How to Teach Music the Charlotte Mason Way
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Gena Mayo from Music in Our Homeschool. I want to speak to you about one of my favorite topics, and that is how to do music the Charlotte Mason way. I love the focus on being inspired by Charlotte Mason's ideas. I am a homeschool mom of eight kids. And I have homeschooled the entire time, and way, way back at the beginning... first of all, I taught in the public schools. I taught junior high choir for a couple of years, three years, and then I taught elementary music before I had my first child. And then I started learning about homeschooling, and one of the first books that really inspired me to look at Charlotte Mason's ideas was this one For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.
I was just, my eyes were opened to so many different ways of teaching kids things that I had not learned when I was in college getting a [00:01:00] music education degree, or the way that I taught in the public school system. I just learned so much from this book, and she inspired me with some of Charlotte Mason ideas of short lessons and living books and nature study and picture study and things like that. And I just love including a lot of those in my homeschool. I am not a purist. I am inspired.
After I learned about Charlotte Mason, I started studying this book, Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola, and I love this book because it breaks it up into chapters that gives you things to learn for different topics like the Habits that you're trying to instill in your kids and how to do Narration, and then how to do something like Picture Study. So this is a great book if you [00:02:00] are new to Charlotte Mason, to just get some very practical tips on how to use her style in your homeschool.
And today, I want to talk to you about how to do music education in your homeschool the Charlotte Mason way.
If you are a homeschooler looking for ways to easily and affordably include a quality music education in your homeschool, you've come to the right place. This is the Music in Our Homeschool podcast. I'm Gena Mayo, homeschooling mom of eight and music teacher for over 30 years.
Now, Charlotte Mason did three main things for music education for her students. She did Composer Study, Hymn Study, and Folk Song Study. So I'm gonna talk to you about all three of those today, and give you some very practical tips on how to do those in your own homeschool very simply. You could [00:03:00] implement it even tomorrow, and even if you don't know anything about music yourself, you can do this.
So let's get started with composer study. So what is composer study? Simply put, it's studying a composer and his or her music. Now, what Charlotte Mason wanted you to do, wanted her students to do, was to study that one composer for a long period of time so that the students really got to know the style of that composer.
So after they had been doing this for a few years, you could play a piece, maybe a piece they hadn't even heard from that composer, and the student would be able to say, "Oh, yeah, that's Bach," or, "That is Gershwin." And they could tell the difference in style just because they had heard so many pieces written by that composer.
This is what Charlotte Mason said, one of her quotes, "It is a pity that we like our music as our pictures [00:04:00] and our poetry mixed, so that there are few opportunities of going through as a listener a course of the works of a single composer. Let young people study as far as possible under one master until they have received some of this teaching and know its style."
So what I encourage you to do with composer study is to take the one composer that you're studying at that time and listen to lots of pieces of music just from that one composer for maybe an entire month or an entire trimester, for three months, or an entire semester, for four and a half months.
And that way your students are really getting to know the style of that composer. Now, if you are saying, "I don't even know what composers to study." Maybe you've heard of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but beyond that you don't know. I have a checklist that's free that you could download. If you head over to [00:05:00] MusicinOurHomeschool.com/bestcomposers, you can find the checklist there, and it lists the composers by the musical age that they wrote in. So there's Middle Ages, Renaissance, the Baroque period, Classical period, Romantic period, and the Modern period. And so you can look up the composer, listen to their music, and then there's a line where you could write the dates maybe that you listened to that particular composer or you could write down the pieces that you like the best. Use it however you want.
Now, if you don't know what the best pieces are to listen to for a composer, my number one tip for this is just type in the composer's name in the search bar at YouTube, and it will list the most popular pieces that, say if you wrote "Mozart," then it would list the pieces [00:06:00] that are the most popular that people listen to on YouTube.
So I would start with those pieces. So you could use YouTube. You could use Spotify, Apple Music. Whatever music streaming service you have, you could do it that way. You could go to the library and check out a CD, like the best of and then the composer's name. There are so many easy, free ways to listen to music, and that's what I would encourage you to do.
Now, if you're interested, I do have lots of music courses where I have chosen the pieces for you. One of those happens to be A Year of Charlotte Mason Music Lessons, and so in there, there's also some notebooking pages that you can use along with while you're listening. But if you want to, you can have your kids simply close their eyes and listen while they're doing it, or they could be coloring or drawing or building with Legos while they're listening.
They could be filling out the [00:07:00] notebooking pages or drawing something that the music inspires them to. However you want to do it, or you can mix it up and do it different every day. You might want to listen to the music while you're driving in the car or doing your chores, eating lunch, while the kids are taking a bath.
So you could fit it in all different times during the day. That's what's really neat about this particular subject with music, is that it doesn't have to be done directly during the school day. So if you feel like, "I just can't add anything else," you could do it during lunchtime while you're eating, just turn on the piece that you wanted to listen to for the day. Very easy to do.
