CMP Review 2025-11-17

November 17, 2025

We wrapped up our first term, and I find it to be a great opportunity for reflection. It’s easy to focus on what went wrong or how we can improve, but I love to pause and notice what went well. To lean into the beauty and goodness woven throughout our days.

This term as we delighted in many living books and ideas, our Shakespeare play has become what Charlotte Mason calls a “family festa.” We ended the term with a live performance, watching characters we’d grown to love (or not love as the case may be) come alive on stage.

Mason’s words about reading Shakespeare “continuously throughout life” feel especially true:

And Shakespeare? He, indeed, is not to be classed, and timed, and treated as one amongst others,—he, who might well be the daily bread of the intellectual life; Shakespeare is not to be studied in a year; he is to be read continuously throughout life, from ten years old and onwards. But a child of ten cannot understand Shakespeare. No; but can a man of fifty? Is not our great poet rather an ample feast of which every one takes according to his needs, and leaves what he has no stomach for?

A little girl of nine said to me the other day that she had only read one play of Shakespeare’s through, and that was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She did not understand the play, of course, but she must have found enough to amuse and interest her. How would it be to have a monthly reading of Shakespeare—a play, to be read in character, and continued for two or three evenings until it is finished? The Shakespeare evening would come to be looked on as a family festa; and the plays, read again and again, year after year, would yield more at each reading, and would leave behind in the end rich deposits of wisdom. (Vol. 5 p. 226)

I saw it this week as my seven-year-old whispered with a knowing grin, “He doesn’t know he’s talking to Hamlet,” and spent days narrating and processing the story so it became a possession of hers for life which she can build on through future readings. A child really does take what she needs.

Tell me, what is something that is going well for you this school year? Something you want to lean into moving forward?

@tessakeath