Wild and Free
Once a year or so I choose an audiobook to listen to that is NOT for my children. I have an auditory processing disorder, which makes listening hard; but as a firm believer in working brain muscles, building skills, and asking for as few accommodations in life as possible, I work on my listening through audiobooks. It takes me months to listen to a book that I could otherwise read in an hour or two. (I read, according to my husband, extraordinarily fast.)
My audiobook choice the last few months has been Ainsley Arment’s The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming Wonder in Your Child’s Education. I chose this one, frankly, because it was available on Spotify and as a homeschool mom for the last decade (and a homeschool aunt for the last two), I have tried to read anything and everything published on and within the homeschool community since my early twenties. It’s important to me to understand a lot of ideas to really feel comfortable choosing direction for our family. Although I firmly land in the Classical /Charlotte Mason corner of the homeschool realm, I have read a great deal on all the corners. I like that Ainsley Arment has as well. She has done her research, she has put in the hours, she is a fantastic source of information.
I needed the affirmation this week as I was recommending groups to new homeschool moms and realized I had been blocked from the one I was trying to recommend! I also, apparently, had accidentally been complicit to stirring a pot in another, by sharing it with people. You see, I classically educate my kids via the Charlotte Mason method, but I don’t limit myself to one particular curriculum or another. I refer to Ambleside Online, I look for ideas on The Charlotte Mason Cottage Curriculum, I utilize the free resources on the Well Educated Heart/Libraries of Hope website. I meet my kids where they are with resources I can afford. Many times I choose my own living books altogether, ones not mentioned on anyone’s published curriculum. For this, I’m not a part of any group. For this, I’m often evicted from certain communities for not doing the same thing the others are doing. If you don’t use Ambleside Online exactly as listed, I feel you are shunned by the AO purists. When I was using Classical Conversations resources as I saw fit, I was constantly admonished for not “trusting the process.” Veering my own direction as I meet the needs of my children is not leaving the path of God’s design, as I’m quite certain God does not have a hard rule on studying a specific topic in September verses February, or a requirement to do school for 8 months rather than year round, or that everyone has to been on the same exact topic at the same time in order to be part of a community. For this, I found Arment’s book a life giving relief after being a maverick black sheep in most homeschool communities. I show up for my kids to have people, I’m in the online groups for the exchange of ideas. I determined this week, I should probably just stay off the internet unless I’m blogging because my ideas are too fluid for those who write their own curricula.
The humor in this mentality amongst homeschool groups is that: aren’t we all bucking the system already? Why would those staying out of a system that doesn’t work for them choose to be a lemming in another system. Sharing ideas and curricula you’ve made is wonderful. I have some I’ve made as well; but when I share it, I share it knowing that it will (and should) be tweaked by the family using it. Why? Because each family unit is unique, each student is unique. I’m sharing what worked for me in case it works for you. I love reading through what works for others to see if it will work for me. The idea that our homes must all be identical is insane to me.
So without realizing it, I have embodied what Arment describes as “wild and free” for years, despite being methodical and extremely diligent. Being wild doesn’t mean abandoning guidelines, rules, or structure. It often comes with embracing rhythms rather than strict schedules. It comes with studying high school level Chemistry as an 8th grader, outside sprawled in the grass, but regularly sitting at the table for Algebra I. It means knowing that STEM can absolutely be prepped for through nature study. I actually had to defend that online earlier this week… the idea that a student can be fully prepped to engage in college level science due to their extensive nature studies was something I thought was common sense. Look at Isaac Newton, for example. People actually think you cannot study fractals and Fibonacci swirls, chemistry, physics, trigonometry, and calculus, without sitting in a classroom at a desk. I find this baffling. Nature philosophy is how every scientist from the beginning of time got their start, why does modern society discredit it so quickly?
