Many parents wonder if they should include literature study as opposed to just reading books in their homeschool curriculum and why it is important. Literature study is important for your homeschool for a number of reasons.
Here is my list of top reasons to include literature study in your homeschool curriculum –
- Character Analysis – When doing a literature study, you include character analysis. This examination and observance of characters through their dialogue and behavior while you read, allows your child to develop personal, emotional, and social skills.
Being able to determine the motivation or understanding of a character’s reason for doing something or feeling a certain way in a story helps you child in real life. They develop empathy and sympathy for others. They also develop intuitive skills in determining a person’s character, a valuable skill in life.
Your child can sit back and observe characters and how they react to situations and other characters in a story and determine if that is how they would react or if they would react differently and which one would be the best way to handle the situation. - Identifying Conflict – Again, literature study includes identifying different forms of conflict in a story. This is also a valuable skill. One of the forms is a conflict when a character has an internal conflict within him/herself.
If your child has the opportunity to observe a character in this type of situation, your child can objectively observe how does the character resolve or “deal with” that conflict. This can also apply to conflicts with other characters or with “society”.
This gives your child an opportunity to, once again, determine “right from wrong”, “best ways to deal with conflicts”, and answer the question “how would I deal with that?” - Develop vocabulary and more sophisticated sentence structure – With a literature study comes the intrinsic development of a more expansive vocabulary and writing style.
Just by being exposed to and reading on a deeper level pieces of literature that are outside “light or pleasure reading”, your child will acquire and use vocabulary in context as they read it in a story.
And over time, you will see their sentence structures develop to include more than a subject and action and an occasional adjective. - Obtain knowledge of how the piece of literature is influenced by the author’s own experiences – Writers do not write in a vacuum. Your child begins to understand bias/unbiased pieces of writing through this type of examination.
They live lives during specific time periods and societal norms as well as their own personal experiences. These all have an influence on the stories they write, whether or not the story is about their own time period or not.
In a literature study, you discuss the author and his/her time period and if that time period is reflected in the story. You discuss the author’s own experiences and if they are reflected in the story and how.
You can also include a Christian or Biblical Worldview and determine if the writer is writing with that lens or filter, and how you can determine this.
Being able to distinguish personal and objective viewpoints is very important. Your child should be able to determine if a written work is influenced by the author’s own experiences and how did they arrive at their viewpoint. And is their writing biased or unbiased? - Appreciate the art of well written pieces of writing – In a literature study, you look closely at a written work and learn they various types of devices and techniques that make it good literature.
Your child may not be the next Charles Dickens or Nobel Prize winner, but they make pick up a technique they enjoyed and begin to include that in their own writing attempts.
As you can see, including a literature study in your homeschool doesn’t mean blowing the dust off of an old book and looking for hidden symbolism in the meaning of the novel.
It’s a study of a story with plenty of important life skills that can be practiced by watching the characters and discussing what is happening in the story, learning new words and their meanings, looking at why that sentence is so great we can actually “see” the story happening in our heads, and understanding why the author decided to write that story and if it has personal meaning to them and why.
These are just some of the reasons why we want to include literature study in our curriculum! I hope you enjoy it just as much as I do!
To help you along the way, I have some resources to get you started!
Tools to Help you in your Literature Study
For Christmas themed literature study or practicing Literary Devices –
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Literature Study
Free Video Lessons and Printables about Literary Devices with a Christmas Twist
For Practicing Literary Devices with a Valentine’s Day Theme –
Learning Fun with Valentine’s Day Literary Devices
