Family Book Club 2021-2022: Traveling Through World History

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:

Family Book Club 2020-2021: The Flavor of the U.S. for Middle Grades

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: Language Arts Curriculum Review

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.

Rex Barks vs. Drawing Sentences: Curriculum Review for Sentence Diagramming Resources

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.

the domino effect of reading

Through the years, I can’t count the number of times when “I read it somewhere” was the only answer I had to give others who wondered where I’d learned things.

Though I’m not sure exactly when it began, somewhere during elementary school I became a voracious reader.  At one point I remember being frustrated with our town library because I had read any chapter books in the kids’ section that I found remotely interesting (that being a majority of them), and there was nothing new to read.  So the notion of soaking up information through books is nothing new to me.

And yet, sometimes I am still surprised at the ways in which reading connects to other areas of learning. I was reminded yet again this week of the truly interconnected nature of skill-development.

After hovering forever around the A to Z Mysteries and Boxcar Children level of books (for something like a year!), Peatie has FINALLY increased the difficulty/reading level in what he selects to read during his evening free-reading time, and I’m in my glory.  Why?  There are lots of reasons to rejoice, but here are a few:

A) Because he’s as excited about reading these books as he was about the first A to Z and Boxcar books.  (After the first few, it seemed like he read more of the same just because of momentum.)  He now comes dancing out of his room every evening to report on the latest happenings at Castle Glower.

B) Because he also pokes his head out every evening to ask me a vocab word or two.  He now knows about crenelations and retorts and griffins and privy chambers and any number of other glorious words.  Have I mentioned how much I love words?

C) Because he’s incorporating the tone and vocabulary of the book into his conversation at times, which I think is awesome.  The other night he was reporting in on the relative ages of the various characters when he informed me (with a smug smirk), “I don’t know Bran’s age, but I do know one thing for certain–he’s a wizard!”  The deliberate pace, the turn of phrase, and the pregnant pause were perfect, and he knew it.

D) Because even his writing is improving.  The story he started today sounded vastly more interesting and stylistically mature than what he’s written in the past.

A story he wrote a month ago started like this: “One time a bear lived in a tree. His name was Zub. He loved being up the tree, but suddenly Zub saw a hunter trying to get him! The hunter started racing up the tall tree. Zub raced into the high branches.”

His latest story begins, “The wonders of the different worlds spread across the worlds fast. Heartland (a world) had many towns, and one of them was Size (Named because it was HUGE)! In the town of Size the houses are small, and they have many stairs. In Rattle the Rat’s house the shows on TV were always watched on the 2594th floor.  (Now we can’t go over what all his house was like, because it has 10000 levels.) So he was watching a show when he heard a sound.”

Earth-shatteringly brilliant writing?  No, but in my opinion there’s definitely noticeable improvement, and I’m excited for him.  (And for myself.  His stories before were all rather formulaic, insanely improbable, and hard to follow–and I had to read them all.)

All these delightful effects (and more that I haven’t noticed, I’m sure!) come because he’s now read a couple more challenging books.

Isn’t it fun to watch your kids learn and grow, making connections and getting excited about new information and improving their skills!?  I can’t wait to see what he learns next!  I love this job!  (Well, most of the time…)

**In case you’re wondering, he’s currently working through Jessica Day George’s Tuesdays at the Castle series.