If you are a parent doubting your ability to walk the homeschool path through graduation with you child, I urge you to read Arment’s book. Also try Julie Bogart’s The Brave Learner, Charlotte Mason’s Home Education series, and Law’s and Lygren’s How to Teach Nature Journaling or Anna Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study. If you’ve been on the homeschool path awhile and don’t seem to “fit” anywhere, read The Call of the Wild and Free and know that it is ok. Your kids are learning, you probably do have friends, it just doesn’t feel like it sometimes when people get pigeon-holed into “you must do it this way or the highway” mentalities.
To anyone reading this, I do not subscribe to the practice of gatekeeping knowledge. My toxic trait is: the second someone tries to do so, I absolutely think less of them. After reading Arment’s book, I think quite highly of her.
Getting to Know Charlotte
A Homeschool Life…
When I was first sold on homeschooling, I was smitten with the classical model. I learned later that most “classical” models being advertised in the United States are actually “neo-classical” in practice. They have taken an essay written by Dorothy L. Sayers on the Trivium and pigeon-holed it into something it wasn’t exactly meant to be. The neo-classical model sort of married the United States educational “ideal” and pushes intense academia early, limits the elementary school years to a lot of memorization (the grammar stage), and taken to the extreme (like anything taken to an extreme), steals joy from students and teachers alike.
If you have followed my blog for the last fifteen years, you might remember me “homeschooling” my toddler. (FYI, pre-school is just parenting, not homeschooling. It’s literally PRE school.) Pressured by a narcissistic ex who demanded that my then three year old be able to read already (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force formal reading lessons on children under six), be able to copy out poems (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force small children to write, look up x-rays of their hand bones), and wanted her to be trained as some government super spy assassin (I am a third degree black belt in Kung Fu, but some people have watched too many movies and have no sense of reality and I used to be married to “some people”). Homeschool regret #1: giving into the pressure of my ex to do formal reading lessons because she was bright and could do it and I was hyperlexic and was reading at age three despite knowing that educational studies have long stated that formal lessons shouldn’t begin until six. Homeschool regret #2: ever handing her a worksheet in kindergarten, which wasn’t often, but still…
The things I am proud of, however, is that despite all this pressure, we always focused on living books above all else and I encouraged verbal narrations for years. I do not regret the neo-classical homeschool co-ops we joined (and left), they held an important role in our lives at the time and I met some cherished and beloved friends there even if I was regularly told: you’re not very classical, you’re too Charlotte Mason. The first time I heard that, I started doing some research…
I learned that Charlotte Mason was very classical, and what calls itself classical these days just isn’t. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that I still very much subscribe to both tactics of education and as my oldest is now in highschool and I have three more children with one creeping up on kindergarten (FYI: kindergarten is also PRE- school), I’ve been doing even more reading and research and want to share my favorite resources… the ones I don’t regret.
First: if you’re new to homeschooling or not loving your current homeschool rhythm, this is my favorite link to send parents: The Five Flavors of Homeschooling. I like to share this link so much, I have gotten restricted on Facebook as a potential scammer, despite not having violated the group rules in any of the places I posted it. Knowing your “flavor” can save you a lot of money on homeschool pursuits, and I definitely feel like (having been a single homeschool mom who wasn’t receiving child support that was owed) Charlotte Mason and Unit Studies are the easiest to accomplish for FREE.
Which brings me to my next two resources: Ambleside Online (not an online school) and Well Educated Heart, two curricula that are totally FREE. Ambleside Online is named “online” so as to not confuse it with the Christian private school based on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy still operating in the UK. It’s a full “scope and sequence” and any time you can’t find a title for free or a price you can afford, you can usually access it on Project Gutenberg or substitute it with something suitable. The focus is having the students read real books and source documents, narrating those books, and embracing the idea that Education is the Science of Relations by making connections to things they have studied and the world around them. Well Educated Heart is very similar, but clusters the material into something like unit studies, despite Charlotte Mason discouraging unit studies (because she wanted the children to make the connection, not have the teacher present the ideas already connected). Well Educated Heart offers their curricula for free and the feature I like most is that the audio files are also available on their site for… wait for it… FREE.
