Let's Analyze Some Literature!

Last month when I went to our curriculum fair I attended some workshops by Adam Andrews.  Adam, along with his wife, Missy, founded the Center for Literary Education.  They have a program out called "Teaching the Classics" that I bought at the fair.  Basically Teaching the Classics teaches a homeschool mom how to do literary analysis of great books with her kids. I love this program because at the end of the syllabus is a long list of questions that you can use to discuss any work of literature with your kids.  You don't need to constantly buy literature guides for each individual book.

We recently finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth and analyzing it.  The boys loved this book, and I was shocked at how much they got out of it.  I was also shocked when my 9 year old correctly identified one of the conflicts in the book that to me didn't seem that obvious!  I am planning this summer to do another book with them since we enjoyed discussing our first one so much.

Missy Andrews has created books lists for each grade of great literature.  Normally, I use the reading lists in our history program, Biblioplan, for the boys' readers.  This year, however, I am going to incorporate some of the suggestions that Missy gives.  While the book suggestions are awesome in Biblioplan, I want the boys to read more literature instead of reading literature for the sake of getting history information.

So Noah will be reading some of these books...

Zach will be reading some of these....