Weekly Homeschool and Life Wrap-Up 4/17

First, the blessings. This week felt like a roller coaster ride. Having to dig deeper this time, I'm going to break one of my own personal rules, which is not to count blessings that are a mere comparison to those who have it worse than me.

Giving Thanks For These Blessings:

~ The Islamic State group is brutally raping young girls and keeping them as slaves. These girls, some of whom have escaped, will have scars and horror for life and my own pain here, mostly associated with a son's neurological problems, will never get that deep. Sometimes, raising a special-needs child to independence feels like an impossible feat, outside of God's miraculous healing, which doesn't seem to be on the horizon. It's hard to live in a nearly constant state of stress, but far harder to live in a constant state of horror. Both kinds of pain remind us that we are just passing through here. Lord Jesus, come for us!

~ We can see leaf buds on our trees, waiting to display their brilliant glory.

~ Daffodils blooming, a sure sign of God's love for us.

~ Hugs and kisses from my six-year-old sweetie.

~ The continued blessing of homemade honey wheat bread.

~ That family devotions can profoundly change our outlook on life and love.

~ An outstanding, thorough teacher for our small group adult Bible study at the new AWANA church.

On my mind:

For a number of reasons I wanted to expand my children's reading by using the Kindle with immersion reading, but when we set it up with The Three Musketeers, I researched the novel and found that it includes rape, murder, plunder, adultery and the most villainous and possibly most intriguing female character in the history of the novel. Milady, is her name, and she's a cold-blooded killer. And the Three Musketeers, with their fourth convert? Pretty terrible people. There are no heroes in this book, it appears, though many consider it the best of the best as an action-adventure page-turner. If you want to be a professional writer, study it for the expert character development, but think twice before giving it to your child. Far more of a guilty pleasure book than an edifying classic.

So, barring any problems with Treasure Island--and so far I've read of none--we're downloading that. They'll listen to a classic for 20 to 30 minutes a day using immersion reading, on top of their regular curriculum, because I can see they need the extra vocabulary development, which Newbery Medal and Honor books just aren't giving them.

We enjoy and study literature out of a love for the arts, sure, but as Christians timeless literary works also helps us see, on a deeper level, the human need for a Savior. It's one thing to know that we personally need a Savior, but it's still another to look all through history and see it over and over again--and literature through the ages drives that home.

So, I persevere in finding the best books for my children and myself, even though it takes up time I don't feel I have.

If you want a better understanding of literature through the ages, this site (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) includes a series of essays by a man who is committed to reading 100 classic books and giving his take on whether or not they deserve classic status. His essays start with an overview of each book, followed by the pro and con arguments from academics about whether the book is a classic. He ends with his own, often witty opinion each time. I like his essays because as I read them, I gain better understanding of historical and cultural references, for one. His project started in late 2007, and he included books he hadn't already read, so your favorites might be missing, which only means he'd already read them prior to 2007. Part of his goal was to expand his own knowledge as an up-and-coming literary critic. His project is popular among GoodReads enthusiasts, among other literary groups. Here is his project list. The ones with a link are those he's already reviewed:

Pre-Victorianism
~500 BC: The Art of War, Sun Tzu
~360 BC: The Republic, Plato
~170 AD: Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
~1350: The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
1485: Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
1722: A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
1726: Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
1806-32: Faust, Johann Goethe
1818: Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
1818: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
1819: Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
1835-40: Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (two books)

Early Victorianism
1844: The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
1847: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
1847: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
1848: Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
1851: House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
1852: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
1854: Walden, Henry David Thoreau
1857: Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
1860: The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
1861: Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
1862: Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Late Victorianism
1868: Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
1870: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
1871: Alice Through the Lookingglass, Lewis Carroll
1874: Middlemarch, George Eliot
1876: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
1877: Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
1879: A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
1880: Washington Square, Henry James
1880: The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
1883: Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
1884: Flatland, Edwin Abbott
1886: The Masterpiece, Emile Zola
1895: Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
1896: The Island of Dr. Moreau, HG Wells
1897: Dracula, Bram Stoker
1898: Candida, George Bernard Shaw

The Interregnum
1900: Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
1901: Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
1901: Kim, Rudyard Kipling
1902: Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
1903: The Call of the Wild, Jack London
1903: The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
1906: The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
1908: The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton
1911: Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
1914: Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
1916: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
1918: The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington
1919: Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

Early Modernism
1920: The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
1922: The Castle, Franz Kafka
1922: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
1924: A Passage to India, EM Forster
1925: The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
1925: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
1928: All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
1929: A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
1929: The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
1932: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1934: The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
1934: Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
1934: The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M Cain
1939: The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
1945: Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Late Modernism
1947: The Plague, Albert Camus
1951: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
1951: The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
1951: The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
1954: Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1955-74: The Ripley Trilogy, Patricia Highsmith (three small books)
1957: Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
1957: Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
1957-60: The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (four small books)
1960: To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
1960: Rabbit, Run, John Updike
1961: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
1962: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick
1966: The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
1967: The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron
1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Postmodernism and Contemporary
1969: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
1969: Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
1972: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
1975: Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
1980: A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
1980: The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
1980: The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
1981: Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
1985: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
1987: Beloved, Toni Morrison
1989: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
1992-98: The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy (three small books)
1993: The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
1998: The Hours, Michael Cunningham
2000: Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
2001: Empire Falls, Richard Russo
2002: Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

OCD News

We had to stop the new OCD med, Zoloft, because of a pretty intense anger side effect, which contributed to the roller coaster that was our week.

