A Gentle Feast Review For Charlotte Mason Homeschoolers

Last school year we started strong at the beginning of the year using A Gentle Feast Curriculum. It’s a Charlotte Mason based curriculum for grades 1st-12th. It’s beautiful, laid out well, and holds your hand more than some other Charlotte Mason curriculums out there.

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By December I got scared. I wasn’t sure we were doing it right, I didn’t feel like my older ones were spending enough time day on their subjects, so I admitted defeat and switched curriculums. I had my oldest start using the Notgrass US history, picking up where we had left off with A Gentle Feast.

By the end of the school year he told me how boring he thought it was, and he wished we would have stuck with A Gentle Feast. Major mom fail moment there!! I love the elementary and middle school Notgrass history programs, but my high school children really prefer reading living books instead of a textbook.

In March we went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Texas and were there for a day and a half before getting shut down by Covid. I was able to go to one of Julie Ross’s talks (the author of A Gentle Feast) and it was all on narration. We were able to chat afterwards as well, and I realized that was the giant missing piece of the whole puzzle.

I wasn’t being consistent in requiring written or oral narrations from my children! That’s such a huge part of the Charlotte Mason lifestyle, and I knew that but had lost the vision.

This year after much thought and prayer, I ordered Year 4 of A Gentle Feast, which covers modern history.  I’m going to be using it for Form 1, 2 and 3, which covers grades 1-9th grade.

For our 11th grader I’m going to be using A Beautiful Feet Modern US and World History set, because he really wanted to read those books and it felt like a better fit.

Morning Time Plans

One thing that really stood out to me last year was how much my children enjoyed and learned from the Morning Time Plans that A Gentle Feast offers. Even if you don’t use A Gentle Feast as your main curriculum you could order the morning time plans and use them.

Months later, they still can recite the scripture verses we memorized, and remember the poems we read together. We didn’t even continue morning time throughout the whole school year (fixing up the house and moving got in the way!), but it feels like it was the highlight of their memories from last year.

It was the first thing I knew we needed to pick back up again this year.

I use menu folders from Amazon, but they are all sold out right now so you can find them here as well.

The cover page comes with the Gentle Feast morning plans, and they each colored it before putting it in the menu. I will say, putting pages in the menu is not the easiest thing in the world, it’s definitely not something for a child to do if you don’t want them to be crumpled.

The topics covered in the morning time plans are:

• Bible
• Hymns
• Poetry
• Fables
• Composer Studies
• Artist Studies

Making A Gentle Feast Affordable

Any curriculum that involves lots of living books can get pricy. She gives lots of options in the book lists of where to find some of the books free online, so if you are ok with doing tablets and reading books online, it’s a great way to make it more cost affordable.

Using the library is another great way to save on money. I found most of the Form 1 books at our library, so anything I can get there I won’t be purchasing unless it’s a book we use all year long.

Buying used books on Abe books, Ebay, and the used book section on Amazon really does help the price as well.

How To Make A Gentle Feast Work For A Large Family?

Combine as much as you can!

I’m going to have my Kindergarten listen in on the Form 1 readings.

I can’t realistically read everything out loud to my children. My goal is to get my children reading well, so by  2nd or 3rd grade they can easily read their literature books themselves, and then I just do one family read aloud book.

Have children record oral narrations on your cell phone, where you can listen to it afterwards.

Older children could record videos, even acting out narrations like they are recording a Youtube channel if they find that fun (an idea from Julie Ross).

Require written narrations from your older ones. If you want the interaction with your older children that comes from oral narrations, alternate every other day for written and oral narrations.

How I Plan Out My Week

I don’t write in the manual from A Gentle Feast, I use it more as a reference guide and want to keep it looking nice for when we cycle back through again in a few years.

Instead, I use the online forms plus the physical guide and plan out my week using The Well Ordered Homeschool Planner, the planner we created this year.

I have to keep track of what we do for our state requirements, and I like feeling more prepared for the week by laying it all out in the planner. I use these erasable gel pens and like to assign each child a color at the start of the week and color code everyone. I’m not normally that organized, and I feel like supermom when I look at my color coded planner!

I’m really looking forward to starting the new school year using A Gentle Feast again, and can’t wait to dive into all these great living books with my children!