How does one keep up on literature in a timely fashion?

[Jeanne in MN]

I often try to fit in literature with our history and read classics along the way, but find it hard to keep moving with our history topics. My kids are 11, 10 and 10 so we can read the same things, but it takes time and sometimes we are ready to move on in SOTW, but we are not done with books from that period yet. I love to include lit. with our studies, but how do we keep things moving? Or don't we?

 

Jeanne

[Rhondabee]

I usually have a Read Aloud going at a separate time of the school day from history. These are almost always historical fiction, set in the time frame of the larger history-era we're studying that year. But, history is independent of that. So, this year, for example, I was still reading Across Five Aprils, set during the Civil War, even though our history studies had already moved on to the early 1900's.

 

In the same way, I keep our literature separate, though definitely related. We use the literature lists in WTM, which are chronological. But, there's not a one-to-one correspondence of history topics and reading assignments. This week, we finished up Call of the Wild, set in 1897 Canada in literature; but, we are studying fascism & Mussolini in history. (And our Read Aloud is Sing Down the Moon, set in the 1860's somewhere on the American frontier.)

 

That's just how *we* do it. The great thing about homeschooling is that there is no "right" way.

 

Best wishes!

[woolybear]

We've been doing the ancients this year and although the time period that we are studying doesn't always match our read aloud, I think it is fine. We read some good novels and historical fiction. The historical fiction I have kept to the ancient period, but it does get mixed up or behind our studies. It's fine. We've read Detectives in Togas and A Triumph for Flavius recently. I was debating whether to read The Golden Goblet next or not. It isn't in order, but I think dc would like the story and still be able to connect it to what we studied previously.

[Matryoshka]

We're in our fourth year of American History and still in the 1920's. Hem. So I guess we haven't been moving ahead. :D

 

So many books, so little time....

 

I am somewhat consoling myself in that 20th century Am. Hist. includes a lot of world history... yeah, that's it...

[MamaT]

I assign the children historical fiction in whatever time period we are studying and try to line up when they will finish their books (they have a set amount to read every day) with when we plan to move along.

 

Our read alouds usually do not have anything to do with our history.

[Chris in VA]

We are a big read aloud family, and sometimes we have several books going at the same time--Daddy's reading thru the Chronicles of Narnia, I read whatever looks good, and I schedule some history read alouds during the year.

I guess because we read multiple times during the day, we don't seem to spend more than a couple of weeks (maybe 3 at the most) on our chapter books. I don't do supplemental reading with every chapter of SOTW (I should put this in the past tense--I'm more talking about 2nd grade, because dd is in public school now), but I never worried if we took longer than the week we usually spent on a chapter/topic.

 

I think, too, like a pp, that it's good to review and revisit historical periods--that is one of the basic premises of the 4 year repeating cycle, after all! I would never skip a read aloud I thought was a good fit for my dd, just because I couldn't coordinate it with the period we were in.

[Shasta Mom]

We're consistent with the others. It's fairly typical that our more lengthy read alouds come after we've already studies the chapter. I, also, think this is good because it becomes a review. I only read aloud for 1/2 per day, so sometimes our read alouds can take over a month. Right now we're finishing Beorn the Proud (from c. 1000 AD) but just read Marco Polo (c. 1300) in SOTW 2 yesterday. DS is doing some Marco Polo reading on his own during the day.