S8 E3 | Why Poetry Study is Beneficial and Necessary, Pt. 1 (Shiela Catanzarite)
Show Notes:
God hardwired our children's brains for poetry. Charlotte Mason knew this when she said, "Children are born poets, and they dramatise all the life they see about them, after their own hearts, into an endless play." She talked about the incredible benefits of poetry to a child's intellectual, academic and emotional development, and neuroscience only continues to prove what she insightfully observed. In this episode I'll share research behind the three main benefits of poetry and Charlotte's vision for why it should be a necessary part of every child's daily educational plan.
About Shiela
Shiela Catanzarite is an author, speaker, editor, and communication coach. She's a 20-year Charlotte Mason veteran homeschooler and has worked as Jeannie Fulbright’s editor and designer for 20 years helping develop Jeannie’s award-winning Apologia science curriculum and most recently her Charlotte Mason products published through Jeannie Fulbright Press. Shiela is the author of the newly published Living Verse Language Arts in Poetry and is finishing up her second book in the series Living Verse Language Arts in Scripture, to be released spring 2024.
Earning a bachelor’s degree in Special Education and a master’s degree in Christian Education from Dallas Theological Seminary, Shiela has been teaching language arts in some capacity for 40+ years. Her passion remains helping students understand the elements of language and how to use these elements artfully to communicate effectively. Shiela is currently a language communication coach, working one-on-one with students who have language learning and communication challenges. She also writes curriculum for her private middle and high school English language communication classes that focus on writing and speaking.
Both of Shiela's and her husband Bruce’s daughters attended private universities on scholarship and went on to pursue graduate studies in medicine and global business. She attributes their love for learning and academic achievement to homeschooling with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and methodology.
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Show Transcript:
Jeannie Fulbright Welcome to The Charlotte Mason Show, where we discuss Charlotte Mason's philosophy and how to implement her life-changing methodology in your homeschool. My hope is to come alongside you and mentor you as you seek to homeschool your children with excellence and joy using the Charlotte Mason model. I'm your host, Jeannie Fulbright, the author of the multi-award winning bestselling science series Exploring Creation with Astronomy, Botany, Zoology, Anatomy and Physiology and Chemistry and Physics, which all employ the Charlotte Mason methodology and have been helping families fall in love with science for over 20 years. I also created the Charlotte Mason Heirloom Planner and the Culture and Craft Enrichment Curriculum, which is coming out fall of 2023. These and many other Charlotte Mason products can be found on my website at JeannieFulbright.com, where if you sign up for my email list, you'll receive your Charlotte Mason daily and weekly checklist which will simplify your homeschool days. While there, check out my blog which covers almost every aspect of the Charlotte Mason method and philosophy.
Shiela Catanzarite Welcome to the Charlotte Mason Show. I'm Shiela, and I'm so glad that you're with me today. I truly pray that this episode is a blessing for you. Today we're going to talk about the beautiful language of poetry, and all of its benefits and why it's necessary to include it in your homeschool education and why your children need to be engaging with this beautiful language that God has given to us. But before we talk about that, I want to tell a story about one of my private students who I had a few years ago. Her name is Nikki, and Nikki came to me when she was 11-years-old. She was autistic and had been nonverbal her whole life. And her mom contacted me and said, Miss Shiela, my daughter, I've lived with her for 11 years of her life and we've tried everything, but she can't speak to me and I just don't know her. I've lived with her since the day she was born, and I know she can hear me, and I know she can understand me, but she can't speak to me. And I don't feel like I know my daughter. Can you help? And I said, sure, I can try. I don't know. And so I began meeting with Nikki three times a week and could see right away that she was so intelligent, very good with numbers, could read well, could write well, but there was not a pathway in her brain for speaking, for verbal language. I began to pray for wisdom and insight as I worked with her, I would study her, and begin to think maybe we can give her language, maybe we can create language for her and build a pathway in her brain for speaking words. So, I thought, well, maybe I will try to create some conversations that I could script and she could read until she began developing the pathways for verbal language. I thought, well, we're going to try this.
