How to Teach Literature Without a Curriculum Part 2: The Early Years

a long, long time ago

Deb, my virtual buddy from Not Inadequate, dropped a bomb on the Twitter Posse yesterday.  It seems she is considering buying a literature curriculum for her kid.  Her six year old kid.  She asked for advice, so I’m sure you all know what I did.  First I laughed at reassured her, then I started writing a companion post to How to Teach Literature Without a Curriculum.  Because little kids don’t need a literature curriculum.  All they need to do is read.

But, but but!  (That’s Deb interjecting.)  How do you know they understand what they’re reading?  Well, you talk to them.  You ask them questions.  But, but, but!  (That is Deb interjecting vigorously.)  How do I know what questions to ask?  Well, it depends.  If your kid is between 4th and 8th grade, you can try the ones listed in the grammar stage section of The Well-Trained Mind.  If he’s six, the only questions you need to worry about are:

What was the best part of the story?

What was the worst part of the story?

Which character did you like best?

Which character did you like least?

And so on.  Very basic, very specific, very concrete questions.  Don’t throw all of them at the kid at once, either.  Pick one per session.  And don’t even bother trying to do a narration session if either one of you is excited about a birthday or tired after a long day at the zoo or hungry or constipated or nervous.  This should be a mostly pleasant activity for all parties.

Be sure to model complete sentences.  Let’s say you start out by asking, “What character did you like best?”  When (not if, but when) your kid says, “Bob,” you respond by saying, “Oh, so Bob is your favorite character!  That’s great; I like Bob, too.  Now say, ‘Bob is my favorite character,’ so I can write that down for you.”  (Your kid will give you the stink eye, but you will ignore him.)  You may go on to ask, “Why do you like Bob?”  When (not if, but when) your kid says, “He doesn’t have to take baths,” you reply, “Oh, so you like Bob because he doesn’t take baths.  I know you hate to take baths, sweetie, but sometimes you smell like cheese.  Don’t cry, darling.  If your mother won’t tell you, who will?  Now.  Say, ‘I like Bob because he doesn’t take baths,’ so I can write that down for you.”  Eventually you’ll have written a narration similar to this:

The Greatest Story Ever by The Greatest Author Ever

Bob is my favorite character.  I like Bob because he doesn’t take baths.  He thinks soap smells funny and he pushed his mom into the bathtub because she said he smelled like cheese.  Bob wasn’t sorry.

And that’s it.  Let the kid draw a picture of Cheesy Old Bob at the bottom of the page and stick it in his notebook.  Leave it at that for now.  Don’t expect your six year old to be able to identify the time period in which the story was set.  Don’t get wrapped up in the lead character’s (or, heaven forbid, the author’s) internal motivations.  Don’t ask him to explain the symbolism.  Keep it simple. 

At first you’ll do most (if not all) of the actual writing yourself, but eventually you’ll transfer that chore to your kid.  I did this gradually.  My Goobs started out not writing anything at all.  Then they wrote the first sentence.  Then they wrote the first two sentences.   They wrote a little more, and a little more, and by third grade, they were writing fairly respectable book reports on their own with a minimum of fuss.  We did written narrations for literature once or twice a week.  (We also did narrations for history and science.)

But, but, but!  (Hey, Deb!  I feel your angst.  Let’s get adjoining rooms in the asylum, okay?  We’ll drool and watch teevee.)  What books should they read?  In the earliest years, we focused on Bible stories and fairy tales.  Bible stories and fairy tales are perfect for beginning narrators: they’re short, they’re exciting, they have a small cast of characters, and the plots tend to be linear, without confusing flashbacks and other distractions.  Later on I tended to save our “big discussions” for the weightier titles.  (I mean, Bunnicula is awesome, but I wouldn’t count it for school.)  We read many of them aloud or listened to them on tape.  

