Habits Archives - Ambleside International

Home is the First Classroom: Parent-Teacher Partnership

Thomas Costello — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:56:03 +0000

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Home is the First Classroom
Parent-Teacher Partnership

“Parents are the primary educators of their children.”

Jill Romine, Principal at Ambleside in Ocala, Florida, references this Charlotte Mason teaching as one of the cornerstones of the Ambleside educational philosophy: the strength in the parent-teacher partnership.

The definition of “education” becomes diluted if we limit it to the mere presentation of facts and data points from a teacher in a classroom. Ambleside embraces a definition that also encompasses the proper cultivation of habits, relationships, and disciplines that lead to a fuller life. Parents who want their children to be discipled need teachers to care about how their children handle struggle, how they approach work, and how their children relate to God, themselves, and others.

“When there’s a strong partnership between a teacher and parents, there’s trust,” Romine says. “That teacher knows how to look above and beyond just a set of skills that need to be mastered, but rather from a character perspective.”

Parents and teachers work together in building that character, both at home and in the classroom. Rather than shying away from weakness, they can address it together. Romine lays out what that can look like in practice.

What Parents Can Do to Support Their Children’s Growth

Model Healthy Authority

Authority is a good and healthy structure. We all ultimately live under God’s authority and sit under other leadership in one way or another throughout our lives. Parents who understand and demonstrate their authority in the home prepare their children to accept their teacher’s authority in the classroom. Having a healthy relationship with authority is important, as is being able to rest in it peacefully.

Build Habits at Home

Habits shape character. Parents can reinforce habits of attention and orderliness by encouraging routines at home — ensuring homework is completed, helping children tidy up after meals, or setting consistent bedtimes. A classroom full of children who are trained in these habits consistently at school and at home is a classroom marked by peace and order, which creates a conducive atmosphere for learning and engagement.

Engage in Meaningful Conversations

Rather than focusing solely on to-do lists, we encourage parents to talk with their children about big ideas. Discussing books, history, or moral dilemmas helps children mature, make connections, and think for themselves. “Since the mind feeds on ideas, relating over the good, true, and beautiful as a family is one of the most important things we can do at home,” says Romine.

Set Boundaries on Screens

Establish firm limits around screen time. Modeling a healthy relationship with technology and setting parameters around its use in the home communicates that being present with one another matters.

Volunteer and Be Present

Parents who volunteer for school activities, like field studies or classroom Handwork sessions, get a close-up look at what their children are capable of. Not only does this support the school community, but it also provides parents with insight into the habits and culture of the classroom, which they can mirror at home.

Encourage Perseverance

Ambleside embraces the idea that struggle and delight go hand in hand. Parents can encourage their children to persist through challenges, from a difficult math problem to learning to crochet. Romine notes, “Real growth happens when we’re outside our comfort zone. Children need to experience the satisfaction of working through something hard and succeeding.”

What Parents Should Avoid

Rescuing Children from Struggles

One of the most detrimental habits parents can develop is stepping in to relieve their child’s discomfort too quickly. This robs children of the opportunity to build resilience and discover their own capabilities. When parents rescue children from every struggle, it sends the message that they can’t handle challenges, which undermines their confidence.

Sowing Limiting Ideas

Casual comments like, “It’s no wonder you struggle with this — I was never a math person,” can have a lasting negative effect on a child’s mindset. Such statements can lead children to internalize limitations that might not exist. Instead, parents should convey that learning is a journey and that effort, not innate ability, determines growth.

Focusing on Performance Over Growth

A parent’s personal anxiety around performance often filters down to children, creating a pressure-filled atmosphere that detracts from a love of learning. Ambleside aims to cultivate curiosity and understanding, not competition. Parents should avoid comparing their children to others and instead celebrate personal growth and effort.

A Beautiful Partnership

“When it’s really working beautifully is when a parent and a teacher are both laboring together, and there’s a sense of being for one another, with ultimately the end goal being the success of the students. We want the fullest life possible for your child.”

Jill Romine

Principal

Ambleside School of Ocala

The post Home is the First Classroom: Parent-Teacher Partnership appeared first on Ambleside International.

