Speakers
We have 5 great veteran speakers on many different topics in a Charlotte Mason education.
John and Nina Pension
John and Nina Pension co-founded Plumfield Learning Cooperative in Danvers, MA in 1993 based on Charlotte Mason's methods. It has since become Plumfield Acadamy. They have been educating in the Charlotte Mason Method for over 25 years.
Shelley Erickson
Shelley was born and raised in Japan to missionary parents. She has degrees in Economics from the University of Illinois at U-C and Japanese Pedagogy from the University of Iowa. She has been a Japanese lecturer at the University of Iowa, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Tufts University.
Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s book For the Children’s Sake started her journey with Charlotte Mason and convinced her to use these principles in the education of her own children. Fifteen years later, her oldest son (19) is in the middle of a gap year, and Shelley continues to homeschool her daughter (16) and younger son (13).
Her personal experience of a CM education with her children over the past fifteen years has sparked a deep desire to extend this opportunity to many more children. To bring this dream to reality, she and a friend began a monthly CM study group for families in Metro Boston. As the group quickly grew, she was excited to see the members putting CM ideas into practice; and the next obvious step was to establish a biweekly TBG group. This fall, Shelley has narrowed her focus with a weekly Cottage School; she continues the CM study group, now meeting twice a month.
Shelley lives in Medford, MA with her husband, three children, howling Samoyed and talking Budgie.
Amy Harkins
Amy Harkins has been homeschooling, using Charlotte Mason’s philosophy for three years. She has a deep love for researching folksongs and leading children in singing games and folk dances. Amy has a Master’s in Music Education with an emphasis in the Kodaly approach. After teaching for 11 years in public and private schools, Amy decided to stay home with her first born. During this transition to life at home with her son, Amy started the website “Little Songster” to share some of her favorite folksongs and resources with fellow parents. She is delighted to meet other CM parents who are eager to learn how to implement music in their homes.
Richele Baburina
Before having children of her own, Richele Baburina was a venturer of faith and ardent student of Charlotte Mason’s applied philosophy of education, implementing picture talks as part of a museum docent program. As a humanities major, she found Mason’s statements regarding the beauty and truth of mathematics particularly intriguing and later, as a mother, she wanted to experience that “delightful consciousness of drawing out… new power” in her own children. She and her husband have now been home educating for more than a decade.
From Jane Austen to Geometry, Richele is passionate about sharing how simple methods rest on profound, fundamental principles throughout Mason’s philosophy of education.
Christina Wassell
Christina Wassell is a homeschooling mother of 6 boys from ages 17 down to 3, and has been schooling in the Charlotte Mason tradition from the very start. She lives with her family on a little homestead in Douglas, MA. Christina has also been teaching English literature and history for middle schoolers at New Hope Tutorials in Boxford for the last 13 years. New Hope offers courses once or twice weekly for homeschoolers, and so she’s seen many forms of homeschooling in action across many families, which has convinced her that the Charlotte Mason approach has the most to offer. Christina especially enjoys how a strong foundation in narration and living books propels her students (both her children and others) into vibrant reading and writing at the middle and high school level. She’s also been especially inspired by Laurie Bestvater’s The Living Page for the last few years, and has truly enjoyed incorporating a more full array of Charlotte Mason note booking in her homeschool.
Our Schedule
Join Us
8:00-8:45 Check-in & Welcome
9-10 John & Nina Pension - Children are Born Persons: Sustaining a loving atmosphere in the home
10-10:30 Break
10:30-11:30 Shelley Erickson - Beauty in Simplicity
11:30-1 Lunch Break
1-2 Amy Harkins - A Joyful Noise
2-2:30 Break
2:30-3:30 Richele Baburina - Mathematics and Charlotte Mason’s Great Recognition
3:30-4 Break
4-5 Christina Wassell - Narration in Action: How Notebooking can bring Narration to Life (and Your Questions Answered)
Classes
Children are Born Persons: Sustaining a loving atmosphere in the home
A workshop on the CM idea of atmosphere and how atmosphere is routed in the respectful attitude toward the child which Jesus communicates to us in the Gospels and what we as parents can do in facilitating this atmosphere in our home schooling. We will explore together practical ways to reduce suffering (fear, worry, anxiety, conflict, etc.) in ourselves and our children in order to live more in the freedom of God's Spirit.
Beauty in Simplicity
I have found the orchestration of a CM education to be one of the biggest challenges in my life. It is a challenge that has intrigued and engaged me for years. It is complex with many moving parts: so many that I have often wondered how a mother with so many responsibilities can put together a home school that adequately mirrors what Charlotte Mason had in mind. I have found that focusing on the simplicity that runs beneath the seeming complexity has given me a perspective that helps me see the long-range goal and not get bogged down in details that do not matter. Whether you are just starting out or have done this for some years, I hope to encourage you through the daily challenges of spreading the feast before your children.
A Joyful Noise
Gain confidence in selecting folksongs, leading your children in song, and teaching a range of traditional singing games and dances.
Mathematics and Charlotte Mason’s Great Recognition
Charlotte Mason’s oft-quoted words on the importance of the teacher over the textbook can stand like a scowling guard forbidding us to trespass into the domain of the math teacher. See how we can enter the realm of mathematics with confidence, holding the key that the One through whom mathematical laws came to be instructs not only our children but ourselves as well
Narration in Action: How Notebooking can bring Narration to Life (and Your Questions Answered)
Sometimes resistant narrators need help to see the purpose of narration, but the spirit of keeping Charlotte Mason notebooks offers a natural solution to this reluctance. This workshop will offer plenty of time to discuss the roadblocks you may be hitting with narration, and Christina will offer strategies to get narration off the ground in your homeschool, and to keep it running smoothly. Learn some tips and tricks to ‘up the ante’ as younger narrators become more advanced, and have a look at several concrete examples of how keeping notebooks can suddenly transform narration into a natural response to living books that students are eager to work at.
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