The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason

Since I've read this book, it keeps inserting itself in my conversations. I keep recommending it to people! Trying to figure out when to start your book of centuries, and what to do before (or after) that? Read this book. Want to learn more plant & animal names? Well, there is an example list inside, you can draw one in your nature journal - no printer needed. What about the little books maybe you've heard connected to Charlotte Mason, but don't yet know what they are - a word book for beginning readers, or the calendar of firsts? Yes, they are here too.Overwhelmed by it all? No problem, Laurie outlines the 'big three' for you to focus on. Or do you have a deeper problem - trying to justify the use of paper in an electronic world? Well, the answer is here. It has to do with permanence. I think we can agree the modern world (at least my country) wastes too much. But are we ingraining that 'throw it away' mentality from childhood with our fill in the blanks, draw a picture, go show mommy & daddy, then throw it away mass-printed worksheets?This is much, so much more than a book about paper. This is a book on education, on our view of children (and humanity). Where are we going, as a people? Do we want to be a shallow, throw away society, drifting from one fad to the next? Or do we want to develop deep interests and passions - to care deeply about many things?What is education? What if the point of education isn't to pass a test? What if it's more? Read this book - each chapter is better than the preceding one. The last chapter rocked my world in the best way.

The creative ways to help kids keep time were very much appreciated. I’ve run across various things like century charts in reading old PNEU articles, but always seem to lose the thread when I need to reference it. Laurie did a good job compiling all the resources in one place.

I think I can safely declare that this book will be my favorite non-fiction book read this year.I was so inspired by this book-- not just as an encouragement as we homeschool with a Charlotte Mason approach to education, but in my *own* life as I constantly find myself putting pen to paper. (Indeed, my own journal-- with all the quotes I've written in it and Scripture carefully copied-- is really a type of Commonplace Book.)Bestvater has thoroughly researched Mason's writings, particularly any references to keeping notebooks. She has also studied the notes and examples of others who followed in the usage of Charlotte Mason-inspired notebooks, in an attempt to gain a clear understanding of what Mason was after in this whole art of notebooking.The three most familiar notebooks are the Nature Notebook, the Commonplace Book (or Reading Diary), and the Book of Centuries. But there are so many more.I have finished this book, but I know I will come back to it again and again. My pencil was a constant companion as I read this book, and several parts are now underlined, and there are notes in the margins throughout.I am inspired to be more diligent in keeping my own notebooks. (I can't wait to begin my own Book of Centuries after having captured the vision of what Charlotte intended for this book to be!) and I am excited to incorporate what I have learned through this book as I educate my own children.Thank you, Miss Bestvater, for your careful research and for the inspiration. And thank you, Miss Mason, for so understanding a child, and how to capture their interest and imagination!

I’m offering my unsolicited review of The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason by Laurie Bestvater today. I bought the book because I was curious to see if it was as helpful as I’ve heard some in the Charlotte Mason homeschooling community declare. I hoped it would fit well with our summer theme of keeping journals and writing notebooks.The Living Page takes the reader from theory to application with a needlessly ornate wording tagged with copious notes (405!) documenting Bestvater’s sources for her conclusions on Charlotte Mason’s use of notebooks in education. What’s that? You want me to say it in simple terms? That was exactly the feeling The Living Page left me with! I should have suspected that a book with five appendices, a bibliography, a glossary of definitions, and more than 25 pages of notes would take simple ideas and hide them behind fancy explanations.I appreciate that Laurie Bestvater did a large amount of research. She found even rare mentions by Charlotte Mason and related writers in the Parent’s Review publication of notebook types and wrote them down. She pieced together both how and when some of those notebooks were used. She shares samples of a number of these with ideas for setting up a few types of notebooks and ideas on what materials to use.What I did not appreciate was the almost foreign language she employed repeatedly for this practice of keeping things in notebooks. Oft repeated but little explained or difficult to grasp the meaning phrases included:◾forms of vitality◾glory (used many ways: make glory visible, perceive Glory, keep glory, etc)◾describing things as very ‘catholic’, with a small ‘c’ and no definition available in the glossary◾sacramental insistence◾paper posturesIt is as if she wrote The Living Page for scholars with a vocabulary specific to a field of study instead of to the Charlotte Mason education community at large. Maybe that was her intent, I do not know. The book is one I had to wade through, bit by bit. It left me wishing for a dear friend who would come alongside me to share what she had learned of notebooks and how they can relate to Charlotte Mason’s methods. I wanted a practical, friendly companion and what I received was a drawn out treatise.As an in the trenches homeschooling mother with eight children I appreciate clearly written books that include theory and practice for an idea. I do not want to labor over obscure meanings for words surrounding what is, in reality, a simple and effective practice Charlotte Mason used. Charlotte has always seemed eminently practical to me, with well thought out reasons for her methods and a directness to her writings. The Living Page took Charlotte’s sensible, clear methods and waved a fog of words around it to mask the simplicity.My copy of The Living Page will be finding a new home. It is not a book I will add to my home library. I need a library of encouragement for this homeschooling journey and this book did not work for me.{Disclaimer: I bought this book with my own money. I read it. I am sharing my personal opinion. You may love the book. You may not. That’s okay – everyone likes different things!}

I really enjoy this book and will be keeping it for my personal (small) library so I can keep referring to it again and again as we continue our homeschool journey. We're in our 6th year and I found so much valuable information –– I wanted to underline it all! If you're curious about notebooking for your students, this is a must read IMO!

Wonderful resource, a MUST for any home school family, Charlotte Mason fan, or anyone interested in learning and learning to help others learn. Well written, enjoyable, and practical. I wish I had read this back when I was at school/university.

Makes a strong case for notebooking. Very inspiring.

Thorough and inspiring. I found it a great topical guide to the notebooking aspect of a Charlotte Mason education. A book I will keep on hand and refer back to over the years I am sure.