BJU Reading 6 .... for someone who's always been anti-twaddle???

[Shari]

I am in a quandry about what to do with my rising 5th grader. I am planning to begin the BJU sequence for jr/sr high starting in 7th grade, including their literature courses. According to their scope and sequence, 6th grade reading is a "transitional" course to prep for a traditional analysis type course. Looking through the online sample, there appears to be a lot of literary terms and so forth introduced in the 6th grade course that we have never covered.

I have always been very much in favor of living books in our homeschool and can never remember using a "canned" reader for anything. Ever. So I am very much resistant to the idea of using one, I guess. We've used TOG for the past 5 years and are used to the book after book after book approach, kwim? :001_smile: Unfortunately, a lot of the time I just give the kids the book to read, they do it, we move on. Those round table discussions just never seem to happen like I'd like.

Can anyone comment on the BJU course specifically? Or anyone who has moved from a living books approach to boxed?

(BTW, we are looking at the 6th grade complete course from BJU for next year which will give us the readers whether we want them or not, so price is not at issue.)

[angela in ohio]

I think that, used properly with the teacher manual and parental involvement, it is a great course. We have used several years of BJU reading (4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, but not in a row with each dd, just depending on need.) My dc are voracious readers, so they are still reading piles of whole books. I am a living book snob (hundreds of quality choices in our children's home libary, no twaddle in the home,) but the BJU courses offer something they would be missing otherwise. It is a systematic approach to literature that I just do not have time to create on my own. They are great for introducing various genres, teaching literary terms, and modeling literary analysis for a parent.

[shanvan]

and I agree with Angela. And I am a book snob too! BJU offers systematic instruction that would be very time consuming to pull together on your own. We have used it the same way as Angela has. We have always had plenty of time for living books. The stories in BJU for younger years might be considered twaddle by some, but we liked most of them, and they accomplished the goal of getting the children reading. Very few of the 6th grade (and up) selections could be considered twaddle (in my opinion, of course).

I will say that you need to discuss the selection (especially at higher levels) with your children or they will not be getting the benefits of the program. We have had some wonderful discussions this year with BJU 7th Literture. It didn't work well at all when I tried just assigning the lessons. There was not enough learning happening.

We have never done all the workbook pages. In younger years we did some aloud and some written. In 5th- 6th I often made up my own assignments which included more writing. But I always sort of followed the workbook for topics covered- just did a lot of them my own way.

Shannon

[HollyDay]

I have been disappointed in BJU lit 7. We used BJU reading in 2nd - 4th with great success. It tied all the pieces together for my oldest daughter and she grew to love reading. 5th grade BJU starting falling flat because she wanted "real" books, not a collection of short stories. We switched to DITHOR for both her and her my other dc. I always intended to come back to BJU in either Jr high or High School for a more "rigorous" college bound course.

So, in 7th we went back to BJU. We used LL 7 for the end of 6th and over the summer. That was okay. Not thrilling, but okay.

BJU 7 is like the other BJU readers- a collection of short stories. But these stories are different. The first unit is about courage. Some of the stories included are about missionaries killed, women WWII resistance fighters executed, bullies at boarding school. A short paragraph is included about the author with each story. Riki Tiki Tavi is included - which we did with LL7, and stories about triumph and overcoming adversity. The biblical application is very heavy handed in my opinion.

I have the TM and teach from it. The literary tools - irony and foreshadowing, for example are introduced. In the TM, the various tools are highlighted different colors in the text so the teacher can easily point it out. "This is an example of irony" tight thing.

The "thinking zone" questions are included in the student text. The questions are not very thought provoking. "What type of character is Charlie", "Why did the author chose the title", "What is the theme","why is dialogue used", What is the resolution of the story" "describe the character".

I guess I was expecting something more. This might be false expectations on my part. We have not done an in depth literature study but we discuss books in a fair amount of detail. Perhaps I thought a formal literature study should be "more". In short, I feel BJU 7 was not a great choice. It is not a bad choice, but it is not what I expected or wanted. And, I am not sure what to use for 8th or high school now.

[OhElizabeth]

Well I'll offer a third way of implementing it, still happy. She reads the book, does the workbook pages, and we call it good. Oh, I might ask her what she thought of the story. We're in 4th doing the BJU5 reading, sort of like what you're saying with a 5th gr doing 6th. I don't know if I'm book book snob, but she certainly is, and highly picky at at that! She likes most of the BJU reading book and reads ahead for pleasure. Most of the time there are two workpages (a front and back, two sides total) for a story, meaning it was to take two lessons. She'll do those in one. The lessons are meant to have a discussion component using the tm and then the worksheet. I had to trim somewhere this year, and that discussion is where I trimmed. It didn't really meet my original objective of acquainting her with literary terms, so I streamlined it out, teacher's prerogative.

