The New Mason Jar with Cindy Rollins

Three Questions for the Mother...She must ask herself Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And, How should they learn it? If she takes the trouble to find a definite and thoughtful answer to each of these three queries, she will be in a position to direct her children’s studies; and will, at the same time, be surprised to find that three-fourths of the time and labour ordinarily spent by the child at his lessons is lost time and wasted energy.

• On this week’s episode of The New Mason Jar, Cindy and Dawn sit down to chat with veteran homeschool mom, Heather Martin about a wide variety of topics
• How and when Heather actually learned about Charlotte Mason after organically using many of her methods all along
• How getting a teaching certificate actually ensured Heather would choose to home educate instead
• Were there challenges specific to having only boys?
• What were some of the intentional things you did in your home to build your family culture?
• Some encouragement for moms regarding mathematics
• How Heather started local recitation gatherings with other homeschoolers

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

Range by David Epstein

In Vital Harmony by Karen Glass

Morning Time for Moms

Cindy’s Patreon Discipleship Group

Mere Motherhood Facebook Group

The Literary Life Podcast

Cindy’s Facebook

Cindy’s Instagram

• On The New Mason Jar today, we bring you a conversation Cindy and Dawn had with the AmblesideOnline Advisory members Anne White, Donna-Jean Breckenridge, Karen Glass and Leslie Laurio.
• How the friendship of the AO Advisory developed and has been a gift for each member throughout the years
• Did the Advisory members use the whole AO curriculum as written?
• What about those fears about missing out on something if a family doesn’t do everything in the curriculum perfectly?
• The simplicity of the Charlotte Mason approach to language arts
• Do any of the Advisory doubt Charlotte Mason’s methods now that they have all graduated their children?
• Are there any things that aren’t common knowledge that the Advisory wants to share?

AmblesideOnline

Six Voices, One Story by Donna-Jean Breckenridge, et. al.

In Vital Harmony by Karen Glass

For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Anne White grew up and still lives in southern Ontario. She anticipated David Epstein’s Range by changing her university major three times and stretching a four-year degree into seven, but she did complete a BA in creative writing, and later added a BEd in adult education. In the thirty years between those things, she (and her husband) raised three homeschooled daughters, who have each found their own Range. Anne has been associated with AmblesideOnline since its beginning, and is the author of several books about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.

Donna-Jean Breckenridge lives with her family in northern New Jersey. She is honored to be a founding member of the AmblesideOnline Advisory, and she continues to serve AO’s community while homeschooling her granddaughters. She is a public speaker, writer (This Country of Ours – Annotated, Edited, and Updated and Six Voices, One Story: The Heart of AmblesideOnline), and audiobook narrator. She counts her greatest roles as mom to her four children, grandmother to five, and grateful friend. Her heart’s desire is to encourage others that God is safe to trust, no matter what.

After living 25 years in Krakow, Poland, Karen Glass currently lives in Indiana with her husband and youngest daughter. She is a founding member of AmblesideOnline and home educated her four children through graduation. She is the author of several books related to Charlotte Mason and speaks and teaches on the philosophy and methods (especially narration). She reads, writes, tries to grow things, and has been known to crochet doilies and knit socks.

Leslie Laurio is an art school dropout, a veteran, a homeschool mom, and one of the founders and original creators of AmblesideOnline. She and her husband live in Tennessee and have four children who were homeschooled all the way from kindergarten through high school, and are now married and scattered across the eastern US pursuing various careers and passions. She has paraphrased the Charlotte Mason series, Parables From Nature, and other works.

The person who can live upon his own intellectual resources and never know a dull hour (though anxious and sad hours will come) is indeed enviable in these days of intellectual inanition, when we depend upon spectacular entertainments pour passer le temps [to pass the time]. If knowledge means so much to us, “What is knowledge?” the reader asks. We can give only a negative answer. Knowledge is not instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory. It is passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame can be kindled at original minds only. Thought, we know, breeds thought; it is as vital thought touches our minds that our ideas are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life... The direct and immediate impact of great minds upon his own mind is necessary to the education of a child.

Let us, out of reverence for the children, be modest; let us not stake their interests on the hope that this or that new way would lead to great results if people had only the courage to follow it. It is exciting to become a pioneer; but, for the children’s sake, it may be well to constrain ourselves to follow those roads only by which we know that persons have arrived, or those newer roads which offer evident and assured means of progress towards a desired end.

• On The New Mason Jar this week, Cindy and Dawn sit down to talk with veteran homeschool mom Elissa Kroeger about her own journey of self-education
• How Elissa first heard about Charlotte Mason
• Elissa’s own history with reading and self-education through her school years
• How Elissa’s early homeschooling community grew organically
• How was a Charlotte Mason lifestyle a catalyst for wholeness in Elissa’s life?
• How has life changed since most of Elissa’s children have grown and are no longer in her homeschool?
• What Elissa does now for self-education
• Who were the women who made the biggest impression on Elissa’s life?

