Midwest Homeschool Convention - Design Your Own Literature Program

OK, I officially am a fan of Adam Andrews & The Center for Literary Education, since this seminar entitled Design Your Own Lit Program is the third of his that I attended during the Cincinnati convention.

Do you have a book list? Or do you wish you had a book list? Not only "a" book list but perhaps you long for THE PERFECT BOOK LIST? If so, then this seminar is for you. Not because Adams possesses or shares this elusive list, but because you'll learn how to create your own list!

Here's the description:
Designing Your Own Lit Program – a Scope and Sequence Workshop
Many parents are dissatisfied with the books assigned in box curriculum sets – and yet, they feel inadequate to strike out on their own and create effective reading programs for their children. Adam puts these fears to rest with an inspiring lesson in scope and sequence development. Presenting a step-by-step procedure that is accessible to even the busiest teachers, Adam makes a powerful case that it’s not how many books you do, it’s how well you do them! Come listen and be set free from the “tyranny of the booklist.”

Andrews began by pointing out that we as homeschool parents (or even as school teachers) usually do not get to "the end" of the book list. This is ok because education isn't the completion of a book list. He then went on to burst our bubbles by telling us that he wasn't going to give out the secret book list.

He told a story about contacting a former professor of his and asking for some recommendations for his child's reading list. The professor listed the Bible, then after some thought added St. Augustine's Confessions, Milton's Paradise Lost, and then Mitchell's The Gift of Fire. Then he stopped. Andrews asked him if he needed more time, but the prof said, "No, that's all." Andrews was shocked.
(And there's more to this story, but I didn't write it down. lol)

Education is a state of the heart, the mind, the soul. Be free from the tyranny of the book list.

What is a scope and sequence? It's how broad of a treatment of the subject at hand and what order to do it.

What should teaching be? It should be DISCUSSING IDEAS. The core education is an oral discussion. (At this point in my notes, I underlined that sentence three times, starred it, and wrote "This changes everything!")

How to Design Your own Lit Program
1 - Which books shall we discuss?
A - children's stories written by great authors (regardless of the age of students)
B - Classics (books read and loved for a long time, those that have stood the test of time)
C - Books YOU choose

2 - How many books shall we discuss?
A - The Great Conundrum is that you can't discuss it if you haven't read it.
B - The Great Solution
C - The Secret Equation (The # of books you can realistically read = the # of books you should discuss)
D - Give the child LOTS of reading even if you can't discuss them all.

3 - How Shall We Discuss the Books?
A - The Socratic list of discussion questions is available (see below)
B - reading aloud is a plus
C - Group discussion is a fabulous tool

Reading Roadmaps includes "step-by-step instructions for conducting an oral discussion using the Teaching the Classics model, with special attention to each grade level from K-12" applied to more than 200 classic titles.
Teaching the Classics: Basic Seminar "contains everything a teacher needs to conduct powerful literary discussions, including our exclusive Socratic List, a set of 178 graded discussion questions applicable to any book on your reading list."

Typing out my notes makes me want to listen again to this seminar. I was so motivated by it that my notes are not very complete.You can purchase a CD or MP3 download here.

Midwest Homeschool Convention - Teaching Classics from Seuss to Socrates

After enjoying the first seminar from Adam Andrews so much, I raved about it to my friends and one of them came along with me to hear a second seminar by him entitled Teaching Classics from Seuss to Socrates. Even though literature DOESN'T seem like a mystery to me, I was intrigued by the premise of using children's books to discuss literary themes, especially in five simple steps. (Apparently I am a sucker for any number of easy-to-follow steps.

Teaching the Classics from Seuss to Socrates – Literary Analysis for Everyone

Does the subject of literature seem like a mystery?  Are you a loss about how to understand it yourself, much less teach it to your kids?  This inspiring lecture demonstrates that everything you need to know about understanding and teaching literature is present in your second grader’s bedtime story.  Adam reads a classics children’s story out loud and then leads the audience into a discussion of eternal literary themes.  Along the way, he shows how you can do the same at home by following five simple steps.  Your literature curriculum – to say nothing of family story time – will come alive automatically.  You’ll never put the kids to bed the same way again!    

Adam Andrews began the session again with a cheerful energetic manner that makes him fun to hear. His opening point was that studying literature should be more than a vocabulary list, comprehension questions and an optional project at the end (like a diorama). He reiterated some of the points from the earlier seminar, such as 'all books share common elements: style, context, structure.' But no worries, this seminar has a common starting place, but goes a completely different direction.

The five aspects of literature he discussed using a chart easily found in his company's brochure (I didn't find it online) were:

1. Conflict
2. Plot
3. Setting 
4. Theme
5. Characters

 Conflict = Problem; all stories have (or should have) conflict because life does. Plus then it's interesting. lol

There are only five conflicts in all literature and one thing to do with students is to categorize the plot into one of these five.

