Fully Alive

It is so hard to leave with such adorable peoples waving goodbye.  I thought about staying for all of 3 seconds and then pulled out of the driveway on my way to the Living Education Retreat 2015.  I left on Thursday, July 16th and returned late Saturday, July 18th.

This year's retreat theme was Fully Alive.

It was from a quote by St. Irenaeus, "The glory of God is man fully alive."

I have only attended a LER once before I was pregnant with the twins and knew I was in store for a wonderful time.  This year's retreat was moved to a new location a bit further away.

We all gathered at Villa Maria Retreat Center  near Lake Pepin and Frontenac State Park.

Villa Maria was originally established as a girl's academy and boarding school in 1891 by the Ursuline sisters.  In 1969 a fire destroyed the original building that housed the school.  As a result of that loss, the sisters closed the school and opened a retreat center.  It was a beautiful  area and very relaxing. I think they made a wise choice.

The following three pictures are examples of some of the students whose parents use the Charlotte Mason educational style.  They were inspiring and made me wish I could go back to school and do it all again.  

I am hoping I can take a few of these ideas and work them into our school year.

The lovely ladies who plan LER every year gave everyone a coffee mug this year.  It also came with a lovely welcome note and a tea bag.  I just love the quote they had with the welcome note. "The question is not, --how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?" Charlotte Mason

During the retreat I attended all the plenary sessions as well as the workshops.

The plenary session talk that inspired me the most was Art Middlekauff's The Sacrament of Education. To sum it up in very simply and no where near the beautiful words needed to give it justice - the sacrament of education is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us by Christ through a real operation of God and with the right disposition of the receiver will all combine into an instrumental unity that feeds the heart and soul of the child or adult.

If you have a chance to listen to Art Middlekauff speak - put down your broom, put aside that book, find a babysitter, and RUN to his talk.  He is a very inspiring speaker that you will not regret making time for.

Of the four workshops I attended, I was most inspired by the talk given by my friend Marcia and her husband Steve called Enduring Threads of Formation.  During this workshop Steve would give a little information on a Rule of St. Benedict and how to implement that into our family life while Marcia would give a corresponding Charlotte Mason habit suggestion that would beautifully complement that particular Rule of St. Benedict. I felt like our family had for the golden ticket that was going to bring about some balance and peace.  So it has been a month since I returned from the LER and I have yet to put any of this into action.  Soon.

Marcia also gave a great workshop on habits that I enjoyed.  I especially enjoyed her concept of industry that she requires of her children.  It is a great idea I plan to do with my own kids and have done to some extent already.  You can find her blog post on Industry on her blog I Wonder Why.

I also attended a workshop on what living books are.  I know what living books are so why would I go to that workshop?  I wanted to be inspired to read outloud to my kids again.  I left that workshop remembering how wonderful it was to share a story with my kids.  To want them asking for one more chapter and reading it to them instead of folding that load of laundry calling my name.

The other workshop was about teaching high school science using living books. I was glad to have the chance to look through TONS of living science books and get a feel for them.  There are few that on my wish for sure. The one key statement I took away from the workshop was this: We want scholars who love math, science, etc., not engineers or scientists.  We can't make them into scientists. There was a reference to Charlotte Mason's Volume 6 that said if you focus on examinations (fact, tests) you lose the wonder and awe.  I believe that wholeheartedly.  I really think I've allowed our homeschooling atmosphere to lose too much of the wonder and awe.  I wish I could really refocus our vision to include more rabbit trails, more wonder, more awe, more fun.

The highlight of the retreat is always the bookstore.  Jan from Books of Yesterday faithfully brings her best of the best books from her online store to the retreat.  I was the third person into the store when it opened.  I was so excited to find a few treasures including the following:

 So this book was the first one of this series I had ever seen.  I ended up buying it and reading it that day.  There was only one problem with that - (besides the fact that I plowed through 170some pages) I made up my mind I was NOT going back into the bookstore because I wasn't going to blow the whole budget on books.  Well, after reading this book I went back into the bookstore and bought the rest of the books she had from that series.  What a great book!  I loved it!!

I was happy to find a hard cover version of this book!

 The boys are BIG into the World Wars so I bought a few books with that time period of history in mind.  Blase read Thirty Seconds over Tokyo in two days.  I haven't asked if they have read any of the others.

 This is by far my most favorite purchase of the weekend.

It takes the reader through the life of Beatrix Potter in the form of a scrapbook.

Most of the pages have her illustrations on them as well as text that would have been from her point of view at the time. 

A few of the pages have neat things to open like the above photo album.

Or this envelope that had a letter she wrote to someone in it that you could take out and read.  It was the start of the Peter Rabbit story.

It also came with a game board.

I was hoping this book would encourage my kids to start their own scrapbooks.  I know Rex has spent hours reading and rereading this book, looking at the pictures, and talking about her stories.

I am so glad I took the time to go to this retreat.  I came home filled up and renewed!  I was inspired with statements like, "living life in a state of rest," and "live to learn, learn to live," and finally a simple, "Enjoy the journey!"

I AM
I CAN
I OUGHT
I WILL