Education As A Feast

 Charlotte Mason is often described as referring to education as a feast.  You (the teacher) prepare a feast for your child and the child fills up his plate with variety of small samplings.  These small samplings are short lessons.  In an ideal CM setting, a child would cover a lot of topics in one day in short lessons.  A lesson should not be too long (15-20 minutes per subject in the early years) so as not to lose the full attention of the student.
    A Charlotte Mason education would ideally provide a wide variety of topics to study - history, math, literature, science, artist study, composer study, poetry, folk songs and hymns, handicrafts, nature study, and the bible.  This is the feast.  As the consumer of the feast, the student not only experiences a variety of flavors, but has a chance to form their own connection with each dish.  In many ways, a CM teacher is more of a facilitator than a teacher.  The teacher presents the reading material (the dish), the student listens to or reads the material (eats the food), and then the student presents to the teacher what she has learned.
   Here's where my family treads off the CM path.  I have a tendency to cover subjects with a block learning approach similar to that of Waldorf. We work on one main lesson, but instead of chalk drawings we do copywork.  One criticism of the CM method that I often come across on the interwebs is that CM has too much going on at once.  On the one hand, the idea is to train a child to give his full attention to a history story, be able to speak or write about the lesson and then move onto stories in literature, science, and (depending on the age) Shakespeare, and more each day.  I can see learning this way as being very helpful in later years with compartmentalizing and even multi-tasking.  I think one of the reasons that I have resisted it in our homeschool is because going from subject to subject seems a little too "schooly" for me.
  I am not opposed to the CM method of short lessons of many subjects per day. It just hasn't manifested itself that way for us - yet.