And if you wanted to look at that course, you could find it at MusicinOurHomeschool.com/CharlotteMasonCourse.
All right. So I would also encourage you, if you ever have the opportunity, to go listen to the music live, because [00:08:00] seeing a live performance is really amazing, and the kids, if they have already heard the music at home a lot, and then they go, and they hear a choir sing it or an orchestra play it, it's so exciting for them. So check on maybe the high schools in your area, the community colleges, the regular colleges, the citywide orchestras. Usually, there's something that wouldn't be too far from you that you could check in to see if you can get tickets.
And a lot of the city orchestras do children's concerts too, so check their websites and see if they have children's concerts, and then you can make sure to listen to that music before you go.
Along with the composer study, hymn study, and folk song study, I love adding in living books.
Now, if you are new to Charlotte Mason and you don't know what a living book is, let me tell you. It's a book that is [00:09:00] not a dry, boring textbook like I would have studied in college when I'm learning music history. These are books that are exciting, usually written by one author, and usually told in a story format.
If you start reading it and your kids want you to continue, that's a clue that it's probably a living book. So let me just show you that there are tons of picture books about composers or musicians that you can use, you can find in the library. You can find them at a Goodwill store. And these are really fun because a lot of times they have pictures in them, and so you can use these for younger kids.
This one's about Scott Joplin. And then there's some longer books, too, if you really want to spend more time, this is one of those longer types of books that have actual photographs while you're studying the composer. Here's another longer one [00:10:00] and another shorter one. I have tons of these books because I love living books.
I really like these by Opal Wheeler. So these are some other stories that she has a bunch of different composers, like this one's Mozart, and here's Haydn. And here is Schubert. And then I have just one more here, Frederic Chopin.
So I encourage you to use living books along with your composer study. It could be something that you read aloud to your kids, or you assign your kids to read to themselves. If you have little ones, you could just have them looking at the pictures, 'cause a lot of them actually have photographs or drawings, while they're listening to the music.
This is a really fun one because it actually has some of the, the actual sheet music. And so you could read this book and then listen to the pieces that go along with it when you get to that [00:11:00] section of the story. All right, so that is about composer study.
So remember, the simplest way to put it is just pick a composer, listen to lots of pieces by that composer for at least a month, maybe longer. By the way, if you want to get some of the links maybe for some of the books or some of the other resources I'm talking about, you can go to MusicinOurHomeschool.com/CharlotteMasonMusic, and you can find some of these links there.
Now let's talk about hymn study. So hymns, obviously, are the Christian songs that started being written during the Protestant Reformation times. Even Martin Luther wrote some great hymns. So these were songs that were not necessarily sung by choirs, like the earlier church music had been during the Middle Ages and the earlier part of the Renaissance.
But now, Martin Luther and some of the other reformers wanted [00:12:00] people who were in, just regular people, congregants at the church, to be able to sing. And so they wrote hymns for the people to sing praises to God. Charlotte Mason said she really wanted her students to know hymns. The first thing I would encourage you to do is make sure you have an actual hymnal.
You could probably find these at a used bookstore if you don't have one, or order from a used place like AbeBooks or Half Price Books, something like that. And so you can show your kids what a hymn looks like, and it's typically written in four parts, soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And then you see how it says one, two, and three there? And you follow the top line on each row of music, which is called a score, and that is the verses. And then there is usually a chorus, and you can [00:13:00] see that the chorus only has one line of words. And you'll come to the chorus, and then you go back up and start with the second verse.
So this is a really simple way to start helping your kids learn a little bit about how to read music, how it looks on the page. Even if they're not actually reading the notes yet, they could at least know that the top note is soprano, then there's alto, then there's tenor, and then there's bass. Here's a treble clef. Here's a bass clef. There's the key signature and the time signature. They'll start seeing it on the page, and that's really great for kids to start learning.
So then you will want a resource to help you, probably, you don't have to to help you know what hymn to learn and what it sounds like and how to do it. There are some great books like these by Joni Eareckson Tada. This is called Hymns for a Child's Heart, and let me just show you how this one works. So [00:14:00] it starts with a story, so she even does the living book type of story, and a devotional, and it has the sheet music And it has a verse and a prayer that goes along with it.
These also come with a CD. These are great. So here's one about A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. So then you can listen to the CD, you can read the story, you could start learning it to sing it with your kids, and helping them to learn not only how to sing, but what the words mean, because hymns are so deep and rich in the meaning. This is also a way of doing poetry study, 'cause you're studying the poetry of the hymn. Now, let's see. Here's another one that's volume two. Those are really great books.
Then if you wanna pick a different hymn, and you wanna learn another story, there are so many books like [00:15:00] these that you can get that tell you the stories behind the hymns.