Here are some of our favorite books (in no particular order) from our early years of homeschooling:

• The Wind in the Willows; Kenneth Grahame
• Island of the Blue Dolphins; Scott O’Dell
• My Side of the Mountain; Jean Craighead George
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; Robert C. O’Brien
• Ella Enchanted; Gail Carson Levine
• Where the Red Fern Grows; Wilson Rawls
• A Dog Called Kitty; Bill Wallace
• The Secret Garden; Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Fairy Tales; The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll
• Peter Pan; J. M. Barrie
• The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkien
• Black Beauty; Anna Sewell
• Little House in the Big Woods; Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Rascal; Sterling North
• The Chronicles of Narnia; C. S. Lewis
• Tuck Everlasting; Natalie Babbit
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; J. K. Rowling
• A Wrinkle in Time; Madeleine L’Engle
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Mark Twain
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; L. Frank Baum
• The Trumpet of the Swan; E. B. White
• Stuart Little; E. B. White
• Charlotte’s Web; E. B. White
• Babe the Gallant Pig; Dick King-Smith
• Sarah Plain and Tall; Patricia MacLauchlan
• Five Children and It; Edith Nesbit
• The Sign of the Beaver; Elizabeth George Speare
• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever; Loretta Swit

Other favorite authors (again, in no particular order) include:

• Maurice Sendak
• A. A. Milne
• Jon Scieszka
• Kate DiCamillo
• Edward Lear
• Shel Silverstein
• Demi
• Tomie de Paola
• Beverly Cleary
• Richard Scarry
• Ludwig Bemelmens
• Robert McCloskey
• Margaret Hodges
• Beatrix Potter
• Rosemary Sutcliff
• James Howe
• Dr. Seuss
• Judy Blume
• Roald Dahl
• Neil Gaiman
• Jean Fritz
• Philip Pullman
• Cynthia Rylant
• Sharon Creech
• Avi

There are a million lists to check out; the lists in The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise-Bauer are excellent, as are the ones in The Latin Centered Curriculum by Andrew Campbell.  Another good one is the 1,000 Good Books List by the Classical Christian Education Support Group.

But, but, but! (Sez Deb.)  Shouldn’t we be doing, I don’t know, MORE? 

No, not really.  Not yet.  Yes, sure, you could do more.  But unless your kid is starting conversations about the lack of female agency in Cinderella or the possibility that the evil stepmother is nothing but a convenient outlet for the stifled rage of powerless children everywhere, I wouldn’t bother.  Just let him enjoy his stories and save the formal stuff for later.  

Honestly, I think you should take the money you’d spend on a literature curriculum and buy these instead:

• Deconstructing Penguins; Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
• How to Read a Book; Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor; Thomas C. Foster

Or buy the literature curriculum.  What the hell do I know?  My Goobs are still pretty young; they still might end up living in a van down by the river.  (But if they’re in a van down by the river, they’re not in my basement.  So I’m fine with that.)  

How to Teach Literature Without a Curriculum

Once upon a time, I attended a homeschool group function.  Towards the end of the evening, I found myself nodding sympathetically while a slightly hysterical woman told me about the problems she was having with her current literature curriculum.  I nodded sympathetically for twenty whole minutes.  Finally she wiped a tear from her cheek, took a deep breath, and asked, “So, what do you use for literature?”

“Well,” I replied, “We don’t use a program.  We just read books, and then we write about them.”

“Oh,” she said, backing away from me.  “That’s interesting.  There’s Sally.  I need to speak with her about something.  Oh, Sally!”  

I had stayed away from the stinky garlic bread sticks, so I know it wasn’t my breath that had offended her.  Perhaps she thought I was one of those dangerous unschoolers.  Ha!  No, I’m not an unschooler.  It’s just that I’ve spent all my curriculum money on various Latin programs.  But since Mrs. Slightly Hysterical wasn’t interested in hearing how I manage without a literature curriculum, I’ll talk about it here instead.  

