Thursday, January 14, 2010

Reading from the juvenile fiction section suits me just fine

I don’t know about you, but the best stuff I’ve read in the past 2.5 years is from the juvenile sections of the libraries. The latest selections are no different. For chapter one of Story of the World 3, I read a story about a famous painter in Spain and is written from the perspective of his African slave. It is a book I would encourage my upper elementary child to sit and read in order to soak up the cultural and historical content as well as the story. It is not a book I want to read aloud to my 2nd and 3rd graders nor do I wish to wrestle them through it as their personal individual read. There were four other individual or read aloud books from the SOTW chapter about conquistadores and Charles the fifth that we used, but those fit my children’s reading ability and our time use.
My choice from chapter two is about a group of school children who live in a village along the dikes of Holland. I was not quite sure why this area of Europe was included in the chapter about Mary, Queen of Scots, but I’m not into the chapter yet (that’s next week) and the importance of this book is not just the site. The question is posed to six grade school kids to wonder why there are no storks in this village. To investigate and hypothesize what makes their village different from surrounding villages where storks nest freely. I’m excited about the scientific method in play and how it will change the lives of these children and their fellow villagers. I am so pleased that when it is time to work through the logic stage in classical education, I will have a clue what the content is of so many of the books I request my children to read. More to come as there are 42 chapters in each SOTW volume.

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