Last week on Facebook, I posted a link to a 2016 article called "Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today."
Here is the link:
bit.ly/30PU5Br.
Although some of the Facebook comments supported classic reading material, most felt classic was boring or irrelevant and felt modern works were best for modern young readers,
Back in our homeschooling days (I'm talking about me and my six children), we read a large variety of material.
In fact, although reading was my main occupation as a child, those two and a half decades of homeschooling were incredibly rich for me, too, in terms of reading material, in volume, variety, and enjoyment, so much that I'll never experience anything like it again.
Although we read nothing on List Two of the 2016 article, we
did read
Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longellow and we
did read
Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson.
And although we did not read the rest of the exact selections cited on List One, we did read other works by Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
On the other hand, we had a unique approach to reading these works, which would be hard to replicate in a classroom. And all six adult kids still love reading today.
Here's what we did.
1) We steeped our lives in reading.
By the time a baby showed interest in a board book, we spent about an hour a day in reading, although not all at once, perhaps fifteen minutes scattered throughout the day. Until the child could read, I did the reading. And we always read at bedtime.
We also read at meals. The kids brought books to the breakfast table. During lunch, I would read a chapter at a time from a book we normally would not read on our own. This is how we got through titles such as
Treasure Island (twice, in fact),
The Wind in the Willows,
Mrs. Mike, and
The Mysterious Island (to name a few). One chapter and no more. This gave us time for discussion and to anticipate the next day's chapter. The kids also got to hear how reading should "sound."
For the record, we never finished
Pride and Prejudice, although we did try really hard. But the writing made us squirm in irritation until we finally dumped the book and moved on.
We also couldn't "get into"
Tom Sawyer. But that was just us.
During dinner, we had several books at the table: Bibles, church history, lives of the saints, a bit of catechism. We read and talked together (in ways many would find irreverent, but kids process things differently than adults, and I gave them the freedom to do so), and dinner could last a couple hours.
All this reading was over and above the "fun" reading, and reading that was part of our curriculum.
One th flip side, the kids were also terrible at remembering where they set library books (or where a sibling who swiped the books to read, too, had placed them) and returning books on time. Their library fines could be staggerings.
Side note: the kids paid their own fines, especially once we lived in Channahon, and the library was a couple blocks away. The only time they did not was if the book was borrowed from a library a distance from the house, and I was did not drive them there before the book was due.
2) We read a variety of literature - and we were free not to like it.
We're grateful to
Abeka for their outstanding selections, for they assembled many happy hours of reading in their "readers" (which went through twelfth grade), along with stories the kids still pick up to re-read.
Although we did not like every selection, we did read them all, and we did not have to like them. I remember
Markheim by Robert Lewis Stevenson being a dreadful read until I read it for the last time. Somewhere in the six reads (once with each child), I'd developed a grudging appreciation for it.
I approached many selections with "I'm sure I won't like this," only to find I did like it. I had never read Sherlock Holmes and was fairly certain the stories would be dull (they weren't). We read folk tales, and poetry, and many of the books also included a huge variety of art (one illustration of a hare is truly creepy).
I think what gave my kids an open-minded approach to the stories is that we read them together. I never handed them an intimidating book and said, "Go read it," while I did something else.
We sat together at the table, or lay across the living room carpet, and we read together, usually just for fifteen minutes at a time, four days a week. We read each paragraph aloud, in alternating paragraphs, which meant sometimes one person would get a line, and the next might get a paragraph that stretched for half a page.
We shared thoughts as we read. If the entire selection didn't resonate with us, we commiserated together. But we also laughed (and sometimes cried) together, or we marveled at certain elements of the characters and story lines. Sometimes one person loved the selection, and the other couldn't wait for it to be done.
Rebekah and I still reference one story, and neither can remember the name, that was so bad, we kept waiting for the author to pull the "Aha!" and make it better. But that never happened. It was horrible, all the way to the end.
We also, usually, skipped the boring questions at the end of the reading.
Along the way, we gained a knowledge and appreciation of an enormous variety of writing styles and subject matter, along with learning about the people who wrote the selections and (perhaps very important for today), the place in time and culture in which they were written, which gave us an extremely wide perspective and provoked many open conversations.
3) Most of the modern stuff was read on our own time.
So, yeah, we didn't lock ourselves in this quaint little alternate world. Both my mother and sister worked as booksellers for many years (the first at Barnes and Noble, the second at Borders) and always gifted my kids with lots of books on birthdays and Christmas.
My mother used her discount to let the kids pick out what they liked ($50 worth for the younger kids, $100 for the older ones). My sister just came with books, sometimes bags of them. Often, she brought titles she had enjoyed (that's how we read
Mrs Mike and
Fahrenheit 451), with one of them being
The Giver (my kids loved it, I loathed it).
My kids introduced me to
Foxtrot and
Goosebumps; I introduced them to
Doonesbury, Tales from the Far Side, and
Peanuts.
The read volumes of books with titles I'll never know. I have only read the first
Harry Potter and found it to be OK. I tried the second one twice and could not make it past the second chapter (The kids have offered to summarize it for me so I can read the rest. Maybe someday).
I have never read
Pendragon (yet).
We have memories and inside jokes and taglines that will last forever.
BTW, Daniel recently came home with a DVD of the last
Peanuts movie. We all watched it (and loved it together).
Illustration by Kathleen Rose Van Pelt for "Bryony."
