S6 E22 | Five Steps to a Superior Science Education (Jeannie Fulbright)

S6 E22 | Five Steps to a Superior Science Education (Jeannie Fulbright)

Show Notes:

Today, Jeannie Fulbright, shares the five steps to a superior science education that has grown a love for science in thousands of children and launched a multitude of homeschoolers into science careers, including three of her own children. Not only will she share the five most effective ways to ensure your children are educated with excellence, but at the end of the podcast, she’ll share the secret formula her family used to make getting out in nature an everyday activity and built a lifelong love for nature in all of her children. And she’ll give you practical tips to make getting out of doors a great deal easier for you, and much more interesting for your children.

ABOUT JEANNIE

Jeannie Fulbright, a 24-year veteran homeschooler, is the author of the #1 best-selling, multi award-winning Apologia Young Explorer science series: Exploring Creation with Astronomy, Chemistry and Physics, Botany, Zoology, and Anatomy & Physiology. She is also the author of the action-packed historical time travel book series Rumble Tumbles Through Time, as well as preschool science books and activity kits, the Charlotte Mason Heirloom Planner, and many high-quality Charlotte Mason based products. Jeannie and her husband Jeff became empty nesters in 2019. All four of their children all went to the University of Georgia on scholarship (homeschooling works!). For more than 20 years Jeannie has traveled around the country speaking to homeschoolers at conventions, covering a plethora of topics from Charlotte Mason to marriage and prayer.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

Notebooking Ideas by Jeannie Fulbright

Nature Journaling: Everything You Need to Know (The Charlotte Mason Show, S6 E5)

Nature Study Resources by Jeannie Fulbright Press

Charlotte Mason Heirloom Planner by Jeannie Fulbright Press

CONNECT

Jeannie Fulbright | Instagram | Facebook | Facebook Group | Pinterest | Website

Homeschooling.mom | Instagram | Website

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Show Transcript:

Jeannie Fulbright Welcome to The Charlotte Mason Show, a show that discusses Charlotte Mason philosophy, principles and methods. It is our hope that each session on The Charlotte Mason Show will mentor you in the Charlotte Mason model, inspire you with ideas and offer practical ways to implement Charlotte Mason's unique and effective methodology in your home school. I'm your host, Jeannie Fulbright, and I am so glad you joined me today.

Hey, thank you for joining me again today for another Charlotte Mason Show. Today, we're going to be talking about science. Science was one of those subjects that was so near and dear to Charlotte Mason's heart. She talked about it so much and she believed that it should be done in such a way that it truly just gives children joy and the love of God's creation. So today I'm going to talk to you about the five steps--the five things to focus on when you are choosing curriculum, when you are teaching your children science. I want to begin with the first and foremost, and that is that science should glorify the Creator of science. Colossians 3:17 says, "And whatever you do..." Whatever you do, and that's including teaching your children, especially teaching science. "Whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him." Now, I think this is so important in science because, really, there are few things in this world that have the potential--that the enemy has used for his purposes more than science. This is one of the areas where we need to develop in them hearts for God as they learn science.

I remember reading an autobiography about Elisabeth Elliott--and my children were very young when I read this, I wasn't even a homeschooling mom--but she talked about how her mother gave her this love and gratefulness to God because whenever they were out in the garden and they were out in nature and her mother would point out something in nature, she would always give thanks to God for that, for whatever it was. "Look," she would say, "Look at the flower. Look at the little sparkles on the pedal of the flower. God did that. God made the flower like that. Isn't that amazing? Isn't God amazing?" So throughout her time in nature, her mother would be pointing her heart heavenward. That's what we want to be doing with our children--we want to point their hearts heavenward as they learn science, and to truly find gratitude in the things they learn about and just awe. Like it says in Colossians 3:2, that we set their minds on things above. That their mind is on Jesus, on the Lord, on the Creator of it all. John 1:3 says, "Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made." He's talking about Jesus. Through Jesus all things were made. And shouldn't we, when we're teaching our children science, give credit to the creator. If we're going to do art study with our children and we show them a painting of say it's Renoir, and we talk about all the elements of the painting and the movement and the colors and the way that he made the water sparkle, but we never mention who the author of the painting is, that would be absurd. Well, that is the same with teaching science. There was an author. There was an author for every single shape of every leaf. There was an author who designed every single bird as it is, and the bird songs, and how he created their vocal cords, and the incredible tongue of the woodpecker and how it protects their head when they are pecking at trees. And when learning science, we should be giving credit to God.