Video Series Part 16. Chapter Thirteen: Establish a Strategy

Thomas Costello — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 16:18:21 +0000

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Video Series Part 16. Chapter Thirteen: Establish a Strategy

“Godfrey was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments, but he had a sense that his father’s indulgence had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better will.” ~ Silas Marner

After inspiring a child with an idea and building an alliance, then, establish a strategy for forming a new habit. Ask the child, “How can I help you?” Often they themselves will offer a great strategy. The adult’s job is to inform the student’s ignorance and support the student in overcoming their weakness. Discipline is not control; it is formation, cultivation, and helping a child grow up to form healthy relationships. Ambleside teachers prayerfully identify two areas for each child’s growth, and then act with tact, watchfulness, and persistence to form new habits.

In Part 16 of our video and discussion guides, Bill St. Cyr explains the need to establish a strategy in the formation of good habits. This is accomplished with a growth focus — the formation of new habits formed out of the right kind of heart, the right kind of intrinsic motivations which must be cultivated relationally. Always casting a vision of what it could be and reinforcing the notion that there’s a different and better way to do things. When we hang in there with the child and remain the troubadour of a virtuous life, day in and day out with tact, watchfulness and persistence, then we find in the child those rails of habit laid down which will lead them to easily and smoothly have the kind of relationships with God, self, others, work, and the whole created universe that we long for our children to have.

Tact, Watchfulness, and Persistence. For example, and to choose a habit of no great consequence except as a matter of consideration for others: the mother wishes her child to acquire the habit of shutting the door after him when he enters or leaves a room. Tact, watchfulness, and persistence are the qualities she must cultivate in herself; and, with these, she will be astonished at the readiness with which the child picks up the new habit.

Stages in the Formation of a Habit.

Johnny,’ she says, in a bright, friendly voice, ‘I want you to remember something with all your might: never go into or out of a room in which anybody is sitting without shutting the door.’
‘But if I forget, mother?’
‘I will try to remind you.’
‘But perhaps I shall be in a great hurry.’
‘You must always make time to do that.’
‘But why, mother?’
‘Because it is not polite to the people in the room to make them uncomfortable.’
‘But if I am going out again that very minute?’
‘Still, shut the door, when you come in; you can open it again to go out. Do you think you can remember?’
‘I’ll try, mother.’

‘Very well; I shall watch to see how few “forgets” you make.’

For two or three times Johnny remembers; and then, he is off like a shot and half-way downstairs before his mother has time to call him back. She does not cry out, ‘Johnny, come back and shut the door!’ because she knows that a summons of that kind is exasperating to big or little. She goes to the door, and calls pleasantly, ‘Johnny!’ Johnny has forgotten all about the door; he wonders what his mother wants, and, stirred by curiosity, comes back, to find her seated and employed as before. She looks up, glances at the door, and says, ‘I said I should try to remind you.’ ‘Oh, I forgot,’ says Johnny, put upon his honour; and he shuts the door that time, and the next, and the next.

But the little fellow has really not much power to recollect, and the mother will have to adopt various little devices to remind him; but of two things she will be careful––that he never slips off without shutting the door, and that she never lets the matter be a cause of friction between herself and the child, taking the line of his friendly ally to help him against that bad memory of his. By and by, after, say, twenty shuttings of the door with never an omission, the habit begins to be formed; Johnny shuts the door as a matter of course, and his mother watches him with delight come into a room, shut the door, take something off the table, and go out, again shutting the door.

The Dangerous Stage.

Now that Johnny always shuts the door, his mother’s joy and triumph begin to be mixed with unreasonable pity. ‘Poor child,’ she says to herself, ‘it is very good of him to take so much pains about a little thing, just because he is bid!’ She thinks that, all the time, the child is making an effort for her sake; losing sight of the fact that the habit has become easy and natural, that, in fact, Johnny shuts the door without knowing that he does so. Now comes the critical moment. Someday Johnny is so taken up with a new delight that the habit, not yet fully formed, loses its hold, and he is half-way downstairs before he thinks of the door. Then he does think of it, with a little prick of conscience, strong enough, not to send him back, but to make him pause a moment to see if his mother will call him back. She has noticed the omission, and is saying to herself, ‘Poor little fellow, he has been very good about it this long time; I’ll let him off this once.’ He, outside, fails to hear his mother’s call, says, to himself––fatal sentence!––’Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ and trots off.

