Commonplace Tales: Tales of Imagination––Stories, again, of the Christmas holidays, of George and Lucy, of the amusements, foibles, and virtues of children in their own condition of life, leave nothing to the imagination. The children know all about everything so well that it never occurs to them to play at the situations in any one of these tales, or even to read it twice over. But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible––even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

• Today on the New Mason Jar, Cindy and Dawn chat with friends Angelina Stanford and Timilyn Downey about the building blocks of stories in relation to a Charlotte Mason education
• How Angelina came to learn about Charlotte Mason
• Why Timilyn values the building blocks of story so much
• What are stories versus literature?
• What is the difference between how modernity sees art and stories and how the medievals saw them?
• What is wrong with the idea of literature as a mirror or a window?
• Some metaphors for approaching story
• Why are unit studies problematic in approaching a Charlotte Mason education?
• How can you learn the language of literature so that you can teach your children?

Last but not least, the fact that the story does not turn on children, and does not foster that self-consciousness, the dawn of which in the child is, perhaps, the individual “Fall of Man.”

Northrop Frye

C. S. Lewis

J. R. R. Tolkien

Harold Goddard

“Meditation on a Toolshed” by C. S. Lewis

Aesop’s Fables illus. by Jerry Pinkney

He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands illus. by Kadir Nelson

Morning Time for Moms

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