The Benefits Of Literature Based Home-Schooling.
It is a fact that Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught man. He read through the whole Bible and any other books he could get his hands on. This tells a lot about the importance of reading. If you could do nothing else for your child, educationally-speaking, it should be to develop a strong, voracious reader.
Once a child has learned the basics of reading and is continually challenged with varied and increasingly difficult selections, he can successfully educate himself about almost anything just through reading. What an amazing concept: reading teaches your child how to teach themselves! Producing this type of a reader requires some careful planning however. I have found that modern literature that is aimed at children is quite often “dumbed-down” and assumes that we shouldn’t burden our children’s brains too much- what a silly idea! Challenging our children to think hard whilst reading is a good thing. It exercises the mind, broadens ones vocabulary and improves their writing and communication skills. Tips on forming a strong reader: Restrict the use of television, computer and video game time (we exercise weekends only rule in our house, for instance). I cannot stress enough how important this is. Not only will your child choose video or TV over reading, because they are instant gratification and require no serious thinking, but too much electronic entertainment, especially in a developing brain, is proven to be detrimental to developing good reading abilities. Give your child a mix of books to read at different reading phases. If all of the books you give your child are very challenging, he may get too frustrated and not want to read at all. It is a good idea to give your child a quality book that is comfortable at his reading level and then the subsequent book should be one level up from there, just sufficient to challenge him a bit.
Alternate and confuse things a bit in this fashion while gradually advancing the general difficulty level. Develop a list of books such as freedom Jonathan Franzen that you know are good quality literature on the subjects you are wanting to cover with your child and do not forget to throw in some just for fun reading as well, and then let your child choose the books from this list to structure his reading syllabus for the year. It will give your child a sense of control instead of “mom is making me read this.” Trying to summarize it briefly. If you decide to begin your home-schooling literature-based program started with freedom by Jonathan Franzen, here is one good place to look for the planning inspiration : use Amazon.com as it has good descriptions of books and helpful suggestions of other books that might interest you. Take the time to shape up a competent, strong reader and your child will easily be tackling Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Oprah Freedom book and Chesterton in their high-school years and be grateful to you for it.
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