1 Corinthians 8:6 says, "Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for him we exist; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist." So we exist through Christ. He is the life-giver. He is the life-giver of all creation. And in Colossians 1--I love this verse--it talks about, "For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." Essentially, Jesus is holding everything together. Everything that exists is being held together by him, through him. So we really want to choose curriculum that builds our children's faith, that gives glory to God. And even in our time with our children talking about anything scientific, our hearts should be pointing them upward.

And when I talk about choosing curriculum--so when I first wrote my first science book, one of the reasons that I wrote it--and that was astronomy when my children were very little--is because my children wanted to learn about astronomy and I could not find astronomy curriculum that went in depth--and we'll talk about depth in a minute--but I couldn't find anything that truly gave glory to God. There was a lot of great astronomy books with beautiful pictures, but they just were not building my children's faith and I wanted to choose curriculum that would build my children's faith. So I wrote one. And then I wrote all the rest of my books. And, just to give you an example, I'm going to read to you an excerpt from my botany book when I talk about how we point our children to the Lord when we're teaching science. So this is a part of my botany curriculum that talks about flowers and I'm just explaining what the purpose of flower is. So I say: "Just like everything else, flowers obey God's plan and design for them. God's purpose in creating them was not only for our needs and pleasure, but also for a very grand purpose. The flower's job is to make babies. Do you remember where all baby plants began? They began as an embryo and a seed, and all flowers make seeds, even the tiniest ones. That is their God given purpose in life." And then after that we go through and we dissect a flower and we look at all the different parts of the flower. But what I'm doing here is--I could just have said flowers make seeds, all seeds originate in a flower without mentioning that that was God's design for them. But as you're learning science, we want our children's hearts to be moved with gratitude towards God with the knowledge that every scientific concept they're learning comes from his design, from his intelligence, because he is the one who designed science to work like it does. And so we want our children's hearts to be softened and their faith to be built when we are teaching our children science.

Another really important reason that I wrote my science series, that's published by Apologia, is that--well, I wanted a Charlotte Mason Science series and there was nothing out there at that time--but I also wanted to give evidence for creation. There were a lot of great books on creationism back when I first started writing my books, but they weren't written in a language that children could grasp. They weren't written in a way that was living language for them. So I chose to create a curriculum that actually gave children evidence for creation that they could narrate back and be able to know in their hearts what the truth is, and to be able to explain it to others. As an example of this, my books have what I call "creation confirmations," which if it was relevant when we were learning some in depth science--if there was a relevant aspect of it that I could tell the children about that brought about the truth of creation, I would add that into the book. So one of the creation confirmations in my Zoology 2 book talks about a shark's ampullae of Lorenzini, which is such a long word for this detection system that God gave sharks. This is what I say: "A shark's ampullae of Lorenzini are yet another example of how incredibly God made his creation. Not only can a shark detect the presence of prey by using its ampullae of Lorenzini, but the shark's brain can even interpret the signals so as to give the shark the precise location of the potential meal. This combination of the ampullae of Lorenzini and the shark's brain is so amazing that a shark could theoretically detect the precise location of a nine volt battery from over a thousand miles away. To this day, human science and technology have not come close to producing such a marvel. The very fact that a shark naturally has such an amazing system tells us that the shark could not be the result of chance. It was clearly designed by an amazingly intelligent designer." So you see here, we're giving them evidence. We're making them think. And that's what we want to make sure when we're choosing curriculum, whether you use my books or any other science curriculum, make sure that is providing them a love for God, excitement about the Lord and evidence for design--for creation.

Charlotte Mason says, "We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and spiritual life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits and is their continual helper in all interests, duties and joys of life." As Charlotte Mason encourages us always to not allow any separation between the intellectual and spiritual life of children, that we should be always pointing their hearts to the Lord. And so that is the first step to a superior science education. And I would say the most important one that we as parents and Charlotte Mason educators should follow.