Shiela Catanzarite I created three little social speeches, and one was when I showed up at the door for her lesson. I tutor her at her home, and I wrote it out, it said, hi, Miss Shiela, I'm so glad to see you today. Thank you for coming to teach me. Come on in. Something like that. And I would call her mom and say, I'm coming up the street and have Nikki stand at the door with her conversation that I'd scripted. And she'd open the door and she would read it. And then I'd come in and I'd respond to her and then we'd have our lesson. At the end of the lesson, she would read her script. Thank you, Miss Shiela. I enjoyed the lesson, something like that. And then at the end, she had another scripted conversation where she would read to me before I left, bye, Miss Shiela, I hope you have a great day. Something like that. Things like that. And she started reading and she would come. And the first few times we did it, she would look down and read word for word. Then, as I began to come back each week, she would memorize, and I would change it up, but she would memorize part of the script, and eventually she would have the whole thing memorized and she'd look at me and it would be a little bit rehearsed, but she would get all the words out. And in time, as we worked on this, she started developing her own ability to more naturally say, hi, Miss Shiela, come in. And she'd wave to me, and the language became more natural. We'd see her add little words here and there.
Shiela Catanzarite So, we began working on this, and after a few months, maybe six months of really trying to script this and give her the ability to speak verbally, I came to a lesson one day and her mom came up to me and she was just in tears and she said, you are not going to believe what happened. And I said, tell me what happened. She said, I went to get Nikki off the bus and she walked off the bus, looked him in the eye and said, my mom is so cool. And we just, in tears, rejoicing. And that was the first authentic thing that Nikki had ever said to her mother, without any prompting. My mom is so cool. And at that point, through that experience, it just hit me immediately. That language is a gift. It is truly a gift of God. And since then, I've worked with lots of different types of speech students, and sometimes just communicating one word is something to be celebrated. And we take language for granted, but it is a gift and we want to honor it as a gift because God has given it to us. And sometimes we see language arts as merely an academic subject. And it's important to learn all the arts of language and everything that makes language what it is. But ultimately, the purpose of language is for communication and ultimately to connect with other people. And it was so amazing. What a privilege and a joy to be in that moment where this child, after that many years, had the ability, not only to communicate to her mother in words, but to connect with her on a heart level. All these years, I'm sure she had been imagining, my mom is amazing. My mom's incredible. Maybe she didn't have the ability to tell her, but when that language pathways was put in place, that was the first thing she said. And that was a moment of connection for a mother-daughter. And since that time, I've never seen language the same way. It truly is a gift.
We are going to talk today about the benefits of language, specifically the benefits of poetic language, and poetry as a gift. And it is a special language that God has given us for not only our benefit, but for our enjoyment. Poetry is one of the main ways that God chose to communicate with us. And actually, 30% of the Bible is written in poetic language. And if you look at the Psalms, the Psalms are poetry. And David, a man after God's own heart, chose to communicate his praise and worship, his prayers, in poetic language. And so we see that it is a gift. And we want to offer this gift to our children in our homeschool.
Shiela Catanzarite The word poetry actually is a Greek word, comes from the word poema. And the word poetry means a work of masterful creativity. The translation of that word in the Greek, a work of masterful creativity, and it's only used two times in the Bible. In Romans 1:20, when the verse is talking about God's creation and Ephesians 2:10, what it's talking about, how we are God's creation. Romans 1:20 "For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen. Being understood through what has been made." That's the word poem. What has been made, so that they are without excuse. When we see that God made creation, that word poema, tells us that it's a work of masterful creativity. And we can look around us and see that it is in nature. It's just stunning to see God's creation and his brilliance on display, but that word, work of masterful creativity, is also used when God talks about creating us. Ephesians 2:10, "for we are His workmanship, we are His poema, we are His work of masterful creativity. Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them." The two times that we see the word poetry in the Scripture are when God is talking about his creation, masterful creation, and when he's talking about his masterful creation of people, of us and our children, are poems. They are works of masterful creativity. And we need to keep that in mind in our homeschooling. I know sometimes it's hard, sometimes we don't feel that way, but they are. We are. You are a masterful work of God's creative beauty and brilliance, and so are your children. And we have the opportunity, as homeschoolers, to discover and honor the beautiful work of creativity that God has designed in our children and to bring that forth. Because this verse tells us that we are his work of creativity. We were created for good works that God has created, works for us to walk in, fruitful labors for us to engage in as we express his workmanship in our lives. And so that's what homeschooling is really all about. That's what it means to educate your children. And we're going to talk more about that.
