February 2023

Whole-Child

Education should not be one-size-fits-all nor should education be simply the accumulation of knowledge. Education should be tailored for the growth of the whole child with an understanding of the diversity of gifts and abilities our children possess!

Educate with the Multiple Intelligences in Mind
- As a parent you understand your student in a unique way. You can see how one child learns differently than your other child. One may do best when drawing a picture in response to a question; the other may understand concepts well when asked to think deeply about an ethical or moral quandary. Education should mold to your child’s own learning style. Understanding the different forms of intelligence, helps us not only identify the intelligences our own children have but also helps us teach specifically to each child with their preferred learning method! It not only helps them, but it makes your job easier too! Your student will often engage easier when working within their own learning style! Take a look at the multiple intelligences:
  - Visual-Spatial Intelligence: This intelligence is characterized by the ability to see with the mind’s eye and spatial judgement. These students may like to take notes or draw pictures about what they are learning!
  - Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence: This intelligence deals with written or spoken words. Children with this intelligence may perform best when things are read or spoken about to them!
  - Logical-Mathematical Intelligence: Students with this intelligence are good at activities involving logic, abstractions, reasoning, and numbers. These students often enjoy strategy games!
  - Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence: This type of intelligence relates to actually performing activities by moving or involving your body. These students will often perform very well when doing hands-on crafts or activities!
  - Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence: This area has to do with music, rhythm, and hearing. These students may be musically inclined or find that creating tunes to remember information works best for them!
  - Interpersonal Intelligence: Interpersonal intelligence has to do with learning with others or in a group. These students like to engage with others while they are learning!
  - Intrapersonal Intelligence: As you can probably guess this intelligence is the opposite of interpersonal intelligence. These students work best when they are on their own and working at their own pace!
  - Naturalistic Intelligence: As the title suggests students with this type of intelligence love nature and the outdoors. These students may be interested in science over other subjects and most likely enjoy spedning time outdoors exploring their world!
  - Existential Intelligence: This intelligence is a little trickier than the others. It relates to abstract thinking and philosophical questions. These students may enjoy thinking about questions that are not easy for you to asnwer for them! Brainstorming different solutions for something that is rather difficult to solve may be something they really enjoy!

Chances are you thought of your student when reading about a couple of the different intelligences! If you want to learn more about the multiple intelligences and how you can mold your students education to fit their intelligence best, read about it here!

Educate for Whole-Child Growth
- Charlotte Mason viewed education as not only a learning experience but much more of a lifestyle. Education does not mean just learning facts, names, or dates, but education is a wholistic journey. Education should enable students to grow as people- socially, characteristically, and familiarly. We want education to encourage the every aspect of growth for your child. For example, Adventures in the Sea & Sky teaches about bravery and gallantry. We want to use these people in history to show morals and ethics and to help you as a parent instill these characteristics in your student!
Empowering Self-Expression, Offering Self-Knowledge, and Encouraging Self-Confidence
- Self-expression should be encouraged in education rather than discouraged. Our journals are written to encourage all different types of expressions and learning.
  
  You can encourage your student to express themselves via word, drawing, or even expression in nature. Giving children the space to think for themselves and learn to express themselves in the way that connects with them allows for personal growth as well as confidence. When students begin to grow in their self-expression their self-confidence grows as well. Allowing them the time to reflect on what they are learning and what they are feeling and thinking encourages self-knowledge.

Whole-Family

Make education a part of your family experiences by making memories together
- We want education to fit your family! Education should mold to your family culture rather than running your life! Our adventures are designed to be malleable! You can change it to fit your family no matter your dynamic!
- A great way to encourage learning in your children is through making memories. Life is made up of memories. We sit back and remember the little conversations we had with our grandma early in the morning over breakfast or the time our father pushed us higher on the swing than ever before! Memories are one of the best ways to help educate. Memories are best made when you can do it together as a family! It’s a great way to learn but it also is a fun way to build family culture! Discover how giraffes’ tongues work or how the medieval castles influenced their society in fun and interactive ways like visiting the zoo or taking a tour through historical buildings!
We do the work for you so you can maximize family time and relationship
- We want you to focus on your family rather than having to focus on doing a lot of work! A Charlotte Mason parent-teacher focuses on discovering education together rather than just teaching the student. We want to do the work for you so you can focus on discovering your adventure together as a family!
- We also create our themed programs for a wide variety of ages so that you can do adventures together as a family tailoring them to your students ages. Many of our theme programs have specific resources created for older or younger students, but they will still be discovering the same information at the same time so you can do it together as a family! For example, our Animals & Their Worlds has a younger journal which focuses on having young ones drawing their responses or coloring in pictures or cut and past activities where our older journal has many of the same type of activities but also includes more written work. There are also resources such as the Alphabet Fun Pack which help younger learners work on their alphabet where as the older learners would not need to focus on this. We want our WP Families to be able to discover the joy of education together!
Make it simple or dive deep for whatever your family needs and enjoys
- Our programs are chalked full of experiences and activities, but we don’t suggest that you do everything. We want you to choose what is right for your family! Some weeks you may find that life is just too busy – which happens! Life is unpredictable. Things happen! We want our adventures to encourage rather than discourage. We recommend that you go through the list and decide which activities sound exciting or will help cultivate a love for learning in your family! Ask your kids! Which activity or experience intrigues them! Someone like me – I love going to museums. I utterly love it! But other people love experiences in nature or art – go to a zoo or a symphony. Our guides are created to allow you to choose what to do rather than feel the necessity to do them all! Choose what’s right for your family! Don’t feel that you need to complete every activity!

