What We're Reading: Don Quixote

About 3 weeks ago we started reading Don Quixote. I have to tell you it was a long slow read for my oldest when we started out. I know its more difficult because we are reading the unabridged version and I did not have to read that personally till senior year of high school in AP. But usually she does just fine with whatever difficulty level of literature we throw at her. She was able to narrate with ease. She recalled many details. I am so happy we lined our history study to the literature list cause she was so excited when they made mention to the Moors in Spain and when one character was referred to as a Castilian and she knew where he was from. You should have seen to look on her face when she was able to make the historical connections to the time period in this classic fiction novel. Because she was not able to get through the book as quickly as she would have wanted we switched from reading the printed copy to the audio version for free on Librivox. Here is Part I and Part II if you are interested.  She listened to it on her tablet with her new pink head phones that Granddad brought her. I am not worried if something did go over her head this time because we are using a classical model. I know we will cycle back around to it again for high school. By then we would have read Adler's How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (A Touchstone book)  and will dig as deep as we can go.

With the rest of the children we read from the abridge version Don Quixote (Oxford Illustrated Classics Series) . They loved it. Of course they brought up that they already knew who Don Quixote was cause they saw him on Veggie Tales: Sheerluck Holmes and the Golden Ruler. Boy were they set straight when they found out that Veggie Tales version wasn't as accurate as they would have hope. But this is just one of the greatest reasons why I love sharing the classics with my children. There are references to classic stories all around them in the media they consume and its great to be able to make the connections. It really does bring them into the greater conversation.