We are a reading family. We love books, and would simply sit and read aloud or quietly to ourselves all day long and call it school, if it weren’t for such “non-essentials” as penmanship, spelling, grammar, writing skills, map-reading lessons, math. Math– the kids spend an hour or more on it every day—hardly CM, but she didn’t have to get her students through advanced algebra or beyond before graduation. (At age eight, Cornflower is the exception, spending around thirty minutes on math.)
I aim for a CM-type education for my kids (with the exception of that blasted math), so we have quite a few books we are currently in the process of slow-reading.
The kids and I are reading Oliver Twist aloud in the mornings. We are also reading through the book of Daniel in the Bible and have just finished reading the book of Luke. (For our next New Testament readings, I am taking them through some humorous and accurate Bible doctrine essays written by a preacher friend, and then we will start on Philippians—it seems we come back to Philippians again and again.) We finished reading Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost last week and started on Richard II last Thursday. And we are currently reading Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, which is very interesting. At first I thought, why read Plutarch’s version of Theseus? We have read about Theseus many times already and have the myths down pat. But once we began, we realized he retells several versions of the stories one hears about him that we had never heard of, and applies it to the political climate of Archaic Greece, showing how this or that story rose to prominence or sank to obscurity, based on the spin the ancient pundits wished to give it. (Greek civilization was on the rise, so it was considered right that the narrative be as flattering as possible to Athens.) Theseus (who, it is only fair to say, is considered legendary) lived hundreds of years before Christ, with Plutarch writing his chronicle of Theseus’ life in 75 AD. Politics—the same down through the ages. How about that?
