Teaching mid-elementary literature without using children's books

[ElizaG]

(Edited version. Sorry this was wacky the first time it posted; I'm using a tablet that seems to have a mind of its own.)

 

I'm interested in sharing ideas about teaching literature to mid- and upper elementary aged children using general classics -- i.e., not using much, if any, literature written specifically for children.

 

We talked about this a bit in the Ella Frances Lynch threads last year, and in some of Hunter's minimalist threads. It's something I've been drawn toward for a while, even though it's pretty far from the current norm.

 

Anyone else up for discussing the nuts and bolts of this approach?

[Hunter]

These are some of the titles I have seen used for children but not written for children

 

Bible

Aesop's Fables

Shakespeare

Grimm's Fairy Tales

Pilgrim's Progress

Robinson Crusoe

Bulfinch's Mythology

Of Plymouth Plantation

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Odyssey

Plutarch

Famous Speeches

Greek dramas (models of Greek conversation)

Gallic War (in Latin)

 

The titles that I am currently experimenting with for grammar level are:

Bible

Aesop's Fables (Joseph Jacobs translation)

Shakespeare (cheating with Lamb's)

Grimm's Fairy Tales

Pilgrim's Progress

Robinson Crusoe

Bulfinch's Mythology Age of Fable (excerpts)

Le Morte d'Arthur (excerpts)

Autobiography of Ben Franklin (excerpts)

History's Greatest Speeches (Dover Thrift Classics)

 

EDIT: Adding Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea after my little "write to learn" exercise in post 23.

[ElizaG]

For this age group, E.F.L. generally recommended poetry over prose, which was a standard view in her day. Still, in an article about how to improve the public schools, she suggested using Franklin's autobiography as a class text. I'll try to find time to type out some of her suggestions; the article itself is public domain, but it's behind a paywall.

 

I'm considering going with one or two longer works per year -- either poetry or prose -- and also making some use of 1920s and 30s school literature anthologies (not standard "readers"). Their selections are pretty solid, and they don't tend to have mature or controversial themes, so they can be used earlier than the stated grade level. I think this did happen in practice; at least in Catholic schools, double grade skips weren't uncommon in those days. It was widely acknowledged that the standard curriculum moved very slowly, in part because there were so many children from non-English speaking families.

 

Even for the stated grade level, these passages seem more substantial than those in any homeschool curricula I can think of, and they're an astonishing contrast to the material that currently passes for literature in most public and parochial middle school classrooms (which is the main reason my eldest is still homeschooled).

 

Lots to think about. The main challenge right now is that I pretty much have to get rid of 95% of my accumulated elementary English language arts and literature materials. It's not as if I'm using them anyway; at some point, I stopped holding out much hope of any of them being right for us, and started accumulating them more as data points to help me figure out why they weren't working. I think I've managed that, and it's time to let them go, but it will be a major shift. It's actually been somewhat helpful to imagine that we're going to move into an RV, as in another recent thread, even though we have no plans to do such a thing.

 

ETA: so there are evidently at least two sets of issues here -- the practical decisions of what literature to use & how to teach it, and the spiritual/psychological/social challenges of giving up old habits and going into somewhat uncharted waters. Hmm. Maybe this is part of my Lenten basket of challenges for this year. As with an Easter basket, you never quite know what it's going to contain.

[Hunter]

I'm enjoying listening to your thoughts and plans.

[Momling]

We did this using many of the books Hunter listed along with others. It was great, but my one regret is that there are some children's classics that my daughter missed out on and now feels she's too old for such "childish" books. It may not be a problem for you, but keep in mind that there's a pretty small window of time to read those kids books, but a lifetime to read the grown-up ones... So you may want to consider that.

[JanetC]

Have you read Deconstructing Penguins?

 

While the books on their lists are still mostly written for children, it is a guide to having serious literary discussions with 2nd grade and up.  Several classics that aren't just children's literature are on the 4th and 5th grade reading lists, not so much for 2nd and 3rd.

