Lord of The Rings

[Rebecca]

What age for these books? The Lord of the Rings trilogy?

 

Should I hold off until my son is old enough to use the Literary Lessons that go with them?

 

Will it "ruin" it if we read them aloud and then read them again as a study?

Or if he reads them on his own and then we do the study later...

 

Thanks,

Fwiw- we read The Hobbit last year. We read it aloud and then this son read it on his own.

 

Rebecca

[holdoll]

Our youngest dd will be reading LOTR this year for sixth grade. It just happens to be on our reading list.

 

That being said, in this house it is read, re-read, enjoyed, discussed, picked apart, you name it. Hubby can quote a whole lot of it. It's scary. :tongue_smilie:

[Ellie]

I firmly believe that LOTR should be adored and engrossing, not a school assignment. Analyzing every little bit of a book wrecks it. There are other books he can use to learn about literature. Let him just go to middle earth and live there for a bit.

:iagree::iagree::iagree:

 

Also, IMHO, it is never necessary to watch the movies. I am still not over the Faramir debacle.:glare:

[ryyans]

My son is a rising 5th grader and read The Hobbit for summer reading. He read some of it himself and other times I read it out loud. He loved the story so much that he wanted to find out all about J.R.R. Tolkien as he could. There are some documentaries that we got from netflix about Tolklien which he enjoyed plus he saw all the Lord OF The Rings movies.

He really loved this book:001_smile:

[KAR120C]

What age for these books? The Lord of the Rings trilogy?

 

Should I hold off until my son is old enough to use the Literary Lessons that go with them?

 

Will it "ruin" it if we read them aloud and then read them again as a study?

Or if he reads them on his own and then we do the study later...

 

Thanks,

Fwiw- we read The Hobbit last year. We read it aloud and then this son read it on his own.

 

Rebecca

Lord of the Rings is worth a try. DS read the Hobbit, loved it, re-read it a dozen times, and then tried the Fellowship of the Ring... but put it down again after a few chapters. It was probably a year before he picked it up and finished it, but then he loved it too.

 

We are doing the Literary Lessons from the Lord of the Rings this year, and my rule was that he needed to finish the whole series first just to enjoy it before we started studying it.

 

To an extent I agree with Cadam that it's possible to spoil a lovely book by too much analysis... but I think we probably draw the line at "too much" in a different place. It may have to be drawn in a different place for different kids. In our case we will not be doing the vocabulary words and comprehension questions. I know for DS at least, that that amount of fairly tedious work really would take away from the experience of reading. (I have asked him to take a quick read through the vocabulary lists when he's done with a section and make sure there isn't anything he's completely misunderstanding... but he won't be writing out definitions or anything.)

 

What we'll be focusing on is the twelve unit studies. That's where I think he's really going to enjoy the analysis. We have always had book group that focused on things much like the unit studies do, and it really can add quite a bit to the reading experience without being tedious. The books we've covered with that group have become some of DS's long term favorites, to be returned to over and over.

[regentrude]

We listened to LOTR on CD (beautiful dramatization from The Mind's Eye) many times, starting when DS was 6 and DD 8, so well before DS would have been able to read it independently. We enjoyed it, and listening to it they could appreciate the beautiful language without struggling through the very dense reading.

Even now at age 11, he COULD read it, but would probably not enjoy it.

We prefer reading books for enjoyment first and only later "studying" them.

For instance, from an early age my kids have been exposed to retellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we will read the original and study systematically only now in 9th grade.

 

regentrude

[vonfirmath]

:iagree::iagree::iagree:

 

Also, IMHO, it is never necessary to watch the movies. I am still not over the Faramir debacle.:glare:

 

Personally, in some ways I prefer the movies. (and yes I've read the books for myself -- slogged through them ALL THE WAY 3 times trying to figure out what gets my friends so excited about them!)

[ScoutTN]

I firmly believe that LOTR should be adored and engrossing, not a school assignment. Analyzing every little bit of a book wrecks it. There are other books he can use to learn about literature. Let him just go to middle earth and live there for a bit.

 

:iagree::iagree::iagree:

 

That said, I had The Hobbit read aloud in my 4th grade class and we loved it!

But we had a teacher who had great voice control and could do the characters' voices really well.

 

I first read LOTR the summer before 6th grade. Good memories of staying up late, late reading at our little beach cottage, totally wrapped up in the story.

[elfgivas]

when i was in public school, we read LOTR in grade 8 english. some loved it, some didn't, and some couldn't read well enough to know whether they might like it or not.

 

for most books, i leave likely candidates lying around and wait for them to disappear into someone's room, which they do with wonderful frequency now. :001_smile:

[nansk]

What age for these books? The Lord of the Rings trilogy?

