To those who use The Well Educated Mind w/their highschoolers...

[gailb]

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm off to the library to pick up the book today. :-)

The comment regarding how the questions start to stick & then come to mind as you're reading really helped me decide to try this out.

My goal is for her to answer the questions in a notebook & hopefully they will help generate interesting discussions.

Would you please share with me how YOU use the book. Do you keep a list of literary vocabulary? Do your students do essays on any of the books they read?

Thanks again!

Gail

[JennW in SoCal]

Read the beginning of the book and the section on how to read a novel, and you'll see how you can use the book. It isn't just a text that tells you to do specific tasks in a certain way or to answer specific questions. It is designed to make you learn how to think about what you are reading.

I've had my ds follow the recommendation of keeping a notebook with chapter summaries, lists of characters, favorite quotes or plot points. We've discussed some of the beginning and middle level questions together. Its the familiar trio of levels again, "grammar" "logic" and "rhetoric", but not having to do with the age of the reader, but with the level of depth of analysis.

You could easily come up with essay topics out of the higher level questions. Like Nan, I use the WEM with all kinds of genres, and usually look up background or reference material on the book and author from Sparknotes or Wikipedia, or just googling.

This should make much more sense once you have the book in your hand and have read a bit of it. And, I hope you are reassured that this is a doable option for literature with a high schooler!

Jennifer