[Lori D.]

We did this using many of the books Hunter listed along with others. It was great, but my one regret is that there are some children's classics that my daughter missed out on and now feels she's too old for such "childish" books. It may not be a problem for you, but keep in mind that there's a pretty small window of time to read those kids books, but a lifetime to read the grown-up ones... So you may want to consider that.

 

Totally agree.

 

Just my unsolicited opinion:

Your children are YOUNG. Practice ENJOYING literature, rather than TEACHING literature at this age/stage. Allow the logic / analysis portions of their brains to develop (usually around age 12-14) before starting formal Literature studies. At this age, enjoy discovery of the repeated patterns found in literature: character types, choices/consequences, etc. Enjoy INFORMAL discussions now that guide towards appreciation of language, images, ideas, and good writing.

 

Occasionally, without killing the book, ask questions like, "What do you think will happen next?" "Do you think that was a good choice? Why/why not?" "What would you have done differently than the character?" Or point out especially lovely language, or language that creates mood: "Wow, the author used really great descriptive words here; can you picture -- see and hear and smell -- the landscape in your mind"? "Oh, what a wonderful description, can you just see that place in your imagination! What words made that so vivid?" "I like the sound of that sentence (or verse of poetry); let's read that again!"

 

 

I'm considering going with one or two longer works per year...

 

JMO: With the age of your children, I would not consider doing more than this at this stage.

 

A potential danger:

From some reading I was doing recently (and sorry, I can NOT for the life of me remember the source right now!), depending on the student, it can actually be detrimental to a young student's thinking processes to introduce formal literary analysis terms like character, setting, plot prior to the Logic stage. Grammar stage students, who are geared for absorbing facts and black/white answers, quickly become attuned to "looking for the right answer", and they often either lose the love of books and imagination that they naturally have. Worst, books now become a checklist of looking for right answers -- AND that can lead to students having a hard time getting beyond that in the middle school/high school years of thinking deeply about works and finding truth and meaning. Instead, they may stop at: "that's the protagonist; that's the antagonist; that's the symbolism; check, check, check! my work here is done!"

 

 

 I pretty much have to get rid of 95% of my accumulated elementary English language arts and literature materials.

 

Perhaps look for some materials, especially downloaded audio lectures which take up no physical space in your home), which can guide you into being able to pull out aspects you are interested in covering through a classic work -- a Ruth Beechick approach for teaching language arts topics out of passages of classic literature; Andrew Kern or SWB for the literature aspects; etc. And, of course, having several tablets or e-readers to download as many books of all types as you wish would reduce the physical size of your library to fit in an RV, while allowing you the full-range of types of Literature to best fit your family's interests and needs. :)

 

- audio lecture -- Susan Wise Bauer's more detailed info in audio download format

- audio lecture -- Andrew Kern, Teaching Literature Without Killing It

- podcast -- David Kern & Brian Phillips, about Andrew Kern's teaching literature without killing it

 

 

Wishing you and your family joy and deep meaning in your journeys in all types of Literature. :) Warmest regards, Lori D.

[Critterfixer]

I'm using Fairy Tales for our discussions of plot, character, setting, theme and style this year. But I think of the tales I am using as written to entertain children for the most part. 

We do this are part of our composition program and is all the formal analysis I do at this point. We will cover some figurative language this summer when we do CW Poetry for Beginners. 

 

I strongly encourage reading of at level or below level children's fiction in every way. Our read aloud stories are not great fiction and I spend very little time discussing them. They are for enjoyment.

 

[ElizaG]

We did this using many of the books Hunter listed along with others. It was great, but my one regret is that there are some children's classics that my daughter missed out on and now feels she's too old for such "childish" books. It may not be a problem for you, but keep in mind that there's a pretty small window of time to read those kids books, but a lifetime to read the grown-up ones... So you may want to consider that.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.  I don't think this will be a problem for our family, as we have shelves of children's books that do get read -- sometimes aloud -- and often informally discussed.