• Man vs. Nature
• Man vs. Man
• Man vs. Himself
• Man vs. God (or fate)
• Man vs. Society

Plot = what happens (list of events) Andrews explained the plot outline as follows:

1 - Exposition (beginning)

2 - Rising Action (conflict, the tension grows)

3 - Climax (resolution of the conflict)

4 - Denouement (falling action) pronounce it "day-new-mah"

5 - Conclusion (end); usually the author gives some sort of reason for writing

Then Andrews read us a children's book, one of my favorites actually - A Bargain for Frances by Russell Hoban. The pages were projected on two large screens and he read with emotion. After reading, he asked us some questions from his list of 173 Socratic questions (found in the book Reading Roadmaps (which my friend and I later purchased together).

Which conflict characterizes this story? (Man vs. Man - will Frances get the tea set from Thelma) Someone pointed out it could also be Man vs. Self - will Frances learn to stand up for herself? Someone else said, "Can Frances and Thelma learn to be friends?" We had a lively literary discussion on the motivations of these characters and the implications this story had on their lives.

If children can learn to discuss literary themes at a younger age, then literary analysis at the high school and college level will be easier. People who look deeply into literature will read more on their own as well. And it can be useful to read children's books with teens and teach them how. Which would be easier to analyze - A Bargain for Frances or Hamlet? But the steps are the same.

You can buy a lecture with a different name which appears to have the same content on Adam Andrew's website for $3. "Education, Freedom ... and Literary Analysis"

Midwest Homeschool Convention - It's Onomatopeia, Mom!

The first seminar I attended was “It’s Onomatopoeia, Mom!” – Using Children’s Stories to Teach Literary Device. The speaker was Adam Andrews from The Center for Literary Education. You may be able to buy a CD of this talk here. (For those of you in SOF, we did buy a CD of this seminar.) What follows is a recap of the seminar taken from my notes. (which are not nearly as clear as they could be, so I apologize for any holes in the information!)

The seminar description in the conference booklet caught my eye:
Juxtaposition, metaphor, symbolism, irony, foreshadowing – HELP!  Parents often avoid the subject of literature because of the intimidating vocabulary of literary analysis.  The truth is, you don’t need a college degree in literature to understand this vocabulary; what you need is a well written children’s story.   Adam takes the audience on a guided tour of literary devices, making discerning literary analysts out of each and every audience member.  Doing the same with your own children couldn’t be easier, but beware: soon, they will be finding onomatopoeia everywhere they look.

Adam Andrews has an energetic cheerful style that immediately engages the audience. He and his wife have six children whom they homeschool while also running The Center for Literary Education. Andrews promised the audience a curriculum secret to connect your pile of books with your pile of kids and indicated that we could add depth, power, and profundity to homeschooling without also adding a lot of work. Since no one wants to throw out what we are doing and start over, he began to descibe a technique that can enliven all that we are already doing in literature.

Literary analysis is, says Andrews, simpler than college texts would have us believe. He boils it down to three components that all works of fiction share: Style, Context, and Structure. Since usually we try to learn literary analysis with long complicated novels, he urges us to try it with children's literature instead since it is short and clear, yet contains all the elements present in longer fiction works. And the time to start is NOW!

1 - Style (stylistic elements) = literary devices such as onomatopeia, symbolism, assonance, alliteration, juxtaposition
2 - Context - when & where it was written (not the setting)
3 - Structure

Andrews then read us the famous Longfellow poem, Paul Revere's Ride. After reading it once, we went back through it as a group and identified many different literary devices and how Longfellow used them to create an ominous mood of oppression in his poem and a call for Americans to "wake up!"

How does one classify a literary device? 1 - Identify, 2 - Categorize, 3 - Distinguish

• Onomatopeia - a word that sounds like its definition
• Assonance - internal vowel sounds repeating from word to word
• Alliteration - words beginning with the same sound throughout a phrase
• Imagery - paints a picture in the reader's mind
• Personification - gives human characteristics to something non-human
• Simile - comparison using like or as
• Metaphor - comparison that doesn't use like or as
• Allusion - refers to something meaningful outside the bounds of the story (an "inside joke")
• Symbolism - thing that stands for an idea (advanced technique to identify)

He then went through the results of a 90 second Google search on Longfellow to help us understand the context. Longfellow lived from 1807 to 1882 in New England. He was an American poet that was "rock star" famous in his day. This poem was published in January 1861 in Atlantic Monthly at the height of the secession crisis before the Civil War. The poem is a propaganda piece for Union enlistment or possibly a call to unity for the nation NOT just a history of the Revolutionary War, as most of us have believed.

Adam Andrews made me realize how easy it can be to teach literary analysis, since he led us through a discussion of it in just under an hour and illustrated every concept with one short work of literature. I decided that I would go to another of his seminars the next day and I will write about that one soon and how easy I learned all of this can be!