There are videos on YouTube that show little documentaries. I have a course called Great Hymns of the Faith, and I know there's other hymn studies out there. So many great resources to help you with learning hymn study with your kids. And again, you can take a long time with this. You don't have to rush it and feel like, "Okay, we've gotta learn a new hymn every week." No, you could spend a month or two or three just on one hymn, and you don't even have to do it every single day. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. The Charlotte Mason way is supposed to help you breathe and feel good and feel comfortable in your homeschooling, and that includes what you do with music in your homeschooling.
So again, I would encourage you to use a living book along with the hymn study. I showed you there are some stories in those books there. But you [00:16:00] could also find some picture books, like about Fanny Crosby, who was a hymn writer, or about John Newton, the hymn writer who wrote Amazing Grace. So definitely those, and I know more are being written all the time, which is really exciting, 'cause I love those picture books.
Okay, the last thing we're going to talk about for doing music the Charlotte Mason way is folk songs. Now, what is a folk song? Let me give you the definition. A folk song is a song that was transmitted orally, usually with an unknown composer, or it's a song that's influenced by that type of traditional song.
So "transmitted orally" means the song was never written down, or at least it wasn't written down for many years when it was being sung by the people and the community. Maybe it was a song that a mom wrote for her baby like a lullaby, trying to get her baby to sleep. [00:17:00] Or maybe it was a love song that a man wrote for the woman that he loved.
It could have been a song in a story-form of parents wanting to teach their kids some important event in their society. Or maybe it was a song that a man wrote as he was doing his work, like the cowboy songs or the sea shanties. We don't know who wrote so many of those songs, and they have been brought down to us today.
Eventually, there were people, musicologists, that went out into the communities, especially in the 1900s, and they would record these songs, and they would write them down. And now we know them, and it's great to learn so many of these songs. I love folk songs.
All right, let's talk about some folk songs and where to find them and how to choose them. You can easily get a book like this. This is a very old folk song book. It was actually my dad's, so I love [00:18:00] having this little book. And let me find a folk song that maybe you'd recognize. Oh, here we go. "I've Been Working on the Railroad," so that is a folk song, and you'll see that a lot of times it says traditional or anonymous, and that's how we know that we don't know who wrote that song, but it's been brought down to us through the ages.
There are some great Bible folk songs too. I love these Wee Sing books. This is songs like... where's one that would be a good example? " Chatter with the Angels," and it says it's a spiritual. So most of the spirituals that were sung by the African American slaves, we don't know who wrote it. So those are considered folk songs. And so that's one type.
These are little children's songs, maybe campfire songs. Let me find some of these to show [00:19:00] you. How about- " The Wheels on the Bus." That's a great song. Okay, "The Wheels on the Bus" right there, and the words and music are traditional. Okay, so you can get these Wee Sing books at the library or Amazon or someplace like that.
There are some bigger collections like this. This one's called From Sea to Shining Sea: A Treasury of American Folklore and Folk Songs. So this'll have some songs like " Simple Gifts. "'Tis a gift to be simple. 'Tis a gift to be free." Now, it says that it's arranged by somebody, but we don't know who the original composer was. So that's one way you can find some folk songs to do, is a book like that.
I really like these books by Diana Waring. This particular one is Experience History Through Music. This one's called [00:20:00] America. She has Westward Ho, and Musical Memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has in these books the story and some photographs, like that, and then she has the sheet music. Here's another spiritual, All Day All Night. And then in the back is the CD. I love these books by Diana Waring, so you might wanna check out those.
Now, again, you can find living books that are picture books for folk songs. Here is a really cute one for the song Hush Little Baby, with beautiful pictures. Now, what I used to do is when I stopped nursing my babies before their nap time, I switched to reading books to them, and I would often pick up a book like this where I would sing to them instead of reading. I would do this before every nap time [00:21:00] until they didn't take naps anymore. That is another really great way to fit the music in for your kids' education.
So let's see what other ones I have here. Here's a Christmas one The Little Drummer Boy, and then here's a really fun one. I like this author and illustrator. Here's another, some cute ones that they have. So you can find lots of these at the library. So easy to find these folk song books.
I also have a folk song course where you can learn 36 different folk songs, and I have a range of different types, like even some in foreign languages, like De Colores, the Spanish song or Frère Jacques, French song, and you can find that at MusicinOurHomeschool.com/FolkSongResources.
Again, I wanna tell you that you can feel free to email me if you have any [00:22:00] questions or comments, and find a lot more of these resources at MusicinOurHomeschool.com/CharlotteMasonMusic. And it's been a pleasure talking to you today, and I hope that you will be inspired now to include some of these methods or ideas for Charlotte Mason music in your homeschool.
Thanks. Goodbye.
Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/teach-music-the-charlotte-mason-way/