The battles belonging to parents with special-needs children are profound, isolating ones. God has to be my refuge, and time again I am reminded that people, even my own husband, can't help me walk in grace and love and peace. Only God can. Constant stress is inevitable, and every child has enough of a sin nature to be tempted to use their disorder as a manipulative device, so you don't always know when they're legitimately suffering, and when they're being stinkers.

Not wanting to end this on a sour note, let me just say that the Lord's grace is palpable here, so no worries. A Psalm is never far from my reach, and when we read them together and pray their hope, we are renewed, always.

Time to scoot to the library and the store, so more school details coming next time.

How was your week?

Rethinking The Three Musketeers Assignment

Okay, so. I might regret assigning The Three Musketeers to my boys. It's not innocent by any means, and I have to read it myself from cover to cover first, rather than with the boys. Just wanted to warn you, lest you think the classics are all kids books. It might end up being fine, but I'm not sure after reading some reviews.

Kids, Classics, Kindle

In an effort to expand their vocabularies and instill intellectual discipline, I've begun having my boys listen to rigorous classics on our Kindle Fire HD, using audiobooks with immersion reading. Immersion reading, as most of you probably know (we're always the last to know) is listening to a professional narrator read the text while you follow along with the printed text in front of you on your Kindle. The words the narrator reads are highlighted in chunks, thereby allowing children to read higher level texts with pronunciation help on difficult words, along with the touch dictionary feature, allowing them access to definitions quickly and conveniently, with no heavy dictionary in tow. Let's face it: Most of us don't have the discipline to use a big bulky dictionary when we're trying to enjoy a book. 

This morning they were listening to The Three Musketeers. While technically a middle school book, the vocabulary is quite advanced; at least three words from the first chapter were entirely new to me, for example.

We've lost touch with these old classics as educators and readers partly because they require intellectual discipline and a mature attention span--both of which we're losing in this fast-paced era. As a reader and especially as a wannabe writer, I love the genius of his sentence structures, his vocabulary, and his plots, but if I'm tired, Charles Dickens is likely to put me to sleep during long descriptive segments. He's not always adept at moving his story lines along--he and a lot of other giants in literature. Three pages spent on scenery or describing a character can try the patience, depending on our mood.

Children have even less patience and stamina, so immersion reading is brilliant.

There's something to be said for intellectual discipline, and it's my job to push my learners in the right direction. I eat broccoli because I should, and I read great literature for the same reason. Over time, passion grows for the finer things (and a little melted cheese helps!). I've always felt that the richer our reading material, the richer our own prose and vocabulary become over time. The best writers are voracious readers. A writing teacher simply can't impart talent, but great books do it, brilliantly.

Thirty minutes a day to start, I told my boys as we set up the Kindle with The Three Musketeers. They were very good at clicking on the dictionary feature to look up unknown words, but at least for me, the highlighting of the text became distracting after a time. One could easily put too much mental focus on the words, at the expense of the plot. So, I suggested they listen to half a chapter with highlighting of the words, and another half with just voice.

Taking advantage of Whispersync for Voice on a Kindle Fire Tablet and also now on iOS and Android, you need to have purchased both the text version of a book and also the audio version, which you can get as an upgrade once you have the text version. Most older classics are free, and the audio upgrade is usually only $.99.

Immersion reading is not to be confused with the text-to-speech option in which a computerized voice reads the text for you. Oh, man. We hate that voice!

Many of you probably already use the nifty immersion reading technology, but for those who are slow to catch on, like us, you might find this post extremely helpful, from Homeschooling With Dyslexia. An excerpt is included below.

The exciting thing for me is the development of Immersion Reading for Kindle Fire (the latest generation) and Kindle Fire HD owners. With Immersion Reading, Kindle edition books are synched to the corresponding Audible audio edition AND as the books are read the text is highlighted while it is narrated via the Audible audio book.
We have long used audiobooks and had our dyslexic kids listen to the book as they followed along in the paper version. The trouble is that they can often lose their place and end up just listening, thus losing the multisensory input. The benefits of this immersion-type of listening is similar to those of the Neurological Impress Method (NIM). In this instructional method, the parent (or tutor) reads a text that is slightly above the student’s reading ability while running their finger under the text.
This multisensory instruction allows the child to see and hear the words at the same time and is very effective for building word recognition and fluency.
There are nearly 15,000 Kindle books and Audible audiobooks available for Immersion Reading and Whispersynch for Voice as well as a nice selection of free sets including, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, The Three Muskateers, Gulliver’s Travels and other classics.

So, tell me. Do your children enjoy immersion reading? Do you have some classics ready to go? Please share your experiences.

Books & Essays for College Bound Students

I read recently that high schools are not assigning the caliber of novels necessary to prepare students for college. Transitioning seamlessly into college requires not only that students read and understand challenging books, but also that they know how to write a good literary analysis paper.

Whether you homeschool or use a traditional route, as a parent you'll want to be aware of this list of books put out by the College Board. You'll also want an outstanding explanation and example of a good literary analysis paper.

There are many different types of colleges and some will certainly have abandoned the classics as irrelevant. It won't hurt to be prepared for anything, and to look into the expectations of the colleges our children have in mind. The more liberal the college, the more likely it is to assign books written well after 1900.

Further reading: Most college freshman read at a seventh-grade reading level.

Here is the College Board featured list:

Middle school books
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O'Neill, Eugene	Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Poe, Edgar Allen	Selected Tales
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Wright, Richard	Native Son

High school books
Author	Title
-------	Beowulf
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Dante	Inferno
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll's House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
O'Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Proust, Marcel	Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse