Ten Beautiful Ways to Cultivate the Habit of Attention in your Charlotte Mason Home

Where to begin in a Charlotte Mason education has a different answer than most mothers expect, and it will fit inside a schedule that feels as if it has already gone sideways. Mason placed the habit of attention first among all the habits of the mind, writing in Home Education that "the highest intellectual gifts depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner has cultivated the habit of attention" (Vol. 1, p. 137). Every method you have read about rests on this one habit underneath it, which means the mother who begins here has begun in the right place.

The relief in Mason's definition is worth holding onto before you read a single one of these ideas. She wrote that "attention is hardly even an operation of the mind, but is simply the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject in hand" (Vol. 1, p. 145). Attention is an act, and an act can be practiced, and what is practiced faithfully over time becomes a habit. Your child is not missing something other children were born holding.

Here are ten ways to begin cultivating it in your home.

1. Give short lessons with a clear beginning and end

Mason kept lessons "seldom more than twenty minutes in length for children under eight" (Vol. 1, p. 142), and she observed that the sense of having only a little time keeps a child's wits on the alert. Write out a simple timetable so your children know what comes next and how long it will last. A lesson with edges asks for something that a lesson stretching on forever never can.

2. Read once, and then ask for a narration

Mason insisted on a single reading because, as she wrote in A Philosophy of Education, "children have naturally great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the re-reading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarising, and the like" (Vol. 6). Tell your children beforehand that you will read it one time, and then ask them to tell it back in their own words. The knowledge that no second chance is coming is itself half of the training.

3. Alternate a thinking lesson with a painstaking one

Her ordering of the morning was deliberate, placing "a 'thinking' lesson first, and a 'painstaking' lesson to follow" (Vol. 1, p. 142). Sums come while the brain is fresh, and copywork follows as a kind of rest for the mind that has just worked hard. The change of effort restores your child without ever releasing him into idleness.

4. Put the lesson away when the eyes go glassy

Mason gave a remedy so gentle it is easy to overlook. She wrote that "when a child grows stupid over a lesson, it is time to put it away. Let him do another lesson as unlike the last as possible, and then go back with freshened wits to his unfinished task" (Vol. 1, p. 141). Dawdling is a habit forming in real time, and moving on before it deepens protects the habit of attention you are building.

5. Teach one small thing outdoors with lavish detail

The loveliest passage in the whole chapter details a mother and a daisy. Mason described a mother teaching little Margaret to see the daisy as a bright yellow eye with white lashes that looks at the sun all day, which is why its name means day's eye, and that at night it shuts its eye and sleeps until morning. Her conclusion is the invitation: "Thus the mother will contrive ways to invest every object in the child's world with interest and delight" (Vol. 1, p. 140). Choose one thing on your walk this week and love it out loud.

6. Play at picture painting

In her chapter on picture painting, Mason described asking children to look well at a patch of landscape, to shut their eyes and call the picture up, to look again at any part that comes back blurred, and then to describe what they see (Vol. 1, pp. 47 through 50). She was careful to add that this "involves some strain on the attention" and should only be employed now and then. Kept as an occasional game, it teaches a child that seeing is something he can choose to do on purpose.

7. Practice picture study with a single painting

Set one good reproduction before your children, let them study it for a few minutes in silence, and then turn it over and ask them to describe everything they can recall. Mason believed a child is enriched more than we know by having really looked at even one picture (Vol. 1, p. 309). The turning over of the picture is what makes it training rather than decoration.

8. Let the nature notebook hold one thing at a time

A page with a single leaf observed with care has asked far more of a child than a page crowded with hurried sketches. Ask your children to look until they could draw the thing with their eyes closed, and then let them draw it. Attention is built by looking long, and the notebook gives the looking somewhere to go.

9. Let finished work open into free time

Mason understood the power of a morning that opens up the moment the work is done, writing of lessons finished in time to secure a pleasant evening afterward, and observing that the lessons themselves are much better done for the concentrated attention bestowed on them (Vol. 1, p. 147). When a ten minute handwriting lesson is done beautifully in six, send your child outside for the other four. The reward teaches faster than the correction.

10. Tend your own attention

Mason wrote that "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" (Vol. 1, p. 137). The way you set your phone down to listen, the way you finish the book you have started, the way you look up when someone speaks to you, is a lesson your children are already receiving from the atmosphere of your home.

If you are coming to Mason for the first time

You do not need the whole philosophy in place before you begin, and you do not need to have read every volume or settled on a single curriculum. Begin with the habit of attention, and let it be the first thing you tend in your children this season. Keep the lesson short, ask for their whole mind while it lasts, and then release them into the rest of the morning with real warmth. Everything else you will come to love about this way of educating grows out of the ground that this one habit prepares, and that ground can be broken tomorrow morning at your own kitchen table.