 

As someone who came close to studying children's literature in graduate school, I'm not so sure about the "small window" theory, either.   It's possible that your daughter might change her mind in several years, when she knows less than she does now.    ;)     I also didn't have much interest in children's classics at that age, but went on to discover and enjoy many new-to-me titles in adulthood, especially in my college years and as a homeschooling parent.   The Peterkin Papers, Chicken Soup With Rice, The Little Lame Prince, Swallows and Amazons, the Maple Hill Farm books, Father Finn's stories... the list goes on.  :001_wub:

[Kfamily]

I would think that the longer poems by Longfellow (Hiawatha, Evangeline, Courtship of Miles Standish, The Saga of King Olaf and The Discoverer of the North Cape) would be accessible for this age and still very engaging. I know CM also used some of Longfellow's longer poems for Years 4 onward.

 

Here are some more poems used in the PNEU curriculum:

Lays of Ancient Rome by Macaulay

The Vision of Don Roderick by Sir Walter Scott

Idylls of the King by Tennyson (selections)

 

Of course, Bulfinch's Mythology, Shakespeare and Plutarch...

 

 

Hmmm, maybe A Book of Americans by Stephen and Rosemary Benet would help. This is a collection of poems about great Americans in history. I don't own it so I can't remember if they are accurate reflections of the events in history or not.

 

[LostintheCosmos]

I would love to figure out how to do this. We do and will read great kids' lit aloud, but it seems to me that one way to teach literature without "killing the book" is to teach more advanced works that are perhaps not totally immediately accessible and thus become more enjoyable through study. Since those EFL threads, we've very slowly been working through Hiawatha this year (all orally! I'm so proud of myself for managing to memorize it), using it as the basis for all our language arts, as well as the "content subjects," and that has been working well so far.

 

My aim would not be to do more advanced literary analysis, just to use more complex works to accomplish elementary-level goals - although I still need to figure out exactly what those are, too. This summer I hope to sit down with some of the resources I've been collecting, including rereading EFL, to think about all this some more, maybe come out at the end with a kind of scope and sequence. I'd like to really crystallize for myself what the purpose of studying literature is in our homeschool - something I've been noodling away at since first reading Fr. Donnelley last year - and also to continue to deepen my sense of how literature was taught before the rise of the university English department. 

 

I'm considering going with one or two longer works per year -- either poetry or prose -- and also making some use of 1920s and 30s school literature anthologies (not standard "readers"). Their selections are pretty solid, and they don't tend to have mature or controversial themes, so they can be used earlier than the stated grade level. I think this did happen in practice; at least in Catholic schools, double grade skips weren't uncommon in those days. It was widely acknowledged that the standard curriculum moved very slowly, in part because there were so many children from non-English speaking families.

Even for the stated grade level, these passages seem more substantial than those in any homeschool curricula I can think of, and they're an astonishing contrast to the material that currently passes for literature in most public and parochial middle school classrooms (which is the main reason my eldest is still homeschooled).

Lots to think about. The main challenge right now is that I pretty much have to get rid of 95% of my accumulated elementary English language arts and literature materials.

 

Do you have a link to an example of one of these anthologies? Any sense of how they compare to the non-kid lit volumes of stuff like My Book House, Journey through Bookland, etc? Can you share what's in the 5% you are keeping and maybe save me some dumb purchases?  :laugh: 

[ElizaG]

Perhaps look for some materials, especially downloaded audio lectures which take up no physical space in your home), which can guide you into being able to pull out aspects you are interested in covering through a classic work -- a Ruth Beechick approach for teaching language arts topics out of passages of classic literature; Andrew Kern or SWB for the literature aspects; etc.

