The gorge & the feast
When we first started homeschooling, I followed a “list”. I knew I wanted to do the absolute best job I could at this crazy homeschooling adventure and a list felt safe. While I personally had been an avid reader as a child, it was mainly an eclectic mix of what was required at school and whatever else I could get my hands on.
One list I came across described that a great book should be “living”, meaning the words have a weight and depth so deep they can barely be held...and yet they hold us, nurture us, breathe emotion to us. These are the books that a student wants to share, ones they want to discuss further. These are the books that offer more than academics, these are the books that stick.
I strongly believe in reading up to a child, not down; their ability to comprehend story grows when reading books to them that they may not be able to read independently yet. Read excellence even before they can read it themselves.
Short read aloud times dispersed throughout the day have anchored our mornings, afternoons, and evenings for more than decade now. It has offered the opportunity to read and explore literature that I didn’t even know existed in my own youth.
Miss Mason references education excellence as a “feast”. I had a hard time fully grasping what she meant by spreading the feast for a long time. At first, my mind couldn’t wrap around all the “things” I thought I was supposed to be offering. It felt overwhelming and I felt like a homeschool mom failure, an imposter with a laminated library card and a zoo membership. It took multiple movements through the holiday seasons for me to understand that a gorge and a feast are different meals entirely.
At Thanksgiving here, we gorge. It’s tasty, but the day feels like a whirlwind. There are a few leftovers throughout the weekend and into the next week…but, pretty much, Thanksgiving (even though yummy), is a quick holiday here. It’s not that we don’t like the day, we just don’t seem to simmer it for its full flavor.
After Thanksgiving, we dive into Christmas School. It’s a slow yet consistent melding for over a month into the season. There are favorite meals, specifically sources ingredients, a delightful leaning into fellowship that is specific to our family culture.
It intentionally looks different than what you’ll likely find in a typical Christmas sale ad.
And even though you likely won’t find our Christmas School vibe anywhere else on our street, the boys start asking for it as soon as autumn nears completion. They crave it.
That’s the feast, a slow and steady and specific leaning in to all the goodness.
This feast, from the outside, looks a lot like fellowship. From an inside view, though? In your heart and in your home, it is genuinely so much more. It is a simmering that has more than just academic advantages.
When people ask how we’ve approached a Charlotte Mason education, the two things I’ll mention are:
as much outdoor free time as possible-there’s so much learning that takes place through movement of both sides of our body
read aloud to your child at a higher level than they can individually read to themselves-the love of storytelling begins by first hearing good storytelling
How this specifically looks for your homeschool needs to be individualized specific to the needs of both child and parent, but I always come back to those two points.
I don’t follow a list anymore. I hunt down and source the best ingredients I can find for our home library. Our collection has grown, as have we.
A new addition to our free reading collection this past year has been books from The Good and the Beautiful library collection. We’ve found them to be of good living book quality, free from themes that you wouldn’t want a child to read alone. The quality is high enough that we added more this past month.
While I adore a beautiful, hardcover, vintage book in my hands just as much as the next girl, I know that having excellent literature selections accessible is more important to the feast.
