Bookworm, Any Novel Study Guide Users….

It’s on the docket for lit next year combined with Excellence in Literature so haven’t dived in yet.

Is your 7th grader already doing a lit program? If so, not sure that more would need to be added. If not, it would be good to start including. 

When I first printed it all out, I decided that it would be too much to just dive in to doing all of it at once.  I have planned for us to gradually ease into it this year.  My daughter is 11 years old and in 6th grade.  I absolutely do not want to make her hate reading or look upon it with because she has to analyze everything to death.  

For our first two books, Emma and the Prince and the Pauper, all she did was the chapter summaries.  I gave her a composition book for this.  She has a table of contents page in the front, numbered all the pages in the comp book, and she will write her chapter summaries for each book she reads in there.  Oh, and she also writes down any vocabulary words that she comes across.  If she doesn’t know the meaning of the word, she writes it down and looks it up later.  

This week she started Great Expectations.  We will continue with the summaries and vocabulary.  We will also add in the character analysis parts of the study guide.  This weekend I will look through them and decide exactly how that’s all going to work.  My tentative plan is to have her read all week, and then on Friday do a page or two of the character analysis work.  I will not have her working on the Any Novel pages every day.

I am doing all of this work on my own, as well.  I think it helps her, as she is starting out on this process, to see that I am working through the same things.  Also, since this is our first time with this program, I really want to try it out myself and get a feel for how much of it is beneficial and how much of it is busywork.  I will not continue doing all of the work alongside her  after I get a good feel for the program.  

I forgot one other thing.  I remember that there are some projects in there where they can choose what they want to do.  (It’s been several weeks since I really looked through it so I’m just going on memory here.)  I am going to look at whether or not to add those in for this book or wait for the next book.

I would love to hear about your plans when you make them.  I am trying to walk a fine line between an enriching study of literature and a mind-numbing exercise in pointless literary analysis and criticism.