 

This is pretty much what I've been doing for the last couple of years:  looking at many different ways of teaching literature (including some older ones), and deciding which parts to emphasize.  It turns out that much of the variation is due to different ideas about the purpose of studying literature in elementary school.   Some people believe it's mainly of value for personal enjoyment, or encouraging the habit of reading, or picking up the good qualities of the works "by osmosis."  In these cases, if the child is already reading good books, no formal studying is really necessary.   Others use literature more deliberately as a vehicle to teach skills (copywork, elocution, composition, etc.), or content (general knowledge, moral precepts, etc.), or both.

 

All of this is very traditional, and goes back to ancient times.   We'll be doing some combination of the above, I think. 

 

A much more recent trend is to teach "literary analysis" to school children, as if to get a head start on high-level scholarly research, but that's not something I have any interest in for this age group.   I'm inclined to leave it until high school -- though, frankly, I think it belongs more to specialized university studies, which have been displacing the traditional teaching of the liberal arts since the 1800s, first in colleges, then in high schools, now in elementary schools.   [ETA:  cross-posted with LostCove; sorry for any duplication!]

 

Somewhere in all this, I started to think about the fact that children's literature was only added to the school curriculum quite recently, and it doesn't seem as if our literacy has improved since then.   These two things may or may not be related, but this does show that children's books aren't a necessary part of the curriculum.   And since I'm trying to simplify our formal studies as much as possible (leaving more time for other things, including reading for pleasure :001_smile: ), it seems to make sense for us to leave them out.  

 

So I've been thinking about homeschooling this way for a while, but hadn't found anyone who recommended it until I came across Ella Frances Lynch's writings last year.  She does give a suggested reading list, and it has a great deal of Longfellow in the early years (this is kind of an understatement, LOL), but it's not really a full "method" or "curriculum," because most of her specific advice for parents of children aged 9 and up hasn't been published.   

 

I hope that gives a better idea of where I'm coming from.  :001_smile:   And I appreciate all the recommendations!

[ElizaG]

Could someone please post links to the EFL threads, esp. the one that links to the reading list?   I have to go; baby is cranky.  (I tried to still her fretful wail by saying, "Hush, the Naked Bear will hear thee," but she wasn't having any of it.  These modern kids!) 

[Hunter]

Free Books by EFL

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Ella+Frances+Lynch%22

 

Past Threads

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/525821-ella-frances-lynch/

 

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/524036-hunter-or-anyone-comparison-of-the-bluedorns-ella-frances-lynch/

 

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/526891-add-with-methods-ella-frances-lynch-spinoff/

 

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/514391-ruth-beechick-books-anyone-reading-any-right-now/?p=5685908

[ElizaG]

Thank you!

[LostintheCosmos]

Here is the bit at the end of Educating the Child at Home where she lists a bunch of suitable poems for up to age 10 or thereabouts - my sense is they might all be read and discussed, but only some would be memorized or studied in greater depth: https://archive.org/stream/educatingchilda00lyncgoog#page/n208/mode/2up

[nansk]

Have you guys seen Bertha Hazard's Three Years With The Poets? It is available free online and in print from Amazon.

[Hunter]

It looks to me that EFL wants to replace the Roman Aeneid and Greek Homer with an American Longfellow? The Puritans did something similar with the Bible and the Westminster Catechism. The Jews did something similar with the Torah and the Psalms. Some Arab countries memorize the Koran. I think some communist countries have used communist texts? Children memorize THE text of the nation/faith and a high rate of literacy is the result. 

 

Does anyone feel like they have a text to identify with? I can get behind the basic method, but not the chosen American poem.

 

I do like the Psalms. Don Potter's Psalms Reader. Make sure to scroll down to the instructions at the end.

http://donpotter.net/pdf/psalmsreader.pdf

[ElizaG]

We do and will read great kids' lit aloud, but it seems to me that one way to teach literature without "killing the book" is to teach more advanced works that are perhaps not totally immediately accessible and thus become more enjoyable through study. Since those EFL threads, we've very slowly been working through Hiawatha this year (all orally! I'm so proud of myself for managing to memorize it), using it as the basis for all our language arts, as well as the "content subjects," and that has been working well so far.