The second step for a superior science education, and we already have heard this, but I'm just going to reiterate it, especially maybe if you are new to the Charlotte Mason model, but we want to use living books. We want to choose living books and materials with which to inform our children of the wonders of creation and science. Living books are whole books that engage the reader, that ignite a love for the subject, that inspire. One of the main ways that you can tell if a book is a living book is if it inspires the child's imagination. It's not just facts and information. Facts and information do not an education give. Facts and information to be memorized is not science. That's not what we want to give our children. We want to give them a science education that makes them interested--makes them care about the subject. When you're reading the book, does it cause your imagination to begin imagining things? Is it teeming with original ideas? Can you hear the author's voice? Can you hear the author's passion when they're telling you about the subject? Is there excitement behind the words that you're reading? And so that's how you know if you are reading a living book to your children.

There are so many living books for our children that just can bring science to life. I'm going to give you an example of the difference between a living book and, well, a dead book. Charlotte Mason calls it "twaddle," but let's be honest, it's dead; it's drained dry of all life. As some of you know, my mother is--was, she's retired now--but she was a public school educator. She was a principal and then she became an administrator. And she actually chose curriculum. She was very concerned that I was homeschooling my children and what was I going to be using if I didn't have access to these textbooks? So she would just send me all the retired textbooks from her district. So I took a picture of one of them. This is a third grade textbook, and I just took a picture of a subject that I talk about in one of my books. It's about mushrooms--fungi. So I'm just going to read to you this third grade book. This is what the third graders are getting their information about fungus, about what a fungus is and fungi. "A fungus can be only one cell, but most fungi are more than one cell. Fungi cannot make their own food. Some fungi grow on foods. The mold in this picture is a fungus that grows on bread." There's a picture of bread with fungus mold on it. "Other fungi grow on living things and can make them sick. Mushrooms are fungi that get food from dead material in the soil. Plants and animals are made of many cells. Plants can make food. Animals must eat food. Plants do not move from place to place on their own. Their roots keep them attached to the soil. Animals can move around. What are some ways animals move from place to place?" So this is a third grade textbook. And so I just want to give you--that's obviously just facts and information, and that's what this education model and what most textbooks are is just facts and information. A living book brings the subject to life. So I'm just going to read a couple paragraphs from my book on mushrooms. This is from my botany book, which botany is not mycology, but I do have a chapter of mycology at the end of the book. So mushrooms. "You've learned a lot so far about fungi. Now it's time to explore the fungi called mushrooms. For thousands of years, mushrooms have been an important part of society. They have many uses in different cultures and have been beneficial around the world throughout time. In fact, a man was once found frozen in the Alps on the border of Austria and Italy. Scientists believed he lived more than 3000 years ago. Can you imagine that? His frozen body was discovered 3000 years after he died. When scientists searched this man's belongings, they found he was carrying with him two different kinds of mushrooms. One of these kinds of mushrooms is used to ignite fires. The other is now known to have antibacterial healing qualities. Did this man know that? We aren't sure, but we do know that the Chinese have used mushrooms for thousands of years to heal all kinds of ailments." Now, hopefully you could tell the difference between those two books. In the first example, the child does not care about mushrooms, they don't think mushrooms are interesting. But now we're finding that mushrooms are actually pretty interesting. And that's what we want to do is we want to choose living books that bring the subject to life.

So let's now move into the third aspect of a superior science education, and that is using whole books, whole living books. I believe Charlotte Mason says this best. She says, "The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? I know you may bring a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. What I complain of is that we do not bring our horse to the water. We give him miserable little textbooks, mere compendiums of facts, which he has to learn off and say and produce in an examination; or we give him various knowledge in the form of warmed diluents, prepared by his teacher with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject." So what is a compendium? She says, "We give him miserable little textbooks that are mere compendiums of facts." A compendium, the definition of a compendium, is a brief compilation or composition containing the principal heads of a larger work system, or the general principles or leading points of a subject; an abridgment or a summary. And so that is essentially what many forms of education do is they give children a textbook full of a bunch of different science topics, and they don't go deep into any topic. We call this the spiral approach, and this is the methodologies that they use in school. And this is the methodology that, if you went to a public or private school, you were taught with. Most of us graduated from high school having had 12 years of science and didn't remember much at all; truly did not feel competent in science, didn't really understand science as a topic subject. We wouldn't have felt competent to teach anything in science when we graduated, yet we had all those years of science. It stands to reason that the methodologies they use in school do not work to give children a true, rich education; an education where they actually have and retain knowledge. If you give children little bits of information it's boring. Just like the book about mold--the page about mold and fungi--it's just not enough information. They don't make it interesting enough to capture the child's imagination. Science is actually really interesting, it is so fascinating if you go deep. If you skim the surface, you will not find it interesting.

