With Ashley Ewer

Charlotte Mason has something to teach all of us. Ambleside teachers share their unique experiences in teaching with Mason’s methods in the classroom, with special emphasis on applications for parents.

“Could you look at a single painting for 10 minutes?”

This is what the author of a recent New York Times piece asks, touting a Harvard-proven method of restoring shattered attention spans.

At D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, small groups regularly come in with one purpose: silent, sustained observation of a solitary artwork. “Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way,” notes the Times.

This is a habit that Ambleside students practice regularly, except they spend not 10, but 30 straight minutes each week intently studying and then describing, aloud or in writing, a work of art by the great masters.

Language advances as students find the words to describe line, tone, shape, value, brush strokes, arrangement, and details, and connect the subject matter to their knowledge across our vast curriculum.

In Picture Study, we progress through prints of an artist’s oeuvre in the order they were created, stopping once or twice per semester to complete a careful reproduction of one or two works.

In kindergarten, students pull out watercolors to replicate Manet’s A King Charles Spaniel. In seventh grade, metal scribing tools carve into copper plates in imitation of James McNeill Whistler’s etchings.

With two curricular artists per year, our graduates are deeply familiar with 18 artists and over 200 masterpieces. Affinity with the prints turns to wonder as students stand before the da Vinci (the only one in this hemisphere), the Rembrandt self-portrait, and the thickly painted Van Goghs at our yearly field study at the National Gallery of Art.

For a lifetime to come, recognition and enjoyment spark at spying these friend-paintings, so carefully studied and imitated in grade school.

Picture Study skills complement those of Nature Study, which begins with an intense examination of the weekly specimen, plucked from our local environs. There’s bright-eyed delight in scrutinizing the whorl of pine needles up the scaly, flexible sprig (not neglecting the drops of sticky sap) and eagerness to paint the subtle change in color from dark to light green.

Children who learn to thoroughly notice (and not merely see) a Nature Study specimen or a collage of Henri Matisse’s build their capacities for attention and cultivate an affection for complex ideas, beautifully expressed. With expansive powers of observation, Ambleside students are quick to spot — and appreciate — a little snake, an unusual insect, and the earliest blooms while hiking.

They are also building their capacity for love. They are quick to notice a need they can meet: a courtesy to a visitor, a classmate that needs consolation, a mess they can help tidy, an oversight in their own work, or a teacher’s error they can correct! They can navigate the subtleties of a classroom visitor, a formal performance, or the halls of Congress on a Field Study by giving strong attention and reading the situation — much like they would a Norman Rockwell or a Winslow Homer.

Students who grow up looking at portraits and poses, noticing the gaze of the sitters and the relationships between figures, develop into close observers of persons. Attention to the contours of emotion and personality which color, shade, and shape us shows in the classroom in far-seeing interactions with others.

Considering another’s perspective, noticing facial expressions, and creativity all play a part as we miscommunicate and clarify, give offense and apologize, encourage and celebrate, and do the daily work of relational repair and growth in the classroom.

“Every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination.” – Charlotte Mason

There is more value in the study of The Mill and the chrysanthemum than just an appreciation of art and nature.

Application For Home Life

Modeling appreciation and interest in art helps our children cultivate worthy affections. Inviting what Charlotte Mason calls “the Beauty Sense” into the home (and into our children’s affections) requires intentionality.

Do you know which artists your children are studying this semester, and which paintings are their favorites?
Is there a place to thoughtfully display the reproductions your children bring home?
Are artworks of special importance to your family hanging on the walls of your home, as we display our artists’ prints on the walls of the classrooms at Ambleside?
Is there time, a place, a provision of art supplies, and a gracious spirit toward messes that encourages art-making at home?
Consider family trips to see the abundance of famous pieces and new exhibitions we have here in the D.C. area, or further afield.

Stories from the Classroom