I'm impressed that you've stuck with Hiawatha. After my children had learned a few dozen lines (more or less, depending on age), we put it on hold for a while, and never got back to it. I've just come out of "new baby mode" enough to get started again.

 

What we really, really need over here is some help with organization, such as:

 

- a checklist of skills, to keep track of what I'm supposed to be doing with each child. I think modifying a standard grade level language arts scope and sequence would be easier than complete DIY. I'm also drawn to the Montessori approach of making different marks for lessons that are "introduced," "being worked on," and "mastered."

 

- a list of topics we'd like to touch on in the next several weeks -- seasonal, thematic, etc. -- with space to write some possible literary selections that line up with them. Then we won't end up with so much of the sort of randomness we had today, reading Whittier's "The Pumpkin" in early spring, and his poem about the great Chicago fire of 1871 when we're studying WWI (well, at least that one was sort of close!).

 

- and there was also a third type of list that came to mind, but I forgot what it was, LOL.

 

[ETA: Remembered it, after a night's sleep. It was more of a form (printed or online) that we could fill in for each literary work, with some background about the author; our own line by line notes about unfamiliar vocabulary, events, places, etc.; and ideas for reference materials to have at hand in case children want to learn more about things mentioned in the passage. This page would be for teacher preparation, not to give to the children, and ideally not even to read from during the lesson.

 

So: one for "skills," one for "schedule suggestions," and one for "study." I think all of those would be necessary before I could do this sort of teaching in a coherent and non-flaky way.]

 

 

Do you have a link to an example of one of these anthologies? Any sense of how they compare to the non-kid lit volumes of stuff like My Book House, Journey through Bookland, etc? Can you share what's in the 5% you are keeping and maybe save me some dumb purchases? :laugh:

 

Most of the "literary readers" I've been considering are from the late 1920s onward, so they're not online. I'll have to get back to you with specific titles, as I'm still going through them to figure out which, if any, would be most helpful. They're often quite heavy on prose, with a much smaller amount of poetry. (This is also true of Journeys Through Bookland; not sure about My Book House, which we don't have.) But we'll still keep them for pleasure reading, unless they're too full of distracting notes and commentary.

 

Again, though, the graded anthologies would mainly be for organizational help -- basically suggestions of "what to read when" -- and they might just end up being another distraction. You do not need to buy anything! All of the poems and other writings you'd need are online, along with pictures and reference material for teacher preparation, and there's even a lot of free audio. (I'm sort of partial to Librivox's Hiawatha with the English accent, though his squeaky-voiced Nokomis makes me giggle. ;) )

[ElizaG]

Does anyone feel like they have a text to identify with? I can get behind the basic method, but not the chosen American poem.

 

I do like the Psalms. Don Potter's Psalms Reader. Make sure to scroll down to the instructions at the end.

http://donpotter.net/pdf/psalmsreader.pdf

The psalms are a classic choice, and the main one we came up with when discussing this on the boards last year. There's just the question of translation. Even if each of us is able to find one that satisfies us, it won't necessarily be the same one that other families are using. In the short run, this makes it hard to share materials. In the long run, it means that our students won't all have absorbed the same classic turns of phrase, which defeats much of the culturally formative purpose of traditional literary education.

 

It seems like this gives some vindication to the Catholic "Latin Mass only" and US Protestant "KJV only" positions. Sticking to a received text may or may not be essential for preserving doctrine and piety (which is usually the stated reason), but it does seem to be a major factor in developing and maintaining a coherent culture. With no single English religious text that can be agreed on (even among Christians), and no real option of learning Latin, Greek, or Hebrew literature in the early years, what can Americans use? The Declaration of Independence? The national anthem? Advertising jingles?

