Memorization is something we used to do separately. Everyone would pick a poem or Bible section based on their preference, and each day they worked on it for a few minutes, even reciting a portion of it to me to prove that they had made some effort. Each month they recited what they had memorized in front of our co-op. There was mixed success with this. Some of the kids were more successful than others, and some found it to be torture!

When I decided to combine as much as I could, this seemed like an obvious choice. We had never attempted to memorize “Charlotte Mason’s way” before, but this seemed like a good time to try.

The basic outline is that you just read the poem or whatever passage is to be memorized daily to the child(ren). You don’t ask them to repeat back lines, or practice sections, and it’s best to do it when they are unconscious to learning it, and can just enjoy the reading. Eventually, they just know it.

“The gains of such a method of learning are, that the edge of the child’s enjoyment is not taken off by weariful verse by verse repetitions, and, also, that the habit of making mental images is unconsciously formed.” -vol 1 pg 225

Charlotte Mason tells a story about a woman who read to herself during a period of convalescing, and ended up memorizing large passages of the book she was reading. However, she said that after getting back to her regular routine, she couldn’t do it anymore. The busyness of life, and hence the busyness in her mind, inhibited her from being able to do it. Which made me realize that I needed to do this with the kids, instead of sending them off with instructions to do it themselves.

I chose a poem that I thought they would all enjoy, Among the Stars by William Wordsworth, from The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry. (Among the Stars is actually part of the prologue to The Poem of Peter Bell.) I wanted something that used simple English, and that allowed for many mental images. I also wanted a long poem, but I really didn’t expect them to learn the whole thing. I just wanted them to have the opportunity to surprise themselves if it turned out that this way worked as well as it was supposed to.

At first they complained that they could never memorize such a long poem! But I explained that we had no deadline, no specific goal. We would just read it daily and see where we got. This wasn’t a test. We took it in sections, because it was a rather long poem, and I would read it to them twice. Charlotte Mason does not say to do that, but I felt like I should. Some of my kids were well into high school at this point, and their minds were closed off to memorizing. Furthermore, I allowed them to quietly say it with me during the second reading if they wanted to.

Here is a video that I took of them repeating the poem before their friends. They would be so embarrassed for me to share that, but I’m just so proud. It just goes to show – Charlotte Mason knows what she is talking about! We just need to trust her and move forward.

“Let the child lie fallow till he is six, and then, in this matter of memorising, as in others, attempt only a little, and let the poems the child learns be simple and within the range of his own thought and imagination. At the same time, when there is so much noble poetry within a child’s compass, the pity of it, that he should be allowed to learn twaddle!” – vol 1 pg 226

If you pay attention to this quote you will see that I shouldn’t have started with the long poem. They were not little kids, but I believe that with most things Charlotte Mason, you should start at the beginning and work up, no matter how old they are when you begin the method. I don’t always do things just right the first time, but I continue to improve my knowledge year after year.

This year my plan is to do more small poems, rather than long ones. The long ones are great, because they challenge them and really build confidence, but since we haven’t been doing this for years, I feel like they have missed out on storing up several small poems as their own. (Because even the small poems were slowly and laboriously learned before we started doing it this way.) We will still learn full Psalms, so those will be our longer challenging sections.

In the long run, I foresee the possibility of everyone working silently around the table on their own selections, but I don’t see that as the “correct way” and the rest as just a compromise. After all, in the PNEU school there was a time period for memorization, and the Programmes specify what was to be memorized. We don’t know that they learned it aloud as a group, but it seems the most realistic possibility to me.

Thank you to Julie Z. for prompting this post! I hope it helps.