The 750th anniversary of the birth of the great poet Dante Alighieri is being fittingly celebrated today in Italy. Oscar-winning actor Roberto Benigni will visit the Italian Senate to read from Dante’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, to an audience that will include Italy’s...
This 463rd Carnival of Homeschooling offers a smorgasbord of creative ideas, inspiration, and practical tips for homeschooling. As you read each post, I hope you’ll find kindred spirits among the bloggers, and lots of good things to read as you sit by the fire and sip tea.
Essay writing is not the only tool for studying literature. Students can benefit from the occasional opportunity to approach the great books in a fresh way, so here are a few alternatives to writing a literary analysis.
Fairy tales, parables, and other true stories I have been thinking about fairy tales this week after coming across a bowdlerized (to modify by abridging, simplifying, or distorting in style or content) version that appears on a third grade Common Core...
Reading and teaching literature in context is a bit like studying a map before you set out for a walk in a strange city. Context helps you find significant intersections, decipher archaic language, and find a path through old-fashioned rhetoric. Here’s how to do it.
Most modern readers have little context for the mindset, manners, and morals, or even many of the conflicts that consumed the characters in the novels of the late 19th and early 20th century. This lack of context can affect understanding and appreciation of the tales.
A look at the literature portion of the the Common Core Standards (CCS), with an excerpt from Hard Times by Charles Dickens.
If you have a local library, support it through regular visits, volunteering, and other ways. As a homeschooler, you can help to shape your library’s collections and programs through strategic requests (nicely conveyed, of course!). And finally, an infographic on “Why Support Your Local Library?”
Early life Henry James (1843–1916), American author, was born in New York on the 15th of April 1843. His father was Henry James (1811–1882), a theological writer of great originality, from whom both he and his brother, Professor William James, … Continue reading
Daniel Defoe (c. 1659–1731) was an English author and political pamphleteer born in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, London, in the latter part of 1659 or early in 1660, of a nonconformist family. Other spellings of his name include D. … Continue reading
What is an argument? An argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something. It is prompted usually by a disagreement, confusion, or ignorance about something which the arguers wish to resolve or illuminate in a convincing way. In the … Continue reading
The daguerreotype, an early photographic process, was invented by French artist and photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Introduced in 1830, it was the first publicly available photographic process but was superseded by less complicated processes in less than fifty years. To make … Continue reading
Washington Irving by Petri Liukkonen (1783-1859) – pseudonyms: Dietrich Knickerbocker, Jonathan Oldstyle, Geoffrey Crayon American author, short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book writer, biographer, and columnist. Irving has been called the father of the American short story. He is best … Continue reading