 

:confused1: :huh: :001_unsure:

 

This is quite a depressing impasse. I think I need a :cheers2: .

 

So anyway, that's why I'm willing to use Hiawatha (supplemented with other things, including prayers in Latin and English) as a first text. It has some "issues" relating to the attempt to merge aspects of different cultures, and it's only sort of traditional, but the same could maybe be said of America itself.

[ElizaG]

Have you guys seen Bertha Hazard's Three Years With The Poets? It is available free online and in print from Amazon.

Thank you!  This looks at least as useful as the graded "literary readers" I've been considering, with the advantage that it's all in one volume.  LostCove, this might be one to add to your un-shopping list.  :laugh:

[Bluegoat]

This is an interesting idea.  i used a boxed curriculum this year, and it has soured me a bit on children's books, so many seemed to be included because they were historical fiction for the right time period, but they actually really stunk.  Boring, bad writing, you name it.

 

I think I've been convinced again that my original approach is better - that children's literature is to be considered when I think it is as good as adult literature and for private reading.

 

As far as memorizing works that are culturally fundamental - my first thought from an Anglican perspective is the Book of Common Prayer.  That would include the Coverdale psalms, but other possibilities as well.  I read recently an interview with PD James where she mentioned that in school they memorized the collects.  There really don't seem to be as many things that Canadians identify with in this way as their are for Americans.

 

We just the other day decided to scrap our planned memor work to memorize St Caedmon's hymn.  We've been doing British history at home, and saints in Sunday School, so we've been looking a little at British saints, and that is where we ended up.  So we read a few translations, and listened to it in Old English on Youtube. 

 

I do think though that I might not want to start too early with a plan like this, probably not before grade 3 or 4. 

[Hunter]

I think America is too young and diverse to have a common text that won't become quickly dated and will be appreciated by everyone.

 

Having citizenship in 3 countries and living on the coast in a major city, I don't try to be "American". I do try to find a little identity in being "western" in a workingclass folksy kind of way.

 

My culturally formative texts right now are the ones I listed above. The thread on an 1836 home library really taught me alot and helped me figure out a bit more what I think is MY culture. I'm a product mostly of people who lived in villages on both sides of the Altlantic. As I am writing this, I'm realizing that the Atlantic is my home as much as the countries surrounding it. As I've been trying to compile my short list of literature, I have been struggling to shorten the list of sea books and add more mainland books, and I'm realizing why that has been such a struggle. I'm drawn the sea books, because the sea is MY home even more than the individual countries I have citizenship in.

 

I'm adding Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea right back to my list, now with no reservations.

[Hunter]

I'm still trying to maybe find a cheap little paperback volume of Joseph Jacobs English Fairy Tales.

 

The best I have found is this reasonably sized hardcover.

http://www.amazon.com/English-Everymans-Library-Childrens-Classics/dp/0679428097/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1MFX5A6YZRNZCC9A6ETS

 

EDIT: I think I finally found one!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1611041325/ref=dp_proddesc_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155

[ElizaG]

This is an interesting idea.  i used a boxed curriculum this year, and it has soured me a bit on children's books, so many seemed to be included because they were historical fiction for the right time period, but they actually really stunk.  Boring, bad writing, you name it.

Yes... I had a bit of an epiphany under similar circumstances, when we were using Trail Guide a couple of years ago.   After that, I made more of an effort to choose only the excellent ones from the reading lists, but what I've generally found is that -- after days of research and shopping on my part -- the children will blast through the whole stack in a matter of hours (or, for picture books and early grade books, sometimes minutes).   And then we're stuck with the question of how to draw out the process of reading, and make it more challenging, without "killing the book."   

 

Many people use CM or WTM style narration, or the unit study/FIAR approach, or Andrew Kern's "should questions," but it seems to me that all of these focus much more on the content than on the language.   That might not matter to families who are teaching English language arts using other resources, but again, we're trying to simplify.  It seems that a good way to do this, as LostCove suggested above, is to use works in which the language is already more challenging.