Shiela Catanzarite We know that poetry is a gift from God, and neuroscience actually reveals that God has hard-wired our brains for poetic language. And Charlotte Mason knew this when she said, "Children are born poets and they dramatize all the life they see about them after their own hearts into an endless play." She recognized that children were born poets, and there have been lots of neuroscience studies that show poetry appears to be built in and that it has a profoundly intuitive origin. Of course, we know that because God has told us that in His word. But the benefits of poetry are really unmatched. There's three main benefits that we see in poetry, and you don't want your children to miss these. When I think about when we homeschooled, I really didn't do poetry with our girls because I didn't understand it. I really didn't like it growing up, and there wasn't a lot of poetry available when we homeschooled. And I feel once, now that I've learned so much about poetry and have actually written a curriculum, language arts in poetry, I realize how much our girls missed. And I wish I would have known what I know now and had resources available to make poetry accessible because the benefits are unmatched. And God gave these for our children and we want to make sure that they are experiencing everything that God has given for them in poetry.
Shiela Catanzarite And the first main benefit of poetry that we see is that it produces highly pleasurable emotional effects. We know that poetry is processed in the regions of the brain like music and art, and those regions are engaged with, and associated with, pleasure and reward. We know that we love music, there's great reward and pleasure in listening to music. We love art. We go to the art museums and study it and create art, and there's pleasure in that. And poetry also produces the same type of pleasure. There have been many studies that show that the repeated patterns in the rhyme scheme in poetry produce actual positive emotional responses. And one study showed that rhyme and meter produce in people a pre-chill. As you are anticipating maybe the rhythm at the end of the line. When you get going in poetry and you're building up the rhythm and the rhyme and it comes to the end of the line, and you know that that word is going to be there, that rhymes with the in the rhyme scheme. There's a pre-chill experience in the body. And another study showed that poetry can elicit the peak emotional experiences. And they saw this through, again, this idea of the chills. They actually measured people's skin. And when they read poetry there were goose bumps objectively measured, and 77% of the participants experienced chills and goosebumps in response to an unfamiliar poem. So again, we see the body having an emotional response in actually physically shown to in—studies show that the body reacts physically to the pleasure. Charlotte Mason knew this again there's so much that she knew before the new neuroscience has proven it to us. But she said, "that children should have a good deal of poetry to accustom him to the delicate rendering of shades of meaning, and especially to make him aware that words are beautiful in themselves. That they are a source of pleasure and are worthy of our honor. And that a beautiful word deserves to be beautifully said with a certain roundness of tone and precision of utterance." And I just love what she said, recognizing that, not only the rhythm and rhyme of poetry, but the words themselves, the beautiful words that are chosen by poets and well curated. They're a source of pleasure. And our children deserve to experience that in their language arts learning, to begin to engage with these beautiful works of art, beautiful works of word artistry. And Charlotte Mason was very, very careful to make sure that poetry was an important part of the curriculum, and she knew that it would bring a source of pleasure to the child, which is why she encouraged the children to read it every single day.
Shiela Catanzarite I observed this idea of pleasure in two of my private students recently, I did so much study and so much research when I was writing Living Verse Language Arts in poetry, the curriculum that I recently published. And I began to think about my own students who I teach. I teach private language and writing and public speaking to middle and high schoolers. And they come to me after school, and the students are actually public school students, but they come to me for classes and I have private students, as well, who have special needs. And I've been doing some poetry with my public school students and really seen the effect, especially on my high schoolers who hated poetry. I've seen the effect of sitting with them and in reading poetry and talking about poetry and engaging with them and seeing them come alive and be excited about being able to understand poetry and write poetry. So that's been a real joy to see that, but my special needs students, most of them have language difficulties, and I was a little hesitant to do poetry because I always try to make the lesson a really positive experience. And I felt like maybe it would be frustrating for them, but I decided if God has created this beautiful language and if our brains are made for it, then I'm going to try it with all of my students. I had two of my students back to back, and I had chosen some poems that I knew had words that were easy to read. And they're really strong readers and I wanted to see how it went. I got the poems out. And the first one, the first time through the poem, was a little rough and a little bit stumbling and with some articulation and getting the rhythm and like, that's okay, let's try again. So we went through the poem a second time, and it was a little bit better, started getting some rhythm, going. A third time, a little more fluent, and finally the fourth time I'm like, let's try it again, let's go for it. And the fourth time, my students were able to read the poem, all of it in the rhythm and with the rhyme. And it was so interesting to see the response the fourth time when they were able to read it, perfectly. I remember my first just looking up at me with this big smile on his face as if to the—I did it. I could see the pleasure, the pleasure that Charlotte Mason talks about, I could see it in his face. And he didn't say anything, but he had that look like he had accomplished something really amazing. And it was amazing for him and the joy that came with that sense of accomplishment and the enjoyment of engaging with the rhythm and the rhyme was visible on my child's, on my student's face. The other student who came to me the very next lesson, we did the same thing. He was having so much fun by the time his dad came. I tell him, your dad's out waiting for you, he said can we do one more poem? And this is a middle school student and has had so much fun. And so I realized at that point that God made poetry accessible to every child. And we do not want them to miss the pleasure and the joy that poetry brings.