Wait, where are you going?  Come back! 

The hardest step of the whole process is making the book list.  I was born lazy, so I take the easy way out and use the lists published in The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise-Bauer.  First I turn to the literature list for the appropriate grade.  (Anemone is in 6th grade this year, but I am using the 7th grade list.  Yes, you’re allowed to do that!) Then I go through the list and cross out the books she has read (all the fairy tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, “The Raven”).  Then I cross out the books I have not read (The Pilgrim’s Progress), and the books I just don’t like very much (Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe).  This leaves me with the following:

• “A Voyage to Lilliput” and “A Voyage to Brobdingnag”; Jonathan Swift
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”; Washington Irving
• “The Way to Wealth”; Benjamin Franklin
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Jules Verne
• A Christmas Carol; Charles Dickens
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
• Poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson 

I don’t think that’s quite enough to fill up a year, so I’ll replace Robinson Crusoe with Treasure Island and Pride and Prejudice with Emma.  I’ll throw in some books from the Bible and Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, and now I have:

• “A Voyage to Lilliput” and “A Voyage to Brobdingnag”; Jonathan Swift
• Treasure Island; Robert Louis Stevenson
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”; Washington Irving
• “The Way to Wealth”; Benjamin Franklin
• Emma; Jane Austen
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Jules Verne
• A Christmas Carol; Charles Dickens
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
• Poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson
• Selections from the KJV Bible
• Martin Luther’s Small Catechism

Now it’s up to Anemone to read through this list.  She is supposed to spend an hour every day reading literature, but honestly, getting her to read for twenty minutes is a triumph.  (If Anemone were in school, she’d be classified as a jock.  Not a dumb jock, but a jock all the same.)  I can’t let her go up to her room or outside or even to the sofa in the other room to read, because she will put her book down to practice ballet.  Even when she is right in front of me, she will pretend to read while thinking about practicing ballet, so after every reading session we have a quick discussion.  During these quick discussions, I ask her tell me what happened.  That’s it.  It takes about two minutes.  This goes on for however many days (weeks) she drags out that particular book, and then it’s time to have the big discussion.  

Cue the scary music!

No, not really.  We sit down, and I ask her questions.  The list of questions in The Well-Trained Mind (what is this book about, what do the main characters want, what keeps them from getting it, etc.) is very helpful in getting the conversation started.  We talk about any historical connections she may or may not have made.  I ask her what she would do differently from the main characters in a similar situation.  If she hated it, I ask what made it so horrible.  This usually takes about fifteen minutes.  Then I sit her down and say, “Please write one page about this book.  Feel free to use anything we talked about  Or don’t.  It’s up to you.” 

After she has written her page, I point out the spelling errors and grammatical train wrecks, and we talk about how she might have organized her thoughts better.  Then she files it away in her English binder and goes on to the next book.  

See?  It’s easy!  Read books, then write about them.  Save your curriculum money for Latin.

Wait, where are you going?  Come back! 

And be sure to check out How to Teach Literature Without a Curriculum Part 2: The Early Years.

JellyMan's First Literary Essay

I still haven't come up with a good story, so I've decided to share what an 8th grader's essay on Walden might look like.  Most of our literary analysis has been done conversationally up to now, but JellyMan is dangerously close to high school and must learn to put his own opinions into writing. 

Here is the essay topic from SparkNotes:

Thoreau occasionally forces a long series of tedious details upon us, as for example when in "House-Warming" he tells us a precise history of the freezing of Walden Pond over the past several years.  Similarly detailed passages refer to his farming endeavors, his home construction, and other topics.  Why does Thoreau repeatedly display these irrelevant details?  How do they fit in to his overall plan for Walden?