 

Should I hold off until my son is old enough to use the Literary Lessons that go with them?

 

Will it "ruin" it if we read them aloud and then read them again as a study?

Or if he reads them on his own and then we do the study later...

 

 

Hi,

 

I think these books can be read at a sixth grade level. My fifth grade nephew finished The Hobbit recently.

 

I think the iterary Lessons are designed for seventh or eighth grade; atleast, I have seen that members here who do it, do it in eighth grade.

 

Also, imho, it won't ruin it for your dc to re-read the books in eighth grade and do the lessons based on that. FWIW, I enjoyed reading in-depth discussions on online forums reg. the LoTR books last year (which was a few years after I first read the books). I learnt a lot from those discussions, which went into character analysis, themes, cultural influences (Kalevala) on Tolkien's writing, etc. And I do enjoy reading the books again each year.

[Caitilin]

I don't know when I read LOTR the first time--I had been listening to it on audio for years. I know my little sister read it when she was 7, and loved it (and fell IN love with Aragorn), but she's probably not typical. My dh read it for the first time at 12 or 13, which is probably more standard. I think I read it at about 10. I certainly wouldn't wait to read it so you can assign work around it. There's so much to discuss that reading and discussing can happen EVERY time you read it.

 

 

(note: a friend says I think of LOTR as a quasi-religious entitiy, and I don't think he's wrong. :D)

[Dana]

We did Hobbit as a family read-aloud last year. This year ds wanted to read LOTR - and he did. He just enjoyed the story for the story. We may use Literary Lessons when he's a lot older and he may enjoy seeing more depth to the stories returning to them years later.

 

We tried watching the movies, but ds wasn't happy with The Fellowship.... He said he prefers keeping the characters as he imagines them. :D

[Rebecca]

Wow.

Thank you all for this great advice.

 

He turned ten in April and is a very strong reader. He is a "rising" fifth grade (we already started our grade 5 work). I don't know if he would be able to make it through them. I think they would slow him down a little- which is a good thing! A book to chew on and think about...

 

I appreciate the idea of enjoying it before studying it... that makes a lot of sense to me and it doesn't mean the study will be less fruitful, etc.

 

I must say- I picked up Vol.1 to preread and it is so engrossing...much more than I remember when I read it years ago.

 

When I told him that I thought we might wait til seventh grade- he showed me the Veritas Catalog which has them at 6th grade as evidence that he should be able to read them sooner...;)

 

He would be thrilled to try them sooner.

 

Thanks for these great thoughts,

Rebecca

[JadeOrchidSong]

My ds read the Hobbit by himself when he was 6. Now he is 7, he read The Fellowship of the Ring and then dh read aloud to both boys (7 and 5) the Two Towers. They loved it. They also watched the movies.

I always thought it was too early for them. So I feel better that other people are reading these to their young children.

[mo2]

Sorry if this is hijacking, but can someone point me in the direction of a good audio recording of LOTR? Unabridged?

[Night Elf]

We're using Literary Lessons. I have a 7th and a 9th grader. They are doing fine with it. They've never read the books before, but we're doing them as a read-aloud. Dd12 answers the questions about the material very well, moreso than ds14 who is indifferent to any type of reading material. I've heard others say Literary Lessons are so deep, so we must be doing something wrong. Really all it has us doing is reading the book, answering 5 questions about each chapter, and summarizing the chapter with a fill-in-the-blank worksheet which my ds14 likes because it just reminds us what we read in the chapter the night before. Honestly, I'm not impressed with it. We must be a family with shallow thoughts. We get the answers right according to the teacher's guide, but I don't see anything "deep" about it!

[Sunshine State Sue]

Sorry if this is hijacking, but can someone point me in the direction of a good audio recording of LOTR? Unabridged?

 

We enjoyed the ones narrated by Rob Inglis.

 

We listened to the trilogy a few years ago. We're doing LLfLOTR this year. I am a total LOTR fanatic. Ds not so much. :glare:

Edited August 12, 2010 by Sue in St Pete

[KAR120C]

I've heard others say Literary Lessons are so deep, so we must be doing something wrong. Really all it has us doing is reading the book, answering 5 questions about each chapter, and summarizing the chapter with a fill-in-the-blank worksheet which my ds14 likes because it just reminds us what we read in the chapter the night before. Honestly, I'm not impressed with it. We must be a family with shallow thoughts. We get the answers right according to the teacher's guide, but I don't see anything "deep" about it!

These are all the parts of LLfLOTR that we're skipping. I'm not all that impressed with the comprehension/ summarizing/ fill-in-the-blank stuff either, but I love the unit studies. (The look of them that is... we're starting in September.)