The Third International Math and Science Study did this enormous study on all of the countries that--all the First World countries--that have a public education. They tested everybody and they found that the American schools were scoring at the bottom on international assessments in science and math. And they really were only studying science and math. They did a deep study and they wanted to figure out what was missing. Why was our curriculum--what was wrong with the way we were teaching science? And they found science education in America was an inch deep and a mile wide. That teachers were covering too many topics in one year and not spending enough time on any topic. The countries that were scoring at the top, they were spending several months on every field of science. They were not focused on the memorization of facts and tests and examinations, they were focused on building an interest in science--going deep into each field and spending time there, camping out there. As educators, that's the model we should be using. That is how Charlotte Mason taught, and that's how we should be teaching our children. That's how the countries that are scoring the highest in education, in general, do education is they do it deeply. They go deep. They do not give the mere compendiums, as Charlotte Mason talked about.

And so that is the third step, is choosing to go immerse--deep, go deep into each field of study. And just choose a subject, say, "Okay, this year in science we're going to study botany or we're going to study flying creatures or we're going to study--we're going to choose birds--we'll study birds for four months. We are going to spend time and really come to know the topic, to understand it, to have a depth of knowledge." Which what that does is it gives children confidence. When they know a subject well, when they go deep into a subject, they have confidence.

I had a friend who had finished using my Zoology 1 book, which covers flying creatures, and she went to a nature center that they had here in my town. And they were having some like teaching thing--a bird tutorial for kids--and she signed her kids up and they all went. And her kids kept raising their hand and asking questions of the nature guide, and the nature guide was confounded by the depth of the questions that the children were asking about the clutch size and whether, you know, when does the bird migrate? When does it leave? What kind of bird is this? What does this bird eat? And they were actually really interested in everything that they were studying and learning about. The man came up to my friend afterwards and said, "Is your husband an ornithologist?" She said, "Nope, we're homeschoolers." So, as we know, homeschoolers--they're given the opportunity to go deep, to fall in love with the topic, and they're excited to learn. They love learning. And that's the kind of education we want to provide our children with is a education that makes them care. That makes them care. As Charlotte Mason said, "How much does he care?" And here's the thing, children begin life caring when they're little, they're young, they're walking around, they're asking questions. They want to know what everything is, why it works that way, because they care. And so many times we send them off to school and the way that education is presented to them, they stop caring. Which is so sad and we can do it differently, and especially using the Charlotte Mason model.

So number four for a superior science education is we want to choose assignments that assimilate learning. Charlotte Mason talks about how they will not remember--children will not remember what they've learned unless they produce something from it. The number one way that our children do that is through narration, and that is telling back. That's another reason I wrote my book because I wanted to incorporate--when I was a new home schooler back in the early 2000s, I had been trained in the Charlotte Mason model--I went to a very deep, intensive for several days on Charlotte Mason methodology--and one of the things that I had trouble doing is remembering to have my children narrate. And so I incorporated in my books narration prompts where I say, "Okay, now tell us everything you just learned about how the sun gets its power. Or whatever, you know, whatever the topic was they learned. But I had a hard time remembering to do that and so I just recommend putting a sticky note somewhere in your books to remind yourself to say, "Okay, what was the most interesting thing you learned? What did you enjoy about that? Was there anything new? Was there anything that surprised you?" You know, ask questions that help--they're open ended questions, not leading questions. That would be a yes or no answer, but just open ended questions like, "What did you think about the way that bird catches prey? What did you think about that?" Keep them talking. And that is helping them to assimilate their learning. When they begin discussing what they've learned--this act of narration actually is really the biggest hold--most effective thing that you can do as an educator.