I’ve often been asked, “What exactly do you mean by Charlotte Mason Inspired?” I utterly love this question!

There is so much to Charlotte Mason one could write a book on just one aspect of her education — actually, people have! Charlotte Mason knew that education was not just merely learning things but was so much more! It was a life!

Our core values come from Charlotte Mason’s view of education — we just put a little WP twist to it!

We focus on

Joy
Curiosity & Discovery
Living Books
Nature Study

Let’s dive in!

Joy!

Joyful learning is essential to any education because joy is an essential part of any childhood.

When children are young their brains are developing faster and more than at any other time in their lives. So, making a positive joyful connection to learning is key to developing a love of learning that carries forward for the rest of their lives. It does not stop there. To instill lifelong learning habits and success learning and education should be infused with joy as much as possible. So many children have an experience in education that is dry, uninteresting, and certainly not joyful. But that is the opposite of what we want for our children to experience with WinterPromise. That does not mean serious effort and hard work are not a part of the process but in as many ways as we can for as long as we can WinterPromise desires joyful learning as a goal in each and every part of what we do.

Curiosity and Discovery

Children are naturally curious and enjoy discovery almost as soon as they are born.

Nothing is more natural to our young children than an inspiration to learn and discover. Too often it is assumed that as children grow older their curiosity will disappear and we need to educate them differently when that happens. This is not the case. The desire to investigate, discover, and be curious will develop and change over the years but education should be fanning the flames of discovery at every turn in education. The best learner is a learner that is self-motivated and excited (joyful) about what they are learning.

WinterPromise is dedicated to offering a variety of exciting learning experiences that students can dive into and enjoy. Not everything in our guides should be done because some of those things will not inspire joy but dry out interest. Fuel curiosity and see it become directed as students become older. This creates meaningful learning while also creating habits of lifelong learning for years to come.

Living Books

Living books are the centerpiece of how we develop our programs here at WinterPromise.

What is a living book? A living book is a book written by an author on a specific topic in a way that communicates their own passion while also being written and published in a way that may inspire others. Textbooks are often the standard in education but because of their delivery and format, they usually discourage excitement about learning. WinterPromise builds our curriculum around offering books that take you places, invite your family into a new experience, inspire interest in a great person of the past, fuel discussion about difficult topics and offers a chance to discover new and exciting people writing about new and exciting topics. This makes your reading together as a family or the reading your child does another avenue for fueling curiosity and discovery while enhancing the desire to read. We could not imagine offering an education devoid of the joy of living books. There is a magic to a good book that we can all sense but can’t quite pinpoint. A living book delivers that magic to your family.

Nature Study

Charlotte Mason believed that nature study was the foundation of all sciences and essential to a child’s education.

Nature study is a vital component of every program we offer because we believe that getting your child outside and observing the world around them is one of the best ways to enhance joyful learning and begin a life of curiosity. Children thrive when they are in the woods, looking at bugs in the garden, learning about plants and animals, observing and journaling what they see, and getting a little dirty in the process. The benefits of nature study are boundless.

Do you see a naturalist in your little boy or girl? Get them outside classifying, ordering, collecting, and seeing all that they can outdoors. Have a child who thrives with art? Get them outside and create what they see with paint, markers, or pencil. Do you have a child who loves music? Have them listen to the birds and the orchestra that is nature. Do you have a child that loves writing and words? Learn new words by talking about names and labels. Learn about metaphor and how nature is used as a metaphor to describe real life. Do you have a child that you want to develop those areas mentioned above? Get them outside!

Nature study is lifestyle and WinterPromise offers a no-prep way of making it a habit to get your children learning, loving, and living outside.