Shiela Catanzarite And as homeschoolers, we have the opportunity to allow our children to engage with poetry every day. And that's something that in my next podcast, I'm going to talk about. How to make poetry work in your homeschool and how to teach it easily and incorporate into your homeschool day, so your children do not miss all the joy that God has for them. We had when we beta-tested my curriculum that was one of the common comments that we had. And even some of the moms who've written in, who are studying poetry through the curriculum, they will say, it's so much fun, or it brought so much joy, or we start our morning with poetry and we loved it. God made it that way for us. So, it's not surprising to hear that engaging with poems is bringing fun to people's day. It's bringing joy to the day, and they're enjoying it together as a family. And we do not want our children to miss that.
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Shiela Catanzarite The second benefit that poetry brings, and there's such strong neuroscience research to support this, is that it stimulates important neural pathways in the brain. So with poetry, it employs a lot of figurative language in metaphor for other types of rhetorical devices. And because poetry is not automatic, we speak in automatic language, we don't speak in verse. It does require the brain to engage in a more abstract and nuanced mode of thinking. And so it activates the right hemisphere of the brain. And that is where comprehension and inferencing and trying to integrate unrelated concepts happens. So with poetry, it takes more mental effort to, not only say the poems because of the rhythm and rhyme, but to understand. And so it calls upon more complex brain processing. And it actually the brain function peaks with poetry. They've done studies, and it just strengthens the overall cognitive health. So that complex brain processing that children get through poetry is really important for all the literature, reading, all the texts that come. The classical literature, all of our living books, the informational essays at the college textbooks, all reading in general when the child has developed this side of the brain and the part of the brain required for poetry, that just translates to all the other types of reading that your children are going to have to do as they move up through high school.
Shiela Catanzarite And if they choose to go to college, we really need the brain to be prepared for that and developed for that, which is why we want to start poetry as soon as a child can read. And six is a really good age to start because that's when you're really starting to engage with reading comprehension. And so the children whose brains have been developed through the early years of poetry really have an advantage of understanding literature as they read their science books, the history books, all of the information that's going to be reading for learning it's more accessible to them if they've been engaging with poetry and developing that part of the brain. There was a researcher who said an interesting quote. He says, "the poetic work triggered different parts of the brain related to non automatic processing of meaning, leading to increased lively activation of mind and a simultaneous sense of psychological reward." They are not only—we have an emotional reward, but there's a psychological reward with poetry. And so that lively activation of mind, we want that for our children. We want their minds to be activated and to be lively. We want them to have more literary awareness. And this happens through poetry, through reading poetry, listening poetry and understanding poetry. So the cognitive benefits are huge. It's really hard to measure them. And it's crucial that we offer our children these benefits through poetry study. And if we neglected, there's actual part of our children's brain that will remain undeveloped and they can't reach their learning potential. They certainly can't reach their language potential, but they can't reach their full learning potential if they don't study poetry because they're not going to be able to access the deeper understanding and the deeper critical reading skills that are so important for learning poetry.
Shiela Catanzarite Poetry was—something that is a part of literature that Charlotte Mason really considered to be the highest form of intellect, and she had so much to say about that. And one of my favorite quotes on poetry that Charlotte Mason said is, "Poetry takes first rank as a means of intellectual culture." And I love that because when we think of intellectual culture that term, we don't hear a lot, but when we think about literature and trying to give our children the best literature there is and have them engage with the best minds and the best thinkers. She considered poetry to be even a higher level of intellectual engagement, and she was right. The neuroscience reveals that, and so we're thankful for everything she told us that, I think, God had given her the insight to understand, but now we know that it was true. So, if your children are not engaging with poetry, they really are missing out on a critical source of cognitive and intellectual development. And as homeschoolers, we want to give our children the best. We have the freedom to give them the best. We want to give them the best of what poetry offers.