Next time he leaves the door open, but it is not a ‘forget.’ His mother calls him back in a rather feeble way. His quick ear catches the weakness of her tone, and, without coming back, he cries, ‘Oh, mother, I’m in such a hurry,’ and she says no more, but lets him off. Again, he rushes in, leaving the door wide open. ‘Johnny!’––in a warning voice. ‘I’m going out again just in a minute, mother,’ and after ten minutes’ rummaging he does go out and forgets to shut the door. The mother’s mis-timed easiness has lost for her every foot of the ground she had gained.¹

Questions and Thoughts to Consider:

Describe what it is to be tactful, watchful, and persistent. Describe what it isn’t.
Explain the stages in the formation of a habit.
What are your areas of strength and weakness in helping a child form good habits? How can you grow?
What does it mean to be a ‘troubadour of the virtuous life’ for a child. Why is this important?

¹ Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 122-124.

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Video Series Part 15. Chapter Twelve: Building a Working Alliance

Thomas Costello — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:50:37 +0000

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Video Series Part 15. Chapter Twelve: Building a Working Alliance

“I can’t lay down a good habit if I’m filled with anxiety.”

Healthy habit formation occurs when a joyful adult comes alongside a child to help them learn a new habit. We can’t lay down a good habit if we are filled with anxiety, because then the child focuses on protecting themselves from us or making us happy. Children also don’t learn habits well from lectures or punitive measures. They require a caring adult to create a friendly alliance with them, sow a new idea, and offer to help them form a new habit because it is in the child’s best interest to do so.

In Part 15 of our video and discussion guides, Bill St. Cyr gives insight to how adults may effectively support children in habit formation. Habits are best cultivated in a relational manner that reflects genuine care; Charlotte Mason describes this relationship as the “friendly ally.” Adults have to lay down the rails, do the leg work, stand beside the child, remain consistent, always joyful to be with the child. In this episode, Bill St. Cyr discusses how to cultivate a habit of humility, beginning with sowing an idea and building an alliance around an idea.

Habit a Delight in itself. Except for this one drawback, the forming of habits in the children is no laborious task, for the reward goes hand in hand with the labour; so much so, that it is like the laying out of a penny with the certainty of the immediate return of a pound. For a habit is a delight in itself; poor human nature is conscious of the ease that it is to repeat the doing of anything without effort; and, therefore, the formation of a habit, the gradually lessening sense of effort in a given act, is pleasurable. This is one of the rocks that mothers sometimes split upon: they lose sight of the fact that a habit, even a good habit, becomes a real pleasure; and when the child has really formed the habit of doing a certain thing, his mother imagines that the effort is as great to him as at first, that it is virtue in him to go on making this effort, and that he deserves, by way of reward, a little relaxation––she will let him break through the new habit a few times, and then go on again. But it is not going on; it is beginning again and beginning in the face of obstacles. The ‘little relaxation’ she allowed her child meant the forming of another contrary habit, which must be overcome before the child gets back to where he was before. As a matter of fact, this misguided sympathy on the part of mothers is the one thing that makes it a laborious undertaking to train a child in good habits; for it is the nature of the child to take to habits as kindly as the infant takes to his mother’s milk.¹

Some Habits Of Mind – Some Moral Habits

A Science of Education. Allow me to say once more, that I venture to write upon subjects bearing on home education with the greatest deference to mothers; believing, that in virtue of their peculiar insight into the dispositions of their own children, they are blest with both knowledge and power in the management of them which lookers on can only admire from afar. At the same time, there is such a thing as a science of education, that does not come by intuition, in the knowledge of which it is possible to bring up a child entirely according to natural law, which is also Divine law, in the keeping of which there is great reward.