I had one mom email me--this was dozens of years ago--she emailed me and she said, "I just want to thank you. My child, three years after we did your astronomy book, she still remembers the things she learned. We were playing a game, a trivia game, with the neighborhood kids and one of the questions in the game was 'How many Earths could fit inside the sun?' And my daughter knew the answer. The answer on the back of the card was incorrect. The kids were like, 'No, you're wrong. This says this.' So we had to go and look it up and, of course, my daughter had remembered everything that she had learned. She remembered these little details from your curriculum." I was really excited about that. I love hearing testimonies like that. It just blesses me so much. And so I said, "Well, I would love to hear just how you did the course. Did you do every single experiment? Did you do all the projects? Did you do all the notebooking assignments?" And she said, "Oh, no, no. We just read the book at night before bed and she narrated." That was how she did science. And you know what? That's okay. You can do science that way. You can read science at night before bed. That's the nature of using a living book when you're teaching is that the children are excited to listen to it even before bed. My husband actually read my children missionary stories at night, and I would choose them based on the country that we were studying in geography. And so my children got geography every night when they were listening to the missionary stories. That was a period in our lives that was really fun. And so, yeah, you can do science at night before bed. You can do any subject at night before bed.

So effective assignments--narration, number one. Number two, I would just really recommend that you do activities like notebooking, like written narration, which is just having the child recreate what they have learned. Either a creative activity, for example, after children learn about all the different special design features of the Earth and what makes it such a superior--like the only planet in the whole world, in the whole solar system, in the universe that can support life, I tell them, "Okay, create an advertisement to sell the earth." So every child uses their own creativity to make an advertisement to try to sell the earth. So you just find creative activities and ideas.

I actually— on my blog, JeannieFulbright.com, if you click on my blog, there's a blog post called "Notebooking Ideas" and I have probably 50 to 70 different creative ideas that you can implement when you're learning science. So say you're going to learn about sea creatures and you get a bunch of books about sea creatures, and after you read a book about sea creatures sometimes you can just have your child narrate, sometimes you can have them just write down what they've learned and draw a picture, but also there's other times when you might want to do something more creative like design a t-shirt or a commemorative stamp or something like that. I have a list of those on my website.

Today's episode is brought to you by Jeannie Fulbright Press, where you will find the very best in homeschool curriculum, tools, and living books. From the Charlotte Mason Heirloom Planner and original nature journals to the upcoming Bible curriculum and Living Verse, the phenomenal poetry curriculum. Jeannie Fulbright Press is where Charlotte Mason education meets the standards of excellence you expect and quality worthy of your homeschool journey.

So let's talk about the fifth and final step to a superior science education and that is getting your children outdoors. I know you know all about how important nature is for a child's development, all the scientific evidence. If you don't, I have a podcast on this from earlier this season and I will link it in the show notes. If you have already been convinced of how wonderful nature study is and nature time is for Charlotte Mason education, but not just that but for a child's science studies and for truly the development of your child, but you're still struggling to get out in nature, I have some special tips I want to share with you today.

The first is the secret that our family used for getting our entire family outdoors every single day. And that was creating an atmosphere outdoors where we spent time. We actually invested in creating a dinner area outdoors. And we ate dinner outside every single evening and we spent the evenings outdoors. Every single night, we put in a fire pit, and we sat around that fire pit--it was not a real smoke fire pit, we did have to invest in someone bringing in gas and all of that because I just didn't want my hair to smell like smoke. I know that's just kind of lame, but that's how I felt. And so I didn't have a real fire, but we had a fake one, but we sat around that fire pit every single night. And I would have to say that investing in that outdoor space, making it a place where we hung out and we had a swing--the children swaying back and forth on while we talked to them and there were things for them to do, trees to climb and places for them to garden and stuff for them to do outdoors--but mostly we had wonderful seating and a place for us to just be out in nature for hours and hours every single week. That was really where my children grew up is out in our backyard with mom and dad around the fire pit. And oftentimes--we live in Georgia so it was too hot to have the fire on, but just having that space--this is where we sat, this is where we ate dinner, this is where we congregated, this is where we had our conversations. We had a lot of fun kind of family rules about conversation when we all sat out there. I got this great idea from that book Cheaper by the Dozen, and so one of the things that was one of our rules is that every conversation that we had out there together had to be of general interest. And if you haven't read Cheaper by the Dozen, great book on raising a bunch of kids. And so we did. We spent so much time outdoors. And my children to this day love being outdoors. They love being out--when they come home from college or some of them are graduated, they still want to sit out there with the family at the fire pit. And that's where we find our happy place. That's where we connect with each other. We're outdoors. We don't have a covering over us. There are trees and sky above us. I did have neighbors who tried to emulate it, but they didn't want the sky above them and so they put a covering over their outdoor space and they didn't want to be out there because it wasn't really being out in nature. I think we just need to be out outdoors, experiencing it in a garden the way God designed us to live in a garden.

