Introducing Classic Literature? Beat It To Death.

I returned from the library yesterday with media selections. Well, I also picked up some books but the media drew all of the attention. Our local library has a great media room featuring a wide assortment of educational as well as entertainment DVDs and audio books. So, my son was thrilled when I came home with a special treat, grabbed it from my hands and ran up to his room to play it.

Dora?

Transformers?

Sponge Bob?

Nope, an Ivanhoe audiobook.

I’ve written before that the absence of television in our house leaves room for great literature. And so we buy him children’s version of classic novels, plays and operas – on CD, in print and yes, also on DVD.

Great Illustrated Classics

Barefoot Books

Jim Weiss CDs

All designed for kids age 3 or 4 and up…much more interesting for parents to discuss than the latest adventures of Dora. Introducing kids to classics serves several purposes. Educating them and, at least in my case, educating me too!

We generally pick one classic to concentrate on at a time. Then beat it to death. Children, it seems, prefer this method, as any parent who has read Good Night Moon 25 times can tell you. We often work our way up to a performance, the adult kind.

Right now we’re gearing up for a performance of The Magic Flute, an opera by Mozart. Since I’ve never been an opera fan; this is a new one for me too. I suspect I'm not an opera fan because my first exposure to it was a performance. In contrast, we've taken several months to prepare.

First we bought this CD

A few months later, we bought this book and CD

Then recently, we bought this book and CD too.

Then I hunted and hunted and hunted until I found a full performance of the opera where tickets weren’t $275 a seat. In January we’ll go to see it – the “student preview” (which I think means dress rehearsal). At $30 per seat, if we find ourselves leaving halfway through, that will be OK. Which may be because we are thrown out, since the opera is in German with English subtitles we’re still trying to figure out how to read the subtitles to the kids without disturbing the rest of the audience.

In the meantime, my son is engrossed in Ivanhoe.

This isn’t actually on our after schooling list right now. We do however have an abridged version with lots of pictures which my other half picked up one day to read to our son…and read to him and read to him. Since I got sucked in and then a bit tired of reading the same 200 plus pages over and over, I picked up the audio book at the library.

Cop out. Oh well.

When he finishes the 4 cassette abridged version he’s eager to rent the 14 cassette adult version. We’ll see about that as I suspect the abridged version cuts out some of the violence.

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Dinosaured out! An Update on Our Afterschooling Adventure

It’s probably time for me to give an update on our afterschooling adventure. If you’ve been reading my posts on this subject you know we started back in August with a plan to afterschool to supplement what we felt were weaknesses in elementary subjects particularly world history and, to some extent, science.

Using an 8 week model we set forth to do the following:

July 15 – September 15

Science: Rocks

History: The Paleozoic period

September 15- November 15

Science: Weather

History: The Mesozoic period

November 15 – January 15

History: The Cenozoic period

Science: Volcanoes and Earthquake

The first 8 week period went great. We finished reading the books, we did some experiments and projects in each subject and the kids extended the learning with their own ideas.

The second 8 weeks were a little rocky. We switched history (or in this case prehistory) books halfway through deciding to use the Barrons Prehistoric World series of books.

We managed to cover the water cycle and make a weather station for science but, much of what we wanted to cover was a little much for the parents to actually understand let alone the children. And I was a little lame preparing science experiments.

During the third 8 week session everything…um…sort of fell apart.

First, my son was petrified by both volcanoes and earthquakes (even though a few weeks early he was enthused) and refused to study them. Then Crystal bogged down with holidays, birthdays and such never quite got around to writing up the planning grid for history for that session. (We decided to write up objectives, resources and activities for each 8 week session in advance. I wrote mine up for this session but….due to the “fear factor’ never followed it.)

We decided we’re trying to do too much…duh!

So, for this session we’re winging it. My son seems to have gotten over his volcano fear so we’ll gingerly start doing a bit on that subject. I have a great science experiment for it!

We’ll also read as much of the two history books that cover this period as we can. Crystal says both she and her boys are “dinosaured out!”. We are a bit too!

So, we’ll regroup. Starting in January we plan to start following The Well Trained Mind’s History curriculum, which consists of reading perhaps 10 pages of The Story of The World each 8 week period rather than a whole book or two. For science I’m considering using the Kingfisher Encyclopedia of animals and doing a few pages each session.

We’ll meet and brainstorm and try again. Don’t they say you should learn from your mistakes?

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