indication that Mr. Kimmel has ever read CM's works, but their thinking follows along the same lines. Kimmel outlines the primary needs children have, then shows how parents can meet those needs by showing children the same grace that God has already shown us. He recommends that parents examine their children's strengths and weaknesses, looking for ways to hone the strengths and help the child overcome the weaknesses, in the same way that Charlotte Mason encourages us to use habit training not only to avoid the child's natural flaws but also to avoid the pitfalls in their virtues. He suggests that parents follow the child's natural bent rather than imposing our own vision, just as CM says that "children are born persons" and we must respect the persons they are rather than trying to make them into the persons we want them to be.
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Oct. 20, 2007 - Chess for Juniors
Category • Book Reviews
Chess for Juniors, by Robert M. Snyder, covers basic and intermediate chess concepts for young people. We are using the book with our 6yo dd, who started learning chess when she was 4 or 5. She's been reading kids chess books since she learned to read over a year ago, and she's been playing chess against the computer for over a year as well. However, I am not qualified to teach her anything more than just how the pieces move, and without instruction she becomes discouraged as the computer repeatedly wins their games because she is not using strategy. So we bought this book to work through together so that she would have a better foundation in chess. I am working through it with her, about one chapter or half of a chapter each week. We get the chess board out so that we can set it up to match the illustrations in the book. So far (we are just on chapter 6), I have found the presentation very clear and easy to follow, and the topics move slowly enough for us without being plodding. The book covers the very basics, such as how each piece moves, as well as more advanced topics such as specific openings to learn and employ.
• 4 Comments • Post A Comment! • 5:52 PM
Oct. 20, 2007 - Parenting with Love and Logic
Category • Book Reviews
Parenting with Love and Logic, by Jim Fay and Foster Cline, presents many of the same parenting concepts recommended by Charlotte Mason 100 years ago. The first half of the book covers the philosophy while the second half provides specific examples of the philosophy in action. The relatively simple philosophy centers on natural consequences, allowing children to learn from their own mistakes. The book clearly lays out principles to follow and provides guidelines for knowing how to use natural consequences (or logical consequences if natural consequences are not appropriate). I found a great deal of resonance between this book and Charlotte Mason's principles for child training. If you have read Charlotte Mason but need to see her principles in action or if you needed more explanation of her principles from a modern perspective, this book can help. The book does not really deal with habit training, which is a key component of Charlotte Mason's philosophy, but right at the very end of the first half of the book it gives a brief explanation of how to apply their principles that hints at the habit training aspects of CM. Of all the many parenting books I've read, this one seems the most compatible with CM's philosophy and also the most practically helpful. However, the advice, if taken to an extreme, could lead to callous parenting. I don't think that's the authors' intent, but it's certainly possible. Also, some of the example consequences were not ones which I was comfortable allowing in my own home, and some just wouldn't work with homeschooling.
UPDATE:
I've been thinking about this, and I think maybe I should amend my review to add a little clarification. I really did get a CM-comfortable vibe while reading the first half of this book, the philosophy half. Many of her principles were there, such as not pestering the children with endless demands and commands, setting a good example yourself, using natural (or logical) consequences, not manipulating the children but allowing them to make their own choices, and others.
However, when I mentioned that habit training was missing, I should have emphasized that more. CM wanted us to use even natural consequences only when absolutely necessary. If we are consistently training the children via habit training, consequences of any kind should be rarely necessary. Also, the training process should ideally be almost invisible to the children, happening below their radar so to speak. This book does not acknowledge any of that, so it relies very much on the consequences to do the work.
Depending on where you and your children are in this process, you might need to really use consequences for awhile to get the kids on track before you can focus on more gentle habit training. But long term, you wouldn't want to stay primarily in the consequences mode if you were following CM's recommendations.
• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 5:26 PM
Jul. 6, 2007 - Help Your Child With a Foreign Language
Category • Book Reviews
Help Your Child With a Foreign Language (Berlitz Kids) by Opal Dunn provides a simple guide for teaching a child the beginnings of any foreign language. She outlines the process, but also gives a great deal of explanation of how children learn foreign language as well as many examples of how to proceed.
Certainly this small volume embodies Charlotte Mason's advice from Volume 1, p.300: "French should be acquired as English is, not as a grammar, but as a living speech." My familiarity with Gouin is limited to CM's description in that same section of Volume 1. I would say based on that description that Dunn's work applies some of Gouin's principles:
- ". . . we must acquire a new language as a child acquires his mother tongue . . ." (And CM follows this remark with an observation that Gouin's application of this principle may or may not be the best way to apply it.)
- ". . . the ear, and not the eye, is the physical organ for apprehending a language. . ."
- ". . . the child thinks in sentences, not in words. . ."
Dunn encourages us, just as CM did, to delay exposure to the written form of the target language until the child is reading and writing the native language fluently. I believe CM also encouraged waiting until the target language is *spoken* fluently, which is not something Dunn addresses.
Dunn's method uses immersion, even when the parent doesn't speak the target language. It uses whole sentences primarily, rather than individual words. It uses real activities. It uses rhymes and songs. She shows you how to do this yourself, and explains the principles behind the method so you can see why it works.
Although Dunn's method is not the same as Gouin's, I don't believe that represents a conflict with CM. In my reading of the Volume 1 comments on teaching French, at any rate, I sense that CM was ambivalent about Gouin's actual method. She thought his principles were well founded, but she suggested his method might have to be significantly revised to be practical. I would suggest that Dunn's method might fill in for Gouin's in the homeschool of today.
• 4 Comments • Post A Comment! • 4:10 PM
Jul. 6, 2007 - I'll Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You a Song
Category • Book Reviews
I'll Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You a Song
Every father and mother should have a repertoire of stories––a dozen will do, beautiful stories beautifully told . . . . Away with books, and "reading to"––for the first five or six years of life. The endless succession of story-books, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child's vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets. It is contrary to nature, too. . . . And here is another advantage of the story told over the story read. Lightly come, lightly go, is the rule for the latter. But if you have to make a study of your story, if you mean to appropriate it as bread of life for your children, why, you select with the caution of the merchantman seeking goodly pearls. Again, in the story read, the parent is no more than the middleman; but the story told is food as directly and deliberately given as milk from the mother's breast. Wise parents, whose children sit with big eyes pondering the oft-told tale, could tell us about this.
Volume 5, p. 216
Allison's book provides the tools a parent needs to begin to develop that repertoire of stories in an age in which storytelling is not a common skill. She provides sample stories, songs, rhymes--material to help you get started. She also provides tips on how to present this material and make it your own.
The material in the book is aimed at preschool-age children and younger. However, while the stories might change for older children the tips would still apply.
• 0 Comments • Post A Comment! • 3:40 PM