Education in Habit favours an Easy Life. We have seen why Habit, for instance, is such a marvelous force in human life. I find this view of habit very encouraging, as giving a scientific reasonableness to the conclusions already reached by common experience. It is pleasant to know that, even in mature life, it is possible by a little persistent effort to acquire a desirable habit. It is good, if not pleasant, to know, also, with what fatal ease we can slip into bad habits. But the most comfortable thing in this view of habit is, that it falls in with our natural love of an easy life. We are not unwilling to make efforts in the beginning with the assurance that by-and-by things will go smoothly; and this is just what habit is, in an extraordinary degree, pledged to effect. The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children. All day she is crying out, ‘Do this!’ and they do it not; ‘Do that!’ and they do the other. ‘But,’ you say, ‘if habit is so powerful, whether to hinder or to help the child, it is fatiguing to think of all the habits the poor mother must attend to. Is she never to be at ease with her children?’

Training in Habit Becomes a Habit. Here, again, is an illustration of that fable of the anxious pendulum, overwhelmed with the thought of the number of ticks it must tick. But the ticks are to be delivered tick by tick, and there will always be a second of time to tick in. The mother devotes herself to the formation of one habit at a time, doing no more than keep watch over those already formed. If she be appalled by the thought of overmuch labour, let her limit the number of good habits she will lay herself out to form. The child who starts life with, say, twenty good habits, begins with a certain capital which he will lay out to endless profit as the years go on. The mother who is distrustful of her own power of steady effort may well take comfort in two facts. In the first place, she herself acquires the habit of training her children in a given habit, so that by-and-by it becomes, not only no trouble, but a pleasure to her. In the second place, the child’s most fixed and dominant habits are those which the mother takes no pains about, but which the child picks up for himself through his close observation of all that is said and done, felt and thought, in his home.²

Questions and Thoughts to Consider:

What makes a habit a delight in itself?
How might a parent or teacher build an alliance around an idea?
What are some ways of “becoming a friendly ally,” and why is this approach to good habit formation more fruitful? What are the principles behind this method?
“I am here with you and for you to help you overcome your bad habit because it’s in your best interest. I see how this bad habit is going to be a hindrance.” What are the outcomes of disciplining a child out of one’s emotional state versus being engaged in a work of formation for the betterment of the quality of life of their child?
Why doesn’t ‘writing an essay’ or being punitive, work in cultivating good habits in children?

¹ Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 121.

² Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 136-137.

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Video Series Part 14. Chapter Eleven: Good Habits

Thomas Costello — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 20:41:07 +0000

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Video Series Part 14. Chapter Eleven: Good Habits

“When we learn a new habit, we get a new brain.”

Neuroplasticity means the brain is moldable — it physically changes as we learn. If you are an adult with children, you are training the children in habit, for good or for bad. You are fixing the rails of a child’s life, and it’s much easier to lay those rails well the first time. Caring adults can intentionally cultivate habits in a relational way so that children grow in habits such as focused attention, neat and accurate work, asking questions, respecting others, working hard, and recovering from emotional distress.

In Part 14 of our video and discussion guides, Bill St. Cyr continues his explanation of training in good habits at Ambleside according to Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education. Miss Mason was fascinated with the latest brain research of her day and ahead of her time; she wanted her philosophy and methods to reflect the best possible scientific understanding of how the brain works, which we now understand as ‘neuroplasticity.’

The Forming Of A Habit — “Do Ye Next Thinge.”¹

“Lose this day loitering, and ’twill be the same story

To-morrow; and the next, more dilatory:

The indecision brings its own delays,

And days are lost, lamenting o’er lost days,”

says Marlowe,* who, like many of us, knew the misery of the intellectual indolence which cannot brace itself to “Do ye next thinge.” No question concerning the bringing up of children can, conceivably, be trivial, but this, of dilatoriness, is very important. The effort of decision, we have seen, is the greatest effort of life; not the doing of the thing, but the making up of one’s mind as to which thing to do first. It is commonly this sort of mental indolence, born of indecision, which leads to dawdling habits.

How is the dilatory child to be cured? Time? She will know better as she grows older? Not a bit of it: “And the next, more dilatory” will be the story of her days, except for occasional spurts. Punishments? No; your dilatory person is a fatalist. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ he says, but he will endure without any effort to cure. Rewards? No; to him a reward is a punishment presented under another aspect: the possible reward he realises as actual; there it is, within his grasp, so to say; in foregoing the reward he is punished; and he bears the punishment.

