We continued our weekly family book club this year to keep exposing the kids to books they might not otherwise choose to read, and I once again worked to find books that (sort of) matched what we were studying in history and worked well for all three of my kids as far as interest/length/content were concerned. (This year they were in 7th, 6th, and 4th grades by age.)
This year we did a world history overview, so I tried to find books from all over the world in all different periods of history. I browsed book lists and read reviews and tried to find stories that were reasonably authentic and hadn’t aged poorly if they were older books. Some eras in history and parts of the world don’t have as many stories available, so that made for an interesting family conversation, as well. Since I had such a long list, a few of these turned into family read-alouds instead of book club books. Here are the books we read this year and our general opinion of them:
I can’t believe that it’s this time of year already! I feel like this past year, insane and limited as it was, flew by. I’ve had a hard time choosing curriculum for this coming year: I want it to be rigorous since my older two are in middle school, but I still want them to enjoy learning. Add to that the fact that I’m not sure what extracurriculars are going to be available to us because of the ever-changing nature of this pandemic, and I’m not sure how much at-home vs. on-the-go time to plan on. But I’ve done my best, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
To be honest, I’ve never loved the idea of teaching a “Literature” class. I’ve done it as a brick-and-mortar school teacher, since it was required of me, but I always felt a bit as if I was killing the story for everyone by asking them to analyze every aspect of every chapter as they went. There’s definitely a place for literary analysis, but I don’t think it should hinder that first-read-through enjoyment.
Up until this year in our homeschool, I haven’t had any required reading. I’ve wanted my kids to read for enjoyment and to grow naturally as readers–and subsequently, as writers and thinkers, since reading teaches you to write and expands your world. There were long stretches of time when one or another of my kids didn’t do much reading at all. Though if I’m being fair, that’s not strictly true: they simply weren’t reading formally. They’d obsess over video game Wiki pages, write notes to their siblings and read the responses, browse magazines I’d left open on the counter, reminisce by reading through a long-loved picture book, or giggle up a storm at one of the cartoon anthologies my husband and I have from days of yore. So they were reading, but I bit my fingernails wondering if they were doing enough. You know how that goes?
At this point, my twelve-year-old is re-reading the Septimus Heap series at top speed, having recently read through every Rick Riordan book ever written. My eleven-year-old has transitioned from a Rick Riordan obsession to a memoir/biography obsession. My nine-year-old is still in the eclectic reading phase: he’ll pore over military encyclopedias, read Calvin & Hobbes until he’s practically got the anthology memorized, devour elementary nonfiction on topics that fascinate him, and make his way through picture books of the long-and-difficult variety. Most importantly to me, all three of my kids see reading as something they enjoy and pursue of their own volition.
Here are some of the books we read this past year. (A couple more were borrowed from friends or are currently loaned out to others.)
This past year, however, I decided it was time to help them stretch beyond the bounds of their natural inclinations. There are SO MANY good books out there that my kids weren’t reading: either the cover art wasn’t exciting, the genre didn’t appeal, or the text looked too intimidating. Thus, the Family Book Club was born. Okay, okay, so ‘Love isn’t participating since we meet while he’s working, but hey, ⅘ isn’t bad, right?
I Laid an Egg on Aunt Ruth’s Head: Conquering English and Its Ruthless Ways is the best language arts program you’ve never heard of. Featuring rollicking tales of the narrator and his wacky Great-Aunt Ruth, author Joel Schnoor manages to make the nit-picky details of the English language both engaging and memorable.
Aunt Ruth is surprisingly effective for grammar instruction. Read on for more information.Continue reading →
My kids have studied their parts of speech year after year (albeit with different curricula each time), so I wanted to do something different than they’ve been doing. I had loved doing sentence diagrams as a kid, and I thought my kids might like it, as well. Goobie loves puzzles and organizing, and I’ve read that diagramming appeals to mathy types as well, which Peatie certainly is. Besides, I found it helpful to be able to visualize how sentences fit together, which helped me especially when reading very dense college-level texts.
I did quite a bit of searching online and rejected numerous options due to being too simplistic, not offering enough explanation or practice, or being awfully short for the price charged. I narrowed it down to Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy and Drawing Sentences: A Guide to Diagramming. Both books were roughly $30 on Amazon. Since Rex Barks offered a view of some inside pages, I initially decided to try it instead of Drawing Sentences, which had no “see inside” feature.
These are the two sentence diagramming books we tried using this year. Read on for our thoughts on each of them.Continue reading →
I love the start of a new semester! The excitement of curriculum planning has always appealed to me. This year I’ve decided to steer my kids towards a bit more rigorous and independent work, both because they’re reaching middle school and are ready for more independence and challenge, and because we have no social life vying for our time. So without further ado, my curriculum choices for this year:
This year was a hairy one, since I was working valiantly to balance academics with extracurricular activities and social opportunities. Here’s our curriculum for 2019-2020:
This is the first year I’ll have three kids fully in the work rotation, though Pookie did some light daily work for the last half of the previous year. Here are my curriculum choices for everyone:
You’ve heard it all before. Plenty of people have written articles and blog posts about how to guarantee that your child loves reading. But can you REALLY guarantee it?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to read.
I am the youngest of four children. Three of us spent many happy childhood hours with our noses in a book. The fourth sibling utterly surprised me when he showed up at our parents’ house as an adult with a book under his arm. Several years post-college and working a job that required weekly cross-country travel to job sites, he said he didn’t have much else to do while he was in transit. “It’s actually not so bad,” he sheepishly admitted.
I hardly think my family was unique, so I find it difficult to believe that there can be a guaranteed way to raise a child who loves reading. I think everyone can enjoy reading a just-right book, but not everyone will want to spend hours of their free time curled up with a book.
So, if you can’t guarantee that your child will love to read, what can you at least do to encourage a positive attitude toward reading? Continue reading →
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