What is Beauty & Truth Math?
EQUIPPING FAMILIES TO APPLY CHARLOTTE MASON’S PHILOSOPHY
Beauty & Truth Math's Aim
Our goal is to equip parents to use Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and method in their math lessons. We do this by providing math guides (our curriculum), teacher resources, and training.
The way we have designed our products is based on the hundreds of hours we have spent reading Charlotte Mason’s books, reviewing the textbooks and assignments in Mason’s schools, and reading as many math-related teacher training articles Mason edited or wrote in the Parents’ Review articles.
Our Math Curriculum
Our math guides are the core of our products. They are written as scripted conversations between the teacher and student to be used alongside living math textbooks and materials. Samples of each guide can be found in our shop.
OUR GUIDES + LIVING MATH TEXTBOOKS + MATERIALS
=
A COMPLETE CHARLOTTE MASON MATH CURRICULUM
National Math Standards
We track and meet the U.S. National Math Standards put out by NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics), just as Charlotte Mason’s schools followed their national standards. We do not exactly follow their recommended order and timing, but all the standards are covered by the time a student using our curriculum is ready for high school math courses.
Budget-Friendly
We do our best to be budget-friendly because we never want the cost of our products to be a hindrance for families. We use the same textbooks and math manipulatives over multiple years, and stagger big purchases. For example, if students are on track with our pacing, they will purchase the high school algebra textbook in 7th grade and then the high school geometry book in 8th grade.
Other ways we seek to be budget-friendly include:
- Providing the option to purchase our guides one term at a time to spread out the cost throughout the year
- Offering school, scholarship, and missionary discounts
- Providing lifetime access to all our products
- Giving all updates for free automatically in our customers’ accounts
- Ensuring that every text we use is available online (some are free, and some are for purchase)
The Tools of Education
Following Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and practices, we focus on using her three tools of education to help cultivate dependence on the Holy Spirit as students learn to conceptually understand mathematical ideas. Memorization is important, but secondary to investigating and understanding the ideas.
The Atmosphere
Throughout our products, we seek to remind and encourage both parents and students that the Holy Spirit is with and for them. We approach math as an exciting topic where students and parents have the opportunity to discover and see the beauty of God’s mathematical truths. We want to equip others to love and serve God and others with their mathematical knowledge.
We also want to cultivate an atmosphere of respecting students and encouraging a lifelong love for learning. Towards this end, we present ideas in the following ways
- Going from the known to the unknown
- Moving from the concrete (physical items) to the imaginary (pretending physical items are something else) to the abstract
- Spreading out ideas over multiple years and presenting them from multiple perspectives (typically one/year) so that students have time and space to think and let ideas connect with other ideas
- Using a variety of everyday manipulatives to connect math with life
The Discipline
Following Mason’s school timetables and programmes, we keep our lesson lengths short to help cultivate good lifelong habits. Our guides include special symbols to help parents and students stay on track with time management.
The Life
The broad curriculum and feast of living ideas Charlotte Mason spread before students included three streams of math, where students had unique textbooks for arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.
We follow these streams of math because Mason wanted students to learn new ideas from different streams concurrently. We have also seen the beautiful fruit of it in the lives of our own students and countless others. These streams allow flexibility for students who may excel in one stream and struggle in another.
The streams of math also provide unique opportunities for students to make connections across the different disciplines of math.
Consistent streams of math allow students to go more in-depth on ideas instead of spending time reviewing forgotten ideas from over a year ago. Did anyone else forget most of algebra when beginning Algebra 2 after the completion of high school Geometry?
The other unique piece of Mason’s curriculum is that math lessons are primarily oral in the first couple of years with writing increasing as students get older. This is to help ensure that the skill of handwriting never impedes the opportunity to wrestle with the mathematical ideas themselves.
Our prayer is that, whether or not you use our products and resources, you will come away more aware of God’s goodness and perfection shown through mathematics.