Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine
Ray Bradbury
Doubleday Publishing


We are finishing up this book this week.  We are behind and that is making me cranky, but I think we are getting some good stuff done.  We will probably be working through my list of books through the summer.  My daughter is enjoying the books we have read. That may change with the upcoming books.

I had heard good things about Dandelion Wine and wanted to add it into our lineup for the year.  It has not disappointed!  I am really enjoying it and can't wait to find out how it ends.

For this book, I decided to have the main activity be Annotating.  I thought I had never done this before, but I realized that I do some version of it all the time in my Bible. 

First, I had my daughter read a couple of articles on it...

How to Mark a Book

Annotation for Smarties 

Purposeful Annotation- A Close Reading Strategy

We also found this video, which I thought was helpful

I think we are going to do more annotating with future books.

We also worked on this study guide

That is it for Dandelion Wine!  We will be onto Little Women!

The Crucible

The theme for this year in Literature for my daughter seems to be to read all the books that Mom has never read before.  So this book is no exception.  The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller about The Salem Witch hunt/trials in the late 1600's.  What I did not know until I began researching this book, was that it was also speaking about Red Scare in the 1950's and The House Un-American Activities Committee. As we just finished up this time period in history last year, it was a fascinating connection for me to make and since it is fresh in our minds, will make for some interesting discussion.
Here are the resources I am looking into using for The Crucible.
First, we will be using this Character Analysis Graphic Organizer from Teacher's Pay Teachers and this flip book.

So, life took a HUGE detour...and the Character Analysis organizer was the main assignment for this book. I am also having Grace do a One pager for this book.  I added the book, The Wave to her reading as well.

This was a book recommended by a friend.  We should have read it last year for history, but it has a powerful message.  

That is all we got to for this book.

The Catcher in the Rye

Hello!  I am back again as we are wrapping up this book.  I had never read The Catcher in the Rye before and was a little concerned as I was reading it.  I almost axed it, but decided to leave it in our line-up.  I will say that there is an extensive use of God's name in here that is not what you would call reverent  It was so frequent, that it was distracting.  Also, there is some sexual content that you might want to be aware of.  Definitely pre-read this before deciding whether or not it is appropriate for your family.

So, here are some resources we used for this book:

First, I enjoyed the Crash Course videos on this book.  I don't always agree with what he says...so you may want to watch this before your student as well.

We used this resource from Teacher's Pay Teachers as a Study Guide.  This should be the Pinterest Link for that study guide if you can't see it on the other one.

We printed this timeline off and this plot diagram. I believe both of these resources were free when we did this.
We also used pages 7-13 of this resource.  It was creating journal entries as if you were Holden.  We are not finished with the book yet, but my daughter has enjoyed doing this.
I had her read this article (The link was not working when I grabbed it...It is the New Yorker article Who Was J.D. Salinger by Adam Gopnik, September 5, 2013, in case it is still not working when you go to look.)
I wanted to do a mind map similar to the one in this packet, but we haven't done it yet and I don't see it getting added in at this point in time.  A One Pager would be a good idea too.
I think that is it!  Next up, The Crucible!

2.0 and To Kill a Mockingbird

The last two years, we have been greatly blessed to be a part of a small co-op that we called 2.0.  It was run by a small group of moms and we had a particular focus with this...getting these kids ready for college classes.  I don't know if you are aware or not, but homeschool families have particular things we don't do well.  DEADLINES are one of those...Anyway, that is not all that important right now, but we were blessed to have the strengths of others to teach some wonderful things.  My good friend was one of those blessings.  She gave two of my children a love for some great books. I am trying to re-create that for my girl this year, but I am no where near as wonderful as she is.  And we also don't have that wonderful group atmosphere either...BUT, this momma desires her sanity.

So, I thought I would share some of what we are doing for each book.  I want to be able to remember what we did...and HOPEFULLY be able to find it again!  You can take it, leave it or give your feedback. I know there is a variety of thoughts about what we should allow our children to read and all.  We have an interesting list this year, but I would like to expose my children to these titles when we can talk about them together.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time two years ago and LOVED it!  I knew that I wanted my children to read it.  We watched the Gregory Peck movie then, so we didn't watch it again this time, but I would recommend that...after you read the book.

We did not do tons for this book, because I was not on top of my game early enough...but I did LOVE this resource from Teachers Pay Teachers...You may need to be logged in to see it...if so, here is the Pinterest link for it

I also had my daughter do a One Pager.  Here are some examples.  I have not looked at all of these, so use caution...you just never know what will pop up in a Google search.

We did not do everything in this resource, but we did play with creating a Fakebook page for one of the characters...It was fun!

I also had her write an essay...I can't remember where I grabbed the questions I gave her, but here is a list.

I think that is it!