The discussion questions in the tm are a mixed bag. They're pretty thorough, starting at the most basic level of comprehension and moving into interpretation and discernment. What I didn't like about them was the way they spoonfed the thought into the dc. If you ask the question in such a way that there's only *1* answer, the *right* answer, the *BJU* answer, then you're sort of shoving it down their throat, eh? And it's not even that I disagree with the answer at all. It's just that I don't think you take thinking kids and force them to assimilate like the Borg on Star Trek, kwim? (You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.) They need to be able to think. But thinking takes more open-ended questions, more time, more guidance, and more effort on the part of the teacher. It wouldn't be as easy as opening a tm and reading the questions.

I had put the reading 5 aside for a while, unsure if it was really what we wanted, and then came back to it. It *is* what I wanted, and like you I view it as getting on track for their junior high stuff. It's good, and the workbook is worthwhile. Just don't be afraid to toss certain aspects of it if they aren't all necessary in the moment for what you're trying to accomplish. My dd is finding the reading easy enough that I have no doubt that if we wanted to do the reading 6 next year and do the full discussion from the tm we could. I might even learn a few tricks from the ladies here and find a way to make that discussion more my own, who knows! For right now though, even just reading the book and doing the workbook accomplishes my goals. They might not be *your* goals, but it's working to hit mine. One woman's busywork is another woman's skill goal for the year. :)

[OhElizabeth]

BTW, I'm with Holly in the sense that I'm not SURE I'm going to use it again next year. One year was good, but more is not necessarily a good thing? They spiral, and when I looked at the objectives for next year, it didn't seem enough new. I thought I'd look at it at the convention and see. I thought alternating years might help. Not every kid is so disinterested as to need the stuff drilled to death every year, repeated, repeated, for it to stick. In a home setting we discuss, continually apply, and don't have to do that. So while it's met my goals for this year, I might not do it at all next year, who knows? Or maybe I'd get DITHOR and use it on the BJU reading as a discussion approach? In the tm for the BJU reading, there's usually a main concept they're trying to discuss, so if I discuss, that's the one I go at (foreshadowing, whatever). Another of my reasons for using the BJU reading was to get her reading across genres rather than being stuck in just historical fiction like we usually are. In that sense it has been really good.

[HollyDay]

I agree with everything in Elizabeth's second post. Well said. And, I would love to know what you chose for next year.

[OhElizabeth]

Holly-You mean my allusion to the Borg and your calling it heavy-handed weren't the same? Hehe... I know, it's hard when you want to like something SO much because it would make your life easy (get on a track, christian curriculum), and then you realize it just doesn't quite fit. And I don't know if it's a tweaking thing or a dump thing. I think it's somewhere in the middle, where you have to go into it willing to make it your own. We couldn't implement it straight, just couldn't. And even doing it the way we are, she's not in LOVE. She zooms through, reading multiple stories and doing all the workpages for them, and this is a seriously non-workbooky kid! (She just wants to get it DONE.) I felt like the content covered in the workbook, with the skills it hits, were just enough (worthwhile) to justify the imposed torture. I think it's good when you take something relatively obvious (fact vs. fiction) and opening discuss it. Then it becomes a tool, something they're pondering that they can apply to new situations. I think that's good.

On the video samples I've noticed the teacher has them keep a vocab notebook, etc. It may be they're adding more and bringing it more alive than we do? I don't know. I don't consider most of what we've been reading to be twaddle. There was one story I skipped, couldn't stomach it, but most has been fine or even worthwhile. I like the plays and narratives, which I know WTM sort of dismisses as publisher-created twaddle. They're a whole separate category, a genre in my mind. (narratives, things people do in public speaking or for an oral interp class) We've used many of the readings as springboards, looking for more Farjeon after reading the Farjeon poem in the text, noticing other Will James works after we read the one in the text, that sort of thing.

Well anyways, I'm rattling. It's one of those things those is close but never fully what we want. Thing is, I'm not sure anything better is out there. And what are we going to do as we approach high school, just continually reinvent the wheel? I'll try to look at that DITHOR to see what it's like.