 

As far as memorizing works that are culturally fundamental - my first thought from an Anglican perspective is the Book of Common Prayer.  That would include the Coverdale psalms, but other possibilities as well.  I read recently an interview with PD James where she mentioned that in school they memorized the collects.  There really don't seem to be as many things that Canadians identify with in this way as their are for Americans.

Thanks -- that is a good idea. 

 

Someone has recently written a Canadian epic about the Plains of Abraham, but it's not in the public domain, and IMO it isn't as charming and child-friendly as Hiawatha.  (Not surprising, given the subject matter.  :001_smile:)  I guess history will tell whether or not this poem becomes a familiar part of Canadian culture. 

 

It seems to me that Hiawatha would be a reasonable choice for Canadians, though.  The events take place in what's now the border area around the Great Lakes, and the Europeans he meets are French missionaries.   Besides, the culture of English Canada is much younger even than that of the US, and its roots are historically at least as much American as they are British.   (Not to get too far off topic, but most of the early population of Ontario came from the US, and the great majority didn't fit the Loyalist stereotype.  Conversely, when Longfellow was a child in New England during the War of 1812, many of the local leaders favored Britain.  So things were quite a bit more blurred than the conventional narratives of both countries would have us believe.  The Civil War of 1812 is the first book I've found that gets into this in depth; here's hoping I can find time to finish it.) 

 

From what I've read, until the early 20th century, Canadian public schools tended to use Irish school readers.  These were put together by the British, but the selections were specifically chosen to be acceptable to both Catholics and Protestants.   According to the poet and essayist Thomas O'Hagan (who's out of fashion now, but was considered a man of great learning and talent in his day), many of the rural schools of Ontario had a very high standard of literary culture, even though few people went past the eighth grade.  

 

Anyway, with all the differences of religion, nationality, and life experience, I think everyone is going to end up with their own mish-mosh of selections, as Hunter is doing.  But I hope there will be some common ground.  :001_smile:

[Hunter]

The What Your Grader Needs to Know series attempts to create a national canon of literature.

[LostintheCosmos]

I'm impressed that you've stuck with Hiawatha. After my children had learned a few dozen lines (more or less, depending on age), we put it on hold for a while, and never got back to it. I've just come out of "new baby mode" enough to get started again.

 

Don't be too impressed - when I said slowly, I meant slowly, and my kids are younger than yours, so I'm sure we're trying to accomplish less with it than you are at this point. We took a substantial new baby-related break, also.  :001_smile:

 

Modifying an existing scope and sequence was kind of what I've had in mind, too. Setting up the record-keeping aspect Montessori-style makes sense.

 

A kind of standard lesson planning form is a good idea. I've been typing up those kinds of things (vocab, links to YouTube videos of the death-dance of the spirits, reminders to go out in the yard and look at an actual pine tree, etc, etc) and then also taking any useful notes after the lesson about what I wish I had prepared. :laugh: My idea was at the end, I'd have a kind of "Hiawatha album" for future reference/children. 

 

ETA: One thing that I am working on is a list of types of exercises, probably somehow linked to the skills they are meant to develop. 

 

The What Your Grader Needs to Know series attempts to create a national canon of literature.

 

Good call - although I'm not on board with all his ideas around this, E.D. Hirsch is one of the few mainstream education guys out there concerned about this (my husband's a principal at a charter school and they use the Core Knowledge language arts curriculum in part because of that).

 

There's been a fair amount of historical scholarship about the influence of classicism on the early American republic that I'd like to read some day. My impression is that familiarity with classical texts (obviously in translation) was quite widespread, even among folks with little or no formal/institutional education - I'd be curious about which texts in particular, what translations, etc.

[arliemaria]

Have you guys seen Bertha Hazard's Three Years With The Poets? It is available free online and in print from Amazon.

 

Thank you for posting this.  What a great resource!