Another way that I think it's so important for us to make getting out in nature fun for our whole family is during science time. We learn science indoors, but when we're out in nature that's an opportunity for our children to actually apply the things they've learned, to see out in nature the things they're learning about. And one of the ways that I really recommend that mom makes it easier for her to get out in nature during the day, take excursions places, go on nature trails is to have a Bogg bag type of packed bag that you take with you. It is already packed with all of your nature supplies and you have an extra set of everything that you would normally also have in your school room,you have separate in your bag--your nature bag that's fully packed. So you have separate watercolors, separate pencils, separate magnifying glasses, separate binoculars, baby wipes, antibacterial first aid kit. All of that stuff is separate in that bag at all times. And you just pick up the bag, throw in some snacks and food, and go. That is going to make getting out there so much easier for you because you're ready to go. As soon as you decide, okay, we're going to go on this green trail, we're going to go do this hike, we're going to go climb this mountain, we're going to go to this place, we have everything already packed and ready to go. And you can use anything that works for you. It could be a backpack, but have it all ready. I also recommend each child have their own backpack where they carry their own snacks and food, their own nature journal, their own pencils--they have a separate set also for their backpack so they're not looking and trying to gather up their pencils or their watercolors, but there is the nature study set that they take with them and that makes it more special.

Also, of course, make sure that you have a wonderful, high quality, hardbound nature journal. And if you haven't seen my nature journals, go and look at them because they will be a game changer for your family and nature journaling. The hardback, the hardbound quality of it gives your children a strong surface like a desk almost when they're out in nature--if they want to nature journal out in nature. It is made with multimedia, high quality paper. And whether you use my journals or not, use journals that have watercolor paper because not only can you use watercolor on them or any kind of art medium, but if they get wet they're just fine. Everything's fine. And the hardbound quality to them keep them lasting. If your children do sketches on spiral, the pencil sketches can get smeared if it's a spiral bound. So I just recommend you invest, invest, invest in the highest quality nature journals. Your children will put so much more of their energy and effort and time and value--they'll just consider it a quality activity if they have a quality journal. So make sure you have a great journal for nature journaling.

One thing I highly recommend you do is make sure you have a great field guide or app for identifying what they're seeing in nature. I recommend having scavenger hunt lists for each item that you would find in your area. Each nature phenomena or each animal or type of plant or tree that you have in your area. Have a scavenger hunt list and everybody has a folded up list that they keep in their nature journal--nd another great thing about my nature journals is we have either straps where they can put the these lists in or they have pockets you can put you lists in--and they can pull out the list whenever they see, "Oh, there's a cardinal! Okay, that's on my list." And they check off their list. It makes getting out in nature so much more of an exciting and interesting activity for them because they are checking off their lists and they are learning while they do that.

So those are my top tips for making nature a regular part of your schedule. And of course, put it on your schedule. And that's why with my Charlotte Mason planners, I have nature study on the weekly schedule. What are you going to do for nature this week? It reminds you to do it. And so if you don't have a planner, put it on a sticky note. Nature, nature, nature. We're gonna make it a regular part of our homeschool schedule because that is the key to a superior science education: your children getting out and seeing in real life that which they are learning about in the school room.

Thank you so much for joining me today for The Charlotte Mason Show and I look forward to connecting with you online. If you aren't a member of my Charlotte Mason Christian Homeschool Group, I would love to have you join on Facebook and if you don't receive my Charlotte Mason newsletter, sign up on my website because you are in for some treats that I have got planned for you this year. Okay, talk to y'all soon. Bye-bye.

Thank you for tuning into The Charlotte Mason Show. If you want to learn more about Charlotte Mason, go to my website at JeannieFulbright.com. There you can find my blog where I discuss so many of Charlotte Mason's principles and how to implement her philosophy in your homeschool. You can also take a peek at my Charlotte Mason Heirloom Planner, which is much more than a planner. It's a Charlotte Mason mentor that not only teaches you Charlotte Mason principles, but it keeps you focused on the things that are important each week, such as habit training, nature study, scripture, read-aloud, prayer, and self-care, which often gets neglected. And I would love to meet you in person at The Great Homeschool Convention where I'll be sharing a lot of different Charlotte Mason topics. To sign up, go to a GreatHomeschoolConventions.com. Thanks again and have a blessed and bountiful week as you fulfill your call to educate your children at home.

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