How Growing Oaks is Different
An Overview
Ok. You might be asking what makes this curriculum different from so many of the others that claim to be “literature based”? Or how Growing Oaks is different from the others that also claim to be Charlotte Mason and Waldorf inspired?
Growing Oaks: Layered Learning Through Literature is different in four big ways.
Growing Oaks has an integrated language arts curriculum as a part of it. In other words, you won’t need to buy a separate curriculum to teach your child how to read, write, spell, or learn grammar rules. Growing Oaks will do all of that alongside the living books and other integrated arts and activities. It provides systematic and explicit reading instruction, emphasizing phonemic awareness in the early years and will build phonics skills from there. As the grades progress, attention will shift from phonics and learning to read to spelling, grammar, and composition.
Growing Oaks guides you and your child in enjoying and talking about literature. Other curriculums make heavy use of, what Charlotte Mason calls, “living books,” and they do a beautiful job of picking those books and providing rich crafts and projects to accompany them. Growing Oaks does all of that plus provides questions and prompts to discuss the books you’re reading and get the most out of them that you possibly can. With Growing Oaks, you aren’t just reading books, you’re studying them. You are developing a relationship with them. These books are worth the effort or money to track down. You will want to return to them year after year.
Growing Oaks makes use of both the Charlotte Mason and Waldorf philosophies of education. It is not a purist curriculum for either of these philosophies, but it combines real pedagogical aspects of both and not just the aesthetics. Growing Oaks draws on my training as a Waldorf class teacher and from my years in the Charlotte Mason Homeschool world. Each provide so many valuable tools and insights, but both tend to be overwhelming in their implementation. I have taken what I think are the most valuable aspects of each and built a curriculum that’s easy to use.
Growing Oaks is based on a “layered learning” model, which means you revisit books and topics and “layer” your learning each time. You are never done with a topic or book. Instead, you develop a relationship to it, over time.
