Learning how to read the Charlotte Mason way...

Me, that is!....the kids have been reading small portions of good books, and then stopping to reflect and retell what they remember or thought was interesting ever since I started reading about Charlotte Mason's homeschooling methods several years ago.

When we weren't consistent, it was primarily because it was such an odd shift in how I was accustomed to reading.

 Here I must confess that I am a recovering book "gulper" who went through life LOVING books, but going about them in a very wasteful way. If they were fiction, I read them so fast, that within 12 hours, all I was left with was a pleasant warm feeling (and a pile of undone responsibilities. :) If it was for school, I sufficiently memorized what I needed to to make an excellent grade on the upcoming exam and then effectively cleared my short term memory to "make room" for the next term's reading.

My husband was the one who first encouraged me to "savour" a book, mostly because he enjoyed talking through a book we were reading. My self-control in that area was so bad, that really the only way we could discuss a book as we went through it was if I read it aloud to him. Left to my own devises, I could skim the whole thing in two days; but we would miss out on getting to think it through.

Now as a homeschool mama, I am trying to practice what I preach...and you'll NEVER guess what I found out! It's actually FUN to let a book's words soak in slow, to think about an idea, or a word picture, until you've weighed it, and lived it out in your mind!  (This sounds obvious, if not simply sarcastic now, but I remember in the beginning, I was NOT convinced that it could be as enjoyable to read this way.)

Besides still being enjoyable, I also found out that I am now able to make connections and contrasts between things that I am reading. See my post here to listen in on what Charlotte Mason and Tedd Tripp taught me one evening. :)

I still get lazy and read without thinking sometimes, usually when I am reading as a time-wasting activity instead of reading intentionally.  I still don't always make time to sit down and discuss what I've read, (either in person or print). But I'm learning. I'm learning that this way of getting living ideas from a printed page is really important; not only for my kids, but for their mama, too.