If we know one person who grows pale at a lofty thought, whose tears come at the telling of a heroic action, let us learn, from that, that these are thoughts and actions that have the power to move us all; therefore, we must give freely of our best, without the supercilious notion that So-and so would not understand. If music, poetry, art, give us joy, let us not hesitate to present these joys to others; for indeed, those others are made in all points like as we are, though with a different experience. The orator whose Sympathy is awake appeals to the generosity, delicacy, courage, loyalty of a mixed mob of people; and he never appeals in vain. His Sympathy, his comprehension, has discerned all these riches of the heart in the unpromising crowd before him and; like Ariel, released from his tree prison leaps out of many a human prison, a beautiful human being at the touch of this key.

Better Late Than Early by Raymond Moore

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

The Tripods Series by John Christopher

Byzantium by Stephen Lawhead

The City of God by St. Augustine

Genevieve Foster

H. E. Marshall

Spiritual Sight by Joyce McPherson

AmblesideOnline

Set Your Feet Retreat

It is by way of an effort towards this adjustment of power that I wish to bring before parents and teachers the subject of ‘masterly inactivity’. We ought to do so much for our children, and are able to do so much for them, that we begin to think everything rests with us and that we should never intermit for a moment our conscious action on the young minds and hearts about us. Our endeavours become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children ‘late and soon’. We try to dominate them too much, even when we fail to govern, and we are unable to perceive that wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of Education. But this form of error arises from a defect of our qualities. We may take heart. We have the qualities and all that is wanted is an adjustment; to this we must give our time and attention.

Morning Time for Moms

Cindy’s Patreon Discipleship Group

Mere Motherhood Facebook Group

The Literary Life Podcast

Cindy’s Facebook

Cindy’s Instagram

Dawn’s Swedish Drill website

Dawn’s A Reasoned Patriotism website

Dawn’s Substack

No one knoweth the things of a man but the spirit of a man which is in him; therefore, there is no education but self-education...

• On The New Mason Jar this week, Cindy and Dawn sit down to chat about Cindy’s newest book, Beyond Mere Motherhood
• How this book came to be
• What Cindy hopes this book to be and who it is for
• What you can expect from each chapter of the book
• How this book is helping launch a new podcast series coming soon!

Toward a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason

Beyond Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer

“Why the KJV?” by Lynn Bruce

Blue Sky Daisies

Morning Time for Moms

Cindy’s Patreon Discipleship Group

Mere Motherhood Facebook Group

The Literary Life Podcast

Cindy’s Facebook

Cindy’s Instagram

Dawn’s Swedish Drill website

Dawn’s A Reasoned Patriotism website

Dawn’s Substack

We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and spiritual life of mothers, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirit and is their continue Helper in all the interests, duties, and joys of life.

The mind is a spiritual octopus, reaching out limbs in every direction to draw in enormous rations of that which under the actions of the mind itself becomes knowledge. Nothing can stale its infinite variety; the heavens and the earth, the past, the present, and future, things great and things minute, nations and men, the universe, all are within the scope of the human intelligence.

• On The New Mason Jar this week, Cindy and Dawn kick off a new series of the podcast, Morning Time for Moms, with our first guest in the series, Jami Marstall
• How Jami first came to hear about Charlotte Mason
• How much of AmblesideOnline’s curriculum Jami has personally read as the mother and teacher
• What practices Jami put in place to ensure she was growing in knowledge
• How the mother-teacher is the guide, philosopher, and friend
• What is the significance of the “spiritual octopus” quote from the intro?
• How can moms build a reading life in the busy seasons of life?
• What Jami is reading now and what some of her other activities are

Beyond Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

For the Family’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason

The Idea of America by Gordon S. Wood

John Adams by David McCullough

The Universe Next Door by James Sire

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

Lynn Bruce’s article on The Spiritual Octopus

S2E22: Charlotte Mason Through High School with Jami Marstall

Morning Time for Moms

Cindy’s Patreon Discipleship Group

Mere Motherhood Facebook Group

The Literary Life Podcast

Cindy’s Facebook

Cindy’s Instagram

Dawn’s Swedish Drill website

Dawn’s A Reasoned Patriotism website

Dawn’s Substack

What we are concerned with is the fact that we personally have relations with all that there is in the present, all that there has been in the past, and all that there will be in the future––with all above us and all about us––and that fullness of living, expansion, expression, and serviceableness, for each of us, depend upon how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold of.... Every [mother] is heir to an enormous patrimony, heir to all the ages, inheritor of all the present. The question is, what are the [educational] formalities necessary to put [her] in possession of that which is [hers]?