By Susan Howard
My daughter’s SAT scores were good. They were not great. They were just enough to indicate an acceptable level of intellectual competence. Her grades were good, but of course, how else would a mother report her own daughter’s performance? Still, I tried very hard to evaluate her fairly, and there were some B’s and at least one C on our homeschool transcript. But when her school of choice, a very rigorous private liberal arts school, read her analysis of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and saw her high school reading list of over 250 of the greatest books of Western history, they accepted her enthusiastically.
Having tracked my daughter’s maturing and intellectual progress, I am convinced that the single most important thing I did as a home educator was to unplug the television and give my children access to great books from a young age. Great books – not good ones, funny ones, trendy ones, hip ones, but great ones – like those of Beatrix Potter, E.B. White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lewis Carroll, and A.A. Milne at first, and then graduating on to Mark Twain, Jules Verne, C.S. Lewis, Johann David Wyss, Louisa May Alcott and finally to Tolkien, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Bronte, and Dostoevsky for examples.
I discuss why classic literature has such an impact in my last blog article, The Importance of the Classics. You may wonder how in four years’ time we could assign 250 books – approximately 62 books per year. The simple answer is that we didn’t. We gave the children access not assignments.
Having started early with great books and having limited audiovisual over-stimulus, my children were neither intimidated nor unprepared to process the abstract information, advanced vocabulary, and profound themes that good books provided them. Consequently, they discovered the joy of reading a good story, traveling to distant lands and meeting interesting characters. They read great books for pleasure. How to turn that “summer reading” into credits became a creative project for me.
At first, not trying to spoil the idea that all this reading was really just entertainment, I would casually ask my kids, “so, how many books do you think you’ve read over the past month?” and then follow up with, “Wow…any you especially liked? What else did you read?” Then I would covertly record the list and stick it in a file. But I found that to be a very inefficient way to catalog their accomplishments. After all, some kids have better memories than others, and some kids are less communicative. So, while my oldest daughter would recall every title, character, plot twist, author name and copyright date (ok – I am exaggerating to make a point) my son would respond to me queries with answers like, “I dunno…I know I read something.” Additionally, I was never really sure how much of each book the kids really grasped. I knew I had to come up with a more formalized way of categorizing their reading list. So, I made them a deal. I would assign fewer books during the school year and allow them to read anything on the shelf, if they would simply fill out a record of what they had read when they were done. They would still get an assigned book here and there, one that tied in to other areas of study and for which they would have to write and essay or complete a related project. But most of their reading would be self-directed with no strings attached but the literature record.
A literature record is exactly what it sounds like. It is a document in which the student records the title, author, copyright date, and certain important key elements of the story. What are the setting, genre and theme? Who are the most important characters, the protagonist, and antagonist? What is the main conflict (man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself)? For advanced junior and senior high school students you can ask them to record the plotline – the rising and falling action, the climax, and the resolution.
How much a student is expected to complete depends on the student’s age and ability.
The literature record I still use is the one I developed years ago for my older children. I have found it a reliable and easy way to keep my records straight. But it has also served to help my children recall character names, plot elements, copyright dates and other aspects of each title, and has served as a very effective tool in preparing teens for the writing section of the SAT. With a binder full of completed literature records, the student can simply pull three, study the summaries, analyses and author bios and strategize on how he might use the information to respond to a number of essay prompts.
So, what if your children prefer to fill their summer reading with more popular titles – graphic novels, teen romances, Twilight or whatever the popular new series happens to be? You can still get mileage out of their entertainment by teaching them how to analyze what they are reading by documenting it in a literature record.
To access the LessonMinder lliterature record, log on to www.lessonminder.com and click on the Resources link or Tweet this article and we will send you the PDF for free!
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