What remains to be tried when neither time, reward, nor punishment is effectual? That panacea of the educationist: ‘One custom overcometh another.’ This inveterate dawdling is a habit to be supplanted only by the contrary habit, and the mother must devote herself for a few weeks to this cure as steadily and untiringly as she would to the nursing of her child through measles. Having in a few––the fewer the better––earnest words pointed out the miseries that must arise from this fault, and the duty of overcoming it, and having so got the (sadly feeble) will of the child on the side of right-doing, she simply sees that for weeks together the fault does not recur.

The child goes to dress for a walk; she dreams over the lacing of her boots––the tag in her fingers poised in mid air––but her conscience is awake; she is constrained to look up, and her mother’s eye is upon her, hopeful and expectant. She answers to the rein and goes on; midway, in the lacing of the second boot, there is another pause, shorter this time; again she looks up, and again she goes on. The pauses become fewer day by day, the efforts steadier, the immature young will is being strengthened, the habit of prompt action acquired.

After that first talk, the mother would do well to refrain from one more word on the subject; the eye (expectant, not reproachful), and, where the child is far gone in a dream, the lightest possible touch, are the only effectual instruments. By-and-by, ‘Do you think you can get ready in five minutes to-day without me?’ ‘Oh yes, mother.’ ‘Do not say “yes” unless you are quite sure.’ ‘I will try.’ And she tries, and succeeds.

Now, the mother will be tempted to relax her efforts––to overlook a little dawdling because the dear child has been trying so hard. This is absolutely fatal. The fact is, that the dawdling habit has made an appreciable record in the very substance of the child’s brain. During the weeks of cure new growth has been obliterating the old track, and the track of a new habit is being formed. To permit any reversion to the old bad habit is to let go all this gain.

To form a good habit is the work of a few weeks; to guard it is a work of incessant, but by no means anxious care. One word more,––prompt action on the child’s part should have the reward of absolute leisure, time in which to do exactly as she pleases, not granted as a favour, but accruing (without any words) as a right.

*From Goethe Marlowe’s Faust, translated by John Anstler.

Questions and Thoughts to Consider:

What is Hebb’s law? How does it relate to habits?

¹ Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 119-121.

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Video Series Part 13. Chapter Ten: What is a Habit?

Thomas Costello — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:00:42 +0000

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Video Series Part 13. Chapter Ten: What is a Habit?

“Habits are to life as rails are to a train.”

Habit is a propensity to respond to a given situation in a certain way without having to think about it. When a habit is formed, a change takes place in the brain; neurons that fire together wire together (Hebb’s Law). By intentionally and carefully forming new habits in children, we can “lift them above their natures,” freeing them from negative propensities. Focused attention is the most important educational habit to be formed because that to which we give attention, we come to know.

In Part 13 of our video and discussion guides, Bill St. Cyr gives insight to the formation of habits. Charlotte Mason understood that when a habit is formed there is a physical change in the brain. Every time we learn something new, a new neural network is laid down. The more you repeat an activity, the more frequently and easily these neurons fire together. And neurons that fire together wire together —the neurological basis for the formation of a habit. The key is we can form new (better) habits!

The Laying Down Of Lines of Habit¹

‘Begin it, and the thing will be completed!’ is infallibly true of every mental and moral habitude: completed, not on the lines you foresee and intend, but on the lines appropriate and necessary to that particular habitude.’

Habit rules ninety-nine in a hundred of our Thoughts and Acts. In the first place, whether you choose or no to take any trouble about the formation of his habits, it is habit, all the same, which will govern ninety-nine one-hundredths of the child’s life: he is the mere automaton you describe. As for the child’s becoming the creature of habit, that is not left with the parent to determine. We are all mere creatures of habit. We think our accustomed thoughts, make our usual small talk, go through the trivial round, the common task, without any self-determining effort of will at all. If it were not so –– if we had to think, to deliberate, about each operation of the bath or the table –– life would not be worth having; the perpetually repeated effort of decision would wear us out. But, let us be thankful, life is not thus laborious. For a hundred times we act or think, it is not necessary to choose, to will, say, more than once. And the little emergencies, which compel an act of will, will fall in the children’s lives just about as frequently as in our own. These we cannot save them from, nor is it desirable that we should. What we can do for them is to secure that they have habits which shall lead them in ways of order, propriety, and virtue, instead of leaving their wheel of life to make ugly ruts in miry places.

Habit powerful even where the Will decides. And then, even in emergencies, in every sudden difficulty and temptation that requires an act of will, why, conduct is still apt to run on the lines of the familiar habit. The boy who has been accustomed to find both profit and pleasure in his books does not fall easily into idle ways because he is attracted by an idle schoolfellow. The girl who has been carefully trained to speak the exact truth simply does not think of a lie as a ready means of getting out of a scrape, coward as she may be.

But this doctrine of habit, is it, after all, any more than an empirical treatment of the child’s symptoms? Why should the doing of an act or the thinking of a thought, say, a score of times in unbroken succession, have any tendency to make the doing of that act or the thinking of that thought a part of the child’s nature? We may accept the doctrine as an act of faith resting on experience; but if we could discover the raison d’être of this enormous force of habit it would be possible to go to work on the laying down of habits with real purpose and method.

The Physiology Of Habit. A work of Dr. Carpenter’s was perhaps the first which gave me the clue I was in search of. In his Mental Physiology –– a most interesting book, by the way –– he works out the analogy between mental and physical activity, and shows that the correspondence in effect is due to a correspondence in cause.

Growing Tissues form themselves to Modes of Action. To state roughly the doctrine of the school Dr Carpenter represents –– the tissues, as muscular tissue, for instance, undergo constant waste and as constant reparation. Even those modes of muscular action which we regard as natural to us, as walking and standing erect, are in reality the results of a laborious education; quite as much so as many modes of action which we consciously acquire, as writing or dancing; but the acquired modes become perfectly easy and natural. Why? Because it is the law of the constantly growing tissues that they should form themselves according to the modes of action required of them. In a case where the brain is repeatedly sending down to the muscles, under nervous control as they are, the message to have a certain action done, that action becomes automatic in the lower centre, and the faintest suggestion from outside comes to produce it without the intervention of the brain. Thus, the joints and muscles of the child’s hand very soon accommodate themselves to the mode of action required of them in holding and guiding the pen. Observe, it is not that the child learns with his mind how to use his pen, in spite of his muscles; but that the newly growing muscles themselves take form according to the action required of them. And here is the explanation of all the mountebank feats which appear simply impossible to the untrained looker-on. They are impossible to him, because his joints and muscles have not the same powers which have been produced in the mountebank by a process of early training.

Questions and Thoughts to Consider:

How did Charlotte Mason’s ideas about habit anticipate those of modern neuroscience?
What is the effect on a child of forming new habits?
How do we lift children above their nature?
What is Hebb’s law? How does it relate to habits?
Explain how the power of attention is a habit.

¹ Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 107-112.

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Perfect Execution: The Habit of Quality Work

amblesideintl — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:00:29 +0000

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Perfect Execution: The Habit of Quality Work

Recently I have had occasion to re-read and study various sections in the book of Exodus which speak to the building of the Hebrew tabernacle. As God instructed his people through Moses, materials were gathered and used according to God’s specific plan. I was struck once again by God’s detailed directions for the same: exact measurements, steps for accomplishing the construction, carefully chosen materials, workers equipped for the skills needed on the job, the layout of the property, accurate procedures for the task. God also reminded the people of the importance of taking the seventh day rest throughout the process. In addition, He warned of consequences for not complying with His direction. Moses dutifully relayed these instructions to the people, and they willingly and joyfully obeyed. God’s attention to detail was specific and necessary to produce a place where He could dwell, where He would be met and worshipped by His people, and where His glory would be made known.

