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.

What We're Reading:The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

About four weeks back the children and I read from The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. The book is an anthology of classic children's tales. Some of them we were very familiar with and others we had never heard of. We ended up reading The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots. Now these are not the watered down Disney type tales you might be thinking of when you hear these titles. They are the real deal unabridged unedited versions. Some of the endings were quite gruesome. Keep that in mind if you want to give this book a try and you have a child that is sensitive to things like that. Beware! But even with the surprises in the story line the children truly enjoyed this one.

I used this a narration exercise. I would read aloud the stories to the younger two and then they would practice orally narrating the story back to me. They are new to narration and I find that short stories like fairy tales, myth, legends, and fables are the easiest to start out on.They did a coloring sheet after they narrated the story and glued it into there composition notebook.  Kinetic Kid(7yr old) read the stories aloud to me cause he needs some extra practice reading aloud and then he did an oral narration and then I had him write his narration down in his notebook. He got to color a page as well. The first written narration he did was like pulling teeth but by the time we got to last story we read which was Bluebeard he was literally running out of room on the page. I was so proud. Mecca the Great(10yr old) read the story independently and did a written narration in her notebook which she read aloud to me after she was done. She is blooming into a very good writer. Now the thing with her is that she gives every single detail when she writes. Which I guess is not a bad thing cause when she starts to edit more she will having something to work with when she starts to widdle stuff down a bit.

When we read Little Red Riding Hood I also too the opportunity to read to them Lon Po Po: A Red Riding Hood Story From China by Ed Young. We did a venn diagram comparison chart for there notebooks on the two stories. We also observed that all  the stories seemed to have a main female character that was facing harm.

After we finished reading the stories for the week I hunted down movie versions of each story on Cable, Netflix, and Amazon Prime and we had a Friday Movie Fun Fest. It was awesome!

Here are the printables we used with this book:

The Sleeping Beauty 
Little Red Riding Hood
Lon Po Po Venn Diagram 
Puss in Boots
Bluebeard  ( This one is just an encyclopedia image that I printed out and let them color)