Shiela Catanzarite We know it offers the reward, in the emotional reward and the joy. And we know that it offers the cognitive benefit, but it also promotes healing and good health. And this was interesting when I did a lot of study on this, that it's an emotionally powerful vehicle for reflection, self-expression, and healing. And I thought about King David in the Psalms. He used poetic language, really, to pour out his heart before God, to express his emotion, to express his pain, to pour out his prayers and his cries, very reflective. And so the poetic Psalms reveal to us that David really did find healing through expressing his heart for God through poetry. He expressed every emotion imaginable, and he often, David, through his own Psalm, will find healing and restoration. He encourages himself. And isn't this why we're drawn to the Psalms? I know for myself many times going through a difficult time and trying to find just some courage or some hope or some comfort, I'll go to the Psalms and read David's heart and how he expressed himself. And I think because it's written in a poetic form, it does bring that emotional comfort. That's what the neuroscience tells us. And so I just love that God gave us the Psalms. He gave us the opportunity to relate with David as he walked with God through the things he struggled with. We, too, can find the comfort that David found through the Psalms. And so again, it promotes healing and good health.
Shiela Catanzarite There have been a lot of studies. One of the ones that was really interesting and profound was how they've used poetry to help people suffering from PTSD and trauma. They're actually poetry therapists, I wasn't aware of this, but there are therapists who use poetry, and during trauma they found that the normal language centers in the brain can shut down when someone experienced something very traumatic. So, that part of the brain that we have automatic language, it can shut down and then people lose their language, they lose their ability to speak. But they've found that if you activate a different part of the brain through metaphor and through poetry, that people can open up, actually, and find new ways to express themselves. They found that a patient may not be able to express themself just in conversation, but through reading a poem or through writing poetry, it's actually using a different part of the brain, which is still open and able to function. And then they're able to find a voice again and find the healing and restoration that they need. I just thought that was such a beautiful benefit of poetry. They also found that children in the hospital, studies of children who were suffering from cancer, again, they had the children engage with poetry, little activities and songs and drawings, and they found that it reduced their fear and their sadness and also gave them more energy, reduced their fatigue. So they were given—one study, they were given poetry writing kits and writing prompts and construction paper and pen and pens and markers and glue. And it reported that they felt much happier after the poetry activity. And reading poetry also gave them an opportunity for self-reflection and brought relief from stress. So again, children suffering from illnesses, pain, and just the difficulty of maybe being in the hospital long term and isolation. Poetry can bring the healing and the good health that they need. It can actually help aid their physical healing of their disease. So it does a lot to strengthen mental health as well.
Shiela Catanzarite They find that in therapy of people suffering depression and anxiety, again, poetry, everything that it does in the brain, not only cognitively but down on an emotional level where there's pain, it brings healing. And so we just look at so many different blessings of poetry, and it's amazing how God made our brains for poetry, and he knew what it would bring to us. He created us in such a way that we could experience all of these benefits of poetry. And there are more, but those are the three main ways that we see people experience it and that your children can experience the benefits of poetry. And it really is a gift. And we want to offer our children this gift. If they're not engaging with poetry, they really are missing out on a life-giving source that can strengthen not only their academic health, but their mental health and their well-being and the joy and the excitement and the fun that it can bring. And as homeschoolers, we really do have the freedom to bring our children the very best.