But wait, what is narration? That brings me to my third resource that I like to send people: Episode 7 of Cindy Rollins’s podcast The New Mason Jar. I had already read Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell (as well as Charlotte Mason’s original Home Education series) when I stumbled across the podcast episode and I think the podcast is a more approachable way for people to access the road to narration because (Gasp!) a lot of people don’t want to read the books (it actually drives me nuts, but I kind of get it: people are busy, especially mothers). The beauty of pursuing the art of narration isn’t just in the brain development aspect (which is phenomenal), it’s also the price tag… narration is… you guessed it… FREE. No fancy writing programs, no workbooks checking reading comprehension, no drama. A verbal narration costs nothing but the work of a brain muscle and a listening ear plus time. As the students get older a composition book and pen will do the trick. Charlotte Mason educations are truly thorough and affordable. I still teach essay writing, Charlotte Mason purists say they don’t, but a narration is basically an expository essay written beautifully. I still don’t use curricula to teach essay writing, we use narrations and read a lot of well written essays (and sermons) and writing memoirs. My oldest loved Zen in the Art of Writing by Bradbury (after reading Fahrenheit 451) and Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Her seventh grade year also included Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Writing Life. I think the inspiration of her favorite authors talking about their writing lives was the most effective writing tutor I could have ever received.
Other things I’m pleased I did, but will definitely do more of with the younger ones:
- Fairy Tales: read all the fairy tales
- Music: classical music, folk songs, sea shanties, hymns… studying music throughout history and enjoying it in passing has done nothing but enrich our lives and our studies. My oldest plays the tin whistle, piano, clarinet, violin, and pretty much any instrument she can get her hands on. She also enjoyed two years of choir.
- Scripture Memory Box
- Poetry: we added a memory box just for poetry and the kids are loving it. Instead of being set up the way it is for the scripture memory box as described in the YouTube video I linked, it only has month tabs and we read a poem every day that month. This is in addition to the poetry we study for language arts.
- Picture Study: I want to be more intentional about this in the future, but currently we just decorate our home with real art. Paintings we find at Goodwill or garage sales plus a few John William Waterhouse prints I have always loved.
- Classical Conversations songs: they’re neo-classical, they’re expensive, but my goodness if you can find the CDs used somewhere or splurge on their overpriced app, the kids love and remember their awful songs! The Timeline song has been an atrocious gift that keeps on giving and I’m so happy it was and is a part of our lives.
This semester (Fall 2025), the oldest and I have been reading Charlotte Mason’s Ourselves. One of the fun things about homeschooling in the teen years is that as they grow and reason and read for themselves they really start to see the light regarding the choices you have made as a parent and educator over the years. Ourselves isn’t her favorite book, she didn’t catch right off the bat that Mason was alluding to Prudentius–She hasn’t read Prudentius. I’m 41 and have only read some of his work and The Fight for Mansoul just happened to be one of them because I’m a ‘buy all the Latin texts I can afford’ junkie.–But she is having thoughtful conversations with me about it and understands the value of it having been assigned. She can describe the Trivium and how it is needed when learning something new… you always start with the grammar stage (memorizing new facts, acquiring basic knowledge on a subject), move to a logic and dialectic stage (when you can understand and reason through the ideas presented in the subject at hand), and finally rest in a state of rhetoric (being able to express the ideas persuasively), and that these stages will be repeated throughout your whole life as you pursue new things to learn because education is a lifetime pursuit. It’s exciting to be here, even though she’s only in 9th grade, only fifteen years old, even though she wanted to start college courses several years ago and won’t be actually starting one until next semester, it is so exciting to be here and the teen years are absolutely my favorite… and I think Charlotte Mason (and more importantly God) has had a lot to do with that.
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Anakalian Whims 