In pondering these Scriptural passages, Charlotte Mason’s admonition of perfect execution or quality work done by her students was brought to mind, as well as our call as parents and teachers to instill this desire and habit within our children. It might be a call even to ourselves. In Exodus, God commanded specific attention to detail in order to honor Him. His people were called to obedience through their efforts. Their abilities were developed and used for His glory. Theologically, the picture of redemption comes to mind. For us and our students, the element of beauty, order, offering one’s best, the achievement of accuracy, respect for others as they view or use the work, perseverance, joy in accomplishing something of quality and durability, and other similar benefits are seen in doing quality work.

To develop this habit, It is important that we hold high expectations for our children’s work in all areas of study, and model the same when necessary: neat, uniformly-shaped, legible handwriting; clear, evenly-spaced labeling on straight lines for drawings and charts, numerals placed precisely in the grid of math copybooks, matching pitch in singing, taking care not to smudge a picture reproduction, planning carefully prior to the execution of a dry-brush water painting, erect, quiet posture when reciting a poem, exact copying of a transcription, careful proofreading of a composition. We may have to look at our own experience and evaluate our own habits. For example, consider where we may let things “slide,” and then make continued efforts to raise our standards. It may be an opportunity to point our students to God, and train them to look to Him for strength and perseverance in creating quality work.

In thinking again about the building of the tabernacle with God’s detailed instructions to his people, and the task before us in “growing up” our students, we can encourage them and ourselves that their growth and development is of the Lord. Charlotte Mason reminds us: “Whatever the agency, let children be assured that the work is the work of God, to be accomplished in the strength of God, according to the laws of God: that it is our part to make ourselves acquainted with the laws we would work out, and that, having done all, we wait for the inspiration of the divine life, even as the diligent farmer waits upon sunshine and shower.”¹

As we’ve entered this new year and new semester, let us endeavor to maintain high standards and expectations toward producing quality work and challenge ourselves and our students to do so with a dependence on God, who desires our best for His glory.

¹ Mason, Charlotte, Parents and Children, 167.

Image courtesy of RiverTree School, MN

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Cultivating the Habit of Attention

amblesideintl — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:17:49 +0000

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Cultivating the Habit of Attention

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this habit of attention. It is …”within the reach of everyone and should be made the primary object of all mental discipline;” for whatever the natural gifts of the child, it is only so far as the habit of attention is cultivated in him that he is able to make use of them.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 146

The Habit of Attention is Important—One of Ambleside School’s commitments to parents is this: “All students will be supported in mastering the habit of focused attention” through inspirational ideas and natural consequences.

Why is this habit of attention so important?

In addition to the standard classroom practice of presenting short, varied lessons and narration after a single reading, we work with each student in other ways to develop this habit of attention. These are simple interventions implemented daily in the classroom that are also useful at home. Some of these include:

Kindly requiring that a child keep eye contact when engaged in conversation or discussion with someone.

Asking the child to repeat instructions back to ensure they have understood them.

Using subtle gestures such as gently tapping or placing an encouraging hand on a child’s shoulder to re-focus their attention back to the work at hand.

Sometimes, the calm and simple movement of a teacher to closer proximity beside a child lends the student the strength and reassurance they may need to help them regain attention.

Some students may need a teacher or parent to help them by breaking down their work into steps and estimating for them the time a task will take. Charlotte Mason’s idea of “set work for set time” is a way to remedy a child’s tendency to let the mind wander and become distracted. It is important to have a finite amount of time planned for specific work to be done; a realistic expectation is established, the expectation is clearly communicated, and the expectation and timeframe are enforced. For instance, the teacher gives thirty minutes to complete an illustration in a copybook. If a student completes her best work before the thirty minutes has passed, she is then rewarded with that extra time for leisure before she begins her next task. A child will quickly get this idea and be motivated to use his time wisely.

Older students may need an inspirational appeal to their will:

He should be taught to feel a certain triumph in compelling himself to fix his thoughts. Let him know what the real difficulty is, how it is the nature of his mind to be incessantly thinking.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 145

When he brings his own will to make himself attend, “Well done! You have done your duty,” could be our encouraging response. Attention is both a trait and a skill and developing its power in our children requires steady practice and confidence that, no matter how weak the trait, each step of growth unleashes new strength.

Virginia Wilcox
Former Principal of Ambleside School in McLean, VA

The post Cultivating the Habit of Attention appeared first on Ambleside International.

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