Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to welcome you to the Imagination edition of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival! :) While not all the posts are overtly about encouraging imagination in your children or what have you, all of them will involve using your imagination in how apply what you've learned to your situation! :) I'm very excited about this topic, and even though my month has been swamped with too much to do and for that reason I didn't get a chance to post, I've been reading and thinking and imagining all about imagination and it's important role for the learner. I'll intersperse some of my favorite quote finds with the wonderful submissions for the carnival. :)
Imagination, preparing to adorn and crown Truth.
Engraving by Benoît Louis Prévost (d. 1804)
Imagination is Inherent in Children:
"Who shall measure the range of a child's thoughts? His continual questions about God, his speculations about 'Jesus,' are they no more than idle curiosity, or are they symptoms of a God-hunger with which we are all born, and is a child able to comprehend as much of the infinite and the unseen as are his self-complacent elders? Is he 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' in our ways and does the fairy tale afford a joyful escape to regions where all things are possible? We are told that children have no imagination, that they must needs see and touch, taste and handle, in order to know. While a child's age is still counted by months, he devotes himself to learning the properties of things by touching, pulling, tearing, throwing, tasting, but as months pass into years a coup d'oeil suffices for all but new things of complicated structure. Life is a continual progress to a child. He does not go over old things in old ways; his joy is to go on."
vol 6 pg 36
An Imagination Grows:
"Now imagination does not descend, full grown, to take possession of an empty house; like every other power of the mind, it is the merest germ of a power to begin with, and grows by what it gets; and childhood, the age of faith, is the time for its nourishing. The children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times––a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their story books. Their lessons, too, history and geography, should cultivate their conceptive powers. If the child do not live in the times of his history lesson, be not at home in the climes of his geography book describes, why, these lessons will fail of their purpose. But let lessons do their best, and the picture gallery of the imagination is poorly hung if the child have not found his way into the realms of fancy." v1 p153
The Responsibility of Education:
"How do we prepare a child, again, to use the aesthetic sense with which he appears to come provided? His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––Israels' Pancake Woman, his Children by the Sea; Millet's Feeding the Birds, First Steps, Angelus; Rembrandt's Night Watch, The Supper at Emmaus; Velasquez's Surrender of Breda,––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he see. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold."
vol 6 pg 43
Dangers of Imagination:
"Imagination may become like that cave Ezekiel tells of wherein were all manner of unseemly and evil things; it may be a temple wherein self is glorified; it may be a chamber of horrors and dangers; but it may also be a House Beautiful. It is enough for us to remember that imagination is stored with those images supplied day by day whether by the cinema, the penny dreadful, by Homer or Shakespeare, by the great picture or the flaming 'shocker.'"
vol 6 pg 55
Thank you all SO much for your submissions, for reading the carnival and for leaving words of encouragement on the various posts!!
::
The upcoming CM blog carnival:
Hosted
by Barb on February 7th
Theme: Nature Study
Reading Selections: "Sight-Seeing" section in volume 1, page 45-48.
Please
submit your posts by no later than Monday 2/6.
You may do that
here (or from the link in my sidebar).
If you would like to receive occasional reminders by e-mail regarding the CM Blog Carnival, please send an e-mail to charlottemasonblogs (at) gmail (dot) com.
::
And now an exercise for our imaginations!!
Awhile back, I overheard some whisperings of discontent with our current CM Blog Carnival logo... it's outdated!... and ugly! Well, while we all differ in our aesthetic sense, and I'm not necessarily
completely unhappy with it, I wouldn't be opposed to changing it either, so I thought we'd have a game and then a vote. And voting is always more fun when accompanied by a giveaway!! See details below to see how you could win a...
USE YOUR IMAGINATION
...and come up with a design for a potential new CMBC logo/blog button!
Here are the details...
- HOW TO ENTER: Send an e-mail with your SQUARE .jpg, .png or .gif attached to charlottemasonblogs (at) gmail (dot) com by 1/31! This is only a week away!
- On January 31st, a poll will be posted here on FisherAcademy where you can then vote for your favorite from the newly submitted options, or vote to keep the old one!
- HOW TO WIN: Every logo/blog button submission is worth an entry to the giveaway! Anyone can play! Get your aspiring web-designer-kids to try?! Earn another entry simply by voting, but note that only those who leave a comment after voting (on the poll post) will be entered to the giveaway (I don't have a way to track or get in touch with who votes, that's why you must leave a comment! :)
- The giveaway is sponsored by CurrClick.com who has just this month launched a new CM Discussion Group and would love for you to join them (more info to come).
- Stay tuned for more details to be posted on January 31st :)
Here's what the current logo/blog button looks like:
Here are some examples of what a new logo/blog button might look like:
So there you go, please send in your submissions for the upcoming blog carnival
AND your logo/blog button ideas to charlottemasonblogs (at) gmail (dot) com!
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