How many books?

Sue,

I sometimes wonder the same thing myself. We did MFW Ancient History and Lit last year and that was too much heavy reading (Illiad, Odyssey-full, unabridged versions, plus the entire OT, and more). We felt like it was push, push, push-no time to enjoy anything (My dd did not draw one picture all last year-she loves to draw! This broke my heart). So as we were finishing that, I read Sonya’s post about savoring or shoveling. That says it all. No more shoveling here. Now I just ready Sonya’s post 3 Tips for a Successful Homeschool Year Tip #3; basically I gathered to have your hopeful list and go through each one and when your child is finished with that, move on to the next one, but don’t look at it as a “to do” list. So we are working hard to keep the planned, assigned list of reading manageable to allow time for pursuing interest areas and to take a field trip or just enjoy a beautiful day a bit.

Having just attended our state homeschool convention, the one thing I really came away with is not to get too caught up in education, as in building a ton of knowledge, but be building skills that will develop a person who will love the Lord, navigate life well, and feel capable to learn new things as needed and live life with integrity. I think it is easy to prepare our kids for college as if it is the end all, be all and these days all I hear is that colleges are not happy with the students coming in and employers are not happy with the candidates coming to them for jobs. For me this translates into life lessons, character building (perseverence, honesty, integrity, strong work ethic etc) combined with a strong education. 

Mulling this over. That’s my 2 cents.

The above list is a wonderful reference when planning.

I was just thinking about this yesterday!  Last year, we tried to read all we could about a subject – and I think it was too much shoveling!!! So far this year, we listened to some Jim Hodges stories about girls who lived during the time period we’re studying (Mod. 6).  I did have them do a notebook page on each girl, just to have something to remember the girls by.  Other than that, we’re taking our slow reading as directed in Mod. 6…..and my oldest (9yo) is remembering and making so many more connections! It’s really counterintuitive…we think that we need to immerse ourselves, but really we don’t.  WE just need to read a few good books slowly and mull them over.

I used the new AO chart format as my guide this year.  We are only using about half of the AO recommended books,but whenever I dropped something from the chart, I replaced it with something similar in difficulty and length.  you could do the same with the SCM recommendations.

I think number of books and page counts are also great base, but sometimes can be misleading, because they don’t account for difficulty and “density” (by that I mean the amount of new, thought provoking material on each page.)  

Also, for all those other great books that don’t fit in the schedule, I include them as choices on my kids free reading lists.  DD7 is a book gobbler, so I figure I might as well give her plenty of good books related to our studies to gobble, while she savours and narrates a core few that I’ve assigned.

Joanne 

In a CM education, it almost goes without saying that book density will increase as the child ages. 🙂

That’s true, but even within books that you choose for a single year, there will be variety in difficulty.  I just wanted to be careful not to switch out all the ‘denser’ books for simpler ones or vice versa and end up unbalanced, which could happen if I went purely by page count.

There is a blogpost that discusses this topic.  If you click on “scheduling books and pages”, there is a helpful chart.  http://wildflowersandmarbles.blogspot.com/2011/07/considered-booklist.html

I don’t plan it all out like that…we basically work through as many books as we get to and save the rest for another year.    Personally, I don’t like having a ton of read alouds going on…I know that goes against CM’s teachings, but we seem to do best with more frequent readings instead of just one chapter a week.  

I just came across this thread from a link in a different thread…

Like Holly and missceegee, I prefer to read a book a chapter per day as opposed to a chapter per week.  However, as that very thought was passing through my mind, I considered the “weekly chapter” to be similar to our favorite television shows…  We can’t wait for next Sunday night to find out what happens next in “our show.”  Hmmm…. just something to ponder.