I have been reading Charlotte Mason Primer by Cindy Rushton. It is a simple book, but nice and rather inspirational to me right now as winter finally starts setting in here and the days get shorter. I borrowed it from a friend, but found it enough of a keeper to buy the e-book, which was on sale for half price. E-books give me a chance to use my neat comb binder and double-sided laserjet printer too 
So I am finding it a sort of “back to basics” read, reminding me of the way I started out homeschooling 13 years ago now. I had read a lot of books on unschooling before we took the children out of school, but when we started, we enrolled with a Catholic correspondence school. This was not a good fit for us and I burned out and burned out my second son. So when I found Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s book “For the Children’s Sake” on the remainder rack at a Christian bookstore, I devoured it and FINALLY could see how homeschooling could be about “real” things, not workbooks and T/F, but not completely a free for all either (which is my main ongoing problem with unschooling — I have no doubt it’s MY problem, not necessarily a problem with unschooling, but too much free form seems to leave my kids and me sort of hanging in undecided form, for some reason).
One thing that inspired me about the Primer was her description of a typical day. Perhaps because I have been trying to revise OUR typical day a bit recently. It goes like this:
- Quiet time/devotions in room.
- Chores
- Table Time (basic reading, writing, arithmetic and religion).
- Family Time (since her husband worked the swing shift, this happened in the middle of the day)
- Constructive Free Time
- Service activities/ministry/outreach
- Tea and Books.
This is sort of how our days go, but it was helpful to read it laid out with some minor differences. Last week I sat down and looked through the Rule of Six Carnival and then tried to map out my own daily priorities — a rule of Six for me, not necessarily the kids. I ended up with:
- Kitchen (this one is about more than just cooking. I dislike cooking, I dislike spending time in my kitchen, yet the kitchen is sort of a center of the house — lots more than cooking takes place there — so seeing that, I decided that I would commit 3 hours a day to this central location — but the idea is that it’s just the center — sort of difficult to explain, but it makes a difference to how the days go).
- Family (homeschooling, reading, talking, playing)
- Community (our IRL network, friends and relatives etc, who often seem to get shortchanged while I recharge my introvert batteries, ie retreat to my room away from my kids). I guess any missions we might do would fit in here too.
- Personal — my relationship with God, my exercise and self-care, and whatever project I’m working on — I decided to put one thing on Project Status each month — that’s how my busy, and effective father seems to be able to get time to do the Important Not Urgent things in his life without shortchanging his responsibilities).
- Keeping the House — one hour maintenance and one hour active cleaning. (this counts supervising the kids’ work).
- Archiving – blogging, record-keeping, anything I do to preserve memories and keep continuity in my life. I only put aside an hour a day for this but I wanted it to have a category of its own because it seems important spiritually and emotionally and in a lot of other ways.
- Commitments — this category is for appointments, outside classes, homeschool groups etc. Obviously it is somewhat like “community” but I wanted to put it into a category of its own because these are “have-to’s” that come whether I make room for them or not, pretty much, whereas “community” is more about the things like phone calls, outreach and so on that I can postpone indefinitely to the detriment of relationships.
I don’t have a specific category for my religious life because it fits into all the categories “permeates” as Pope Pius said. Private devotions fit into personal time, family prayers into family, our liturgical/church life fits into community — and so on.
When I added up all the time for each category, I had a total of about 18 hours a day minimum, not counting sleep. Hmm… no wonder I always feel I’m running a race. But that clarified things for me and was actually a relief because there are various strategies I can use. For example — some of the categories can overlap. And also, things that I don’t get to on a given day, or consistently short-change, I can put on High Priority status. So when I do my evening examen, I try to reflect what time I spent on various things and figure out how that affects my plan for future days.
I don’t stick to this rigidly, but it does give me a guideline. I find I do seem to need some guidelines to work with, even if they are relaxed.
Back to Cindy Rushton — another thing I found inspiring on this read-through of CM Primer was that all the activities were not horribly deadening or drudge work. The chore time is reasonable and we already do this so that one family member doesn’t carry a huge disproportionate share of the responsibility. The table time — she writes that it should be short, not busywork, and that it should be fairly predictable so the kids know what to expect and are confident they can do it. This is precisely what has been working well here, but I was feeling somewhat guilty about it both because it was so short AND because I was requiring anything at all. I wish my guilt-meter wasn’t so incredibly random and annoying!
Anyway, the boys are both progressing well in various areas and the little boys just seem to LOVE sitting down to do the 3Rs. This morning I couldn’t get away from them — they were counting pictures in their math book, and practicing phonics so eagerly it was like training for a triathlon 
they kept asking to do more.
Some Links:
I found a nice link for Charlotte Mason basics, with links to other articles.
Elizabeth Foss has a CM starter kit from a Catholic large family perspective here (look on the sidebar).
Higher Up and Further In discusses CM’s writings regularly.
Dominion Family has a CM-inspired homeschool with some classical influences, and some links to other CM blogs. The Common Room is another spacious and charming blog spot run by a CM-homeschooling family.
And A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason posts daily bits from CM’s books.