Shiela Catanzarite One of the reasons why we choose to homeschool is because we know we can offer our children more and better than what the system is offering them. And Charlotte Mason, she had the most effective methodology. We homeschooled our girls using Charlotte Mason methodology, and I'll talk more about that in other episodes of the podcast, but I saw that it was so effective with our daughters in so many ways, and I'm working now with teaching private student's classes and private students, and I'm just seeing again, employing poetry into their lessons and into their classes. I'm seeing the benefit. So, I'm trying to offer them—bring poetry back in their lives because the school is not offering that, very little, but again, as homeschoolers, we want to look at what is the best. What are the best methods? What are the best materials that we can offer our children? And we do not want to miss poetry because homeschooling is about opportunity and it's about the freedom to choose the very best for our children and the best lessons, the best resources we want to give them the fullest education possible. In Charlotte Mason, who's a mentor to so many of us, she made poetry a priority, and for good reason. She understood everything that neuroscience has told us. And I think that she would tell us poetry is necessary for our children. And I hope that if you have been at a place where you thought, I don't understand poetry, I never liked it. Many moms told me this at the conventions that we traveled to this past year. I hate poetry. I don't understand it. I don't like it. If you're one of those moms, I just want to challenge you to think about all of the benefits that poetry brings and try it. Think about adding it to your homeschool day. See how your children might find more joy, might have stronger reading skills, might find more laughter through poetry. And next podcast, I'm going to share ways that we can implement poetry study into the home school day. Easy ways to do that and on my website, I have a new website, ShielaCatanzarite.com, but I have created a free PDF called How to Mark a Poem, and I give a little blurb about the best way to mark a poem to help your child understand it. Learn the language arts that are embedded in the poem, and how it's structured. And it's a PDF and I've actually taken a poem and I marked it up to show what it would look like, and also given some instructions. So, if you're brand new to poetry and you're just thinking, what would I do if I set a poem in front of my child? What would we do with it? That PDF will give you some insight and it's something that you can just take a method that you can look at what I've done and you can take a poem, any poem, and have your child do the same thing and it will begin to bring poetry to life for them.
Shiela Catanzarite So, if you go to my website, ShielaCatanzarite.com, you can find that free resource. All I'm asking is that you provide your email. I will email it to you directly. And I'm also going to be starting a newsletter in September. And if you'd like to be on my newsletter list, that email that you provide me through the PDF will put you on an email list. If you don't want to be on my email list, you can let me know that in the comment section. But I'm going to be doing an email, all things language arts. I've been in language arts space for over 40 years. Homeschooled our daughters, they're in their twenties, in graduate school, and loved every second. Used Charlotte Mason methodology. I'm using it now with my public school students, who I teach, it works for every child. So, I'm going to be talking specifically about language arts and giving lots of tips and ideas. And one of the ideas that I have for my newsletter is I want to begin featuring my student's works of poetry on my website, and in my newsletters. I've just set up a student spotlight section on my website where I will be posting some of the writing from my students who take my in-person classes, but the poetry writing from the students who are using my curriculum, Living Verse Language arts in poetry. I've already received some poems and they're, beautiful, and actually had a homeschool mom write a poem along with her children. She was so excited. She sent it to me and it was amazing and that was so fun to see. But I want to start featuring, in my newsletter, the children's poetry writing because poetry is so special and writing is so unique and we want to preserve all of our children's writing because it really is very special. It's a reflection and expression of the unique person who God made them to be. And as the children write poetry, I want to honor that and share that with everyone.
Shiela Catanzarite So my newsletter is going to feature that and feature some helpful tips about teaching language arts and how to integrate it and make it simple and easy in your homeschool. And so I hope that you'll go to my website and you will look for my newsletter and I'm going to be co-hosting this podcast through this season with Jeannie Fulbright and some of the episodes we'll do together and some we'll do by ourselves, but I'm so glad you were here today. I really enjoyed sharing about poetry and all of the benefits for your children and the necessity of including it in your homeschool. So check back the next episode when I will be talking about practical tips and ways to make poetry an important part of your child's homeschool education, so your children can experience all that God had for them when He created this beautiful language. See you next time.
Jeannie Fulbright Hey, to simplify your homeschool, I created a Charlotte Mason daily and weekly checklist. To get it, all you have to do is sign up for my newsletter on my website, JeannieFulbright.com. If you haven't already, join my Charlotte Mason Christian Homeschool Facebook group with thousands of Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, both new and old, share ideas, curriculum suggestions, encouragement, and community. And be sure to follow me on TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. And on Instagram, you can also follow this podcast @HomeschoolingDotMom. And please subscribe to the podcast. And it would be so great if you leave us a review, only if you enjoyed the show. Just kidding. But it really does help us to reach more listeners and to add more to the ranks of the Charlotte Mason community. One last thing— have you been to a Great Homeschool Convention? They are amazing. The Great Homeschool Conventions are incredible events where thousands of homeschoolers meet to hear amazing speakers, hundreds of workshops covering every topic possible, and you can get your hands on all that amazing Charlotte Mason curriculum. Go to the GreatHomeschoolConventions.com to learn more. Have a blessed day and may you experience the joy of the Lord as you homeschool your children.
