One of the things I love about homeschooling is the opportunity for students to read whole books rather than textbook snippets. Every Friday I teach 18 students in grades 9-12 as part of a weekly homeschool co-op, and it’s thrilling to see these young people reading and discussing classic literature.<\/p>\n
We spend most of our classroom time on discussion, not lecture. I discovered several years ago that if I let students do most of the talking, they end up addressing most of the issues in my carefully prepared lecture notes. Encouraging them to think deeply about what they read, to journal about it, and to share their opinions in class has a much more powerful impact than, for example, giving multiple-choice tests about the factual details of the books.<\/p>\n
Our literature books coordinate with the time period we’re studying in history. This year we’re studying the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. Here’s our reading list:<\/p>\n
So far, Augustine’s Confessions<\/em> and Beowulf <\/em>have been big hits with my students.\u00a0The Song of Roland <\/em>didn’t go over so well; one student described it as “a morbid Dr. Seuss,” while another called it “a sing-along murder song.” I’ll be eager to see what they think about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em> this week.<\/p>\n P.S. – You may also be interested in these posts about the literature of antiquity and modernity:<\/p>\n http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/24\/ancient-literature\/<\/a><\/p>\n http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/06\/objectionable-material-in-great-books-of-antiquity\/<\/a><\/p>\n http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/25\/high-school-literature-modernity\/<\/a><\/p>\n http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/23\/literature-selections-for-gileskirk-modernity\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things I love about homeschooling is the opportunity for students to read whole books rather than textbook snippets. Every Friday I teach 18 students in grades 9-12 as part of a weekly homeschool co-op, and it’s thrilling to see these young people reading and discussing classic literature. We spend most of our … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classic-literature","category-homeschooling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How do you teach literature in your homeschool?<\/span><\/h2>\n