And here is JellyMan's response:

The Complex Simplicity of Walden

Throughout Walden, Thoreau writes long, detailed descriptions of his first year at Walden Pond. At first these tiresome elaborations don’t seem to have a purpose, but as one reads it becomes apparent that these superfluous details littered about the book fit perfectly into his plan for Walden: he means to show us the benefits of a simple life. He is saying that a simple life is just as valuable as one of luxury, and that from leading such a life one is able to appreciate nature and develop one’s virtues. 

First and foremost, Thoreau uses these depictions to illustrate the superiority of a simple life over one of wealth. In Chapter 3: “Economy”, he tallies up the expenses he paid in order to establish himself at Walden. He does this to emphasize the simplicity of his own life and to prove that his lifestyle is both more affordable and more fulfilling than a conventional one. He argues that mankind falsely believes that their lives are bettered by money and the ownership of material goods, but should concern themselves less with material ownership so that they may establish more contemplative and virtuous lives.

Thoreau’s long strings of minutiae also document the beautiful cycle of nature. In Chapter 17: “Spring”, for instance, He recounts the history of Walden’s thaw: “In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18thof April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April.” (Page 216) He believes that the natural landscape is worth thinking about, worth the trouble of recording. He might not have had the time to record it if he had been living in the city, toiling for his pay and buying luxurious commodities.

In Chapter 7: “The Bean-field”, Thoreau describes the extensive, wearisome process of planting, hoeing, and reaping his bean crop. After a long day of hoeing, he says to himself “I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds … as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not … sustain me …” (Page 118) He goes on to say that these virtues did not develop because he worked on them less carefully than he worked on his beans. He uses the details about the beans to show that he, like most other farmers, worried too much about his profit and not enough about his character.

These examples show how Thoreau uses details to develop his plan for Walden.  At first the reader may think of his rambling as pointless, but will come to realize that it is Thoreau’s way of making one slow down. When reading Walden, one cannot simply dive into Thoreau’s ideas; one must stop and ponder them. This is the first step to fulfilling Walden’s purpose, which is persuading the reader to be less anxious about money and to live more simply, in hopes of becoming a more righteous being.

**************************************************************

JellyMan writes beautiful summaries and stories and has been discussing books with me for some time now, so I was a little surprised by the amount of trouble this essay gave him.  I was disappointed by the scattered and superficial thinking in his first draft.  (I'm not quite sure what the trouble was - perhaps his words left him as soon as he had to express his own opinion in writing?)  We discussed different ways to develop his ideas and improve the flow of his essay, then I sent him away to make his revisions. He returned with the first draft of an entirely different essay.

What was THAT about, JellyMan?

The second essay was much better than the first, so we went through the editing process again, discussing his ideas (which were good), then working on the organization of his thoughts.  I suggested that he try using an outline, and sent him off to write the second draft.

The second draft was much better; there were still a few issues with organization and flow, but I decided to focus on word choice because JellyMan can only handle one topic at a time - if I were to rip apart his logic, criticize his transitions, and ask him why he used THIS word instead of THAT one all in the same editing session, his brain would play tricks on him and make him think I said, "You suck and I wish you had never been born."  Then he would mope all afternoon and I'd have to make him cookies to cheer him up.  And then I'd have to do the dishes by hand because my dishwasher is broken.  Not happening. 

The "speed bump" concept introduced in the final paragraph was new to the third draft.  I liked it, and wanted to make him put it in the introductory paragraph, but by that time we were both sick to death of Walden, so I just told him what I'd have done and then I let it go.  

I let it go.

I'm sure we'll both do better next time. 

Sheer Poetry

Anemone was bouncing off the walls and getting on my last nerve yesterday, so I told her to go write a poem to submit to the local library's creative writing contest.  I thought I'd get at least twenty minutes of peace and quiet, but she came back after four - four! - minutes and threw this in my lap:

A Poem My Mother Made Me Write

Twenty-one saints were
Mixing up paints
In front of a big blackboard.
What miserable luck!
Out came a duck.
They kneeled and prayed to the Lord.

Yeah.  Nice try, Anemone.  Go write another one.