How much should I read in a lesson to my beginning students? Which books are best suited for early elementary school? Stay tuned in to today’s podcast episode as we discuss Form 1 Literature Lessons for grades 1-3.

Listen Now:

Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)

ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List

Aesop for Children by Milo Winter

Andersen or Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Pilgrim’s Progress (Penguin Classic)

Etsy shop for Pilgrim’s Progress Map

Tales of Troy and Greece (Yesterday’s Classics)

ADE Literature: Forms 1-2 Breakdown

Episode 130: Form 1 Pilgrim’s Progress Immersion Lesson

ADE on YouTube

Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…

Liz
…Liz Cottrill…

Nicole
…and Nicole Williams. 

Emily
Well, now that we’ve discussed the overall place of literature in a Charlotte Mason curriculum, let’s zoom in and specifically look at Form 1, which is grades 1 through 3. So children in these forms are between 6 and 8 or 9 years old. And the form is divided into Form 1B, which is the first year.  And just my little helpful mnemonic here is think B for beginner and Form 1A which is the second and third grade year, think A for advanced. So it’s counterintuitive to how we would probably label things now.

And children do spend two years in Form 1A. So Nicole, will you tell us what books and materials were assigned to these ages? 

Nicole
Yeah so literature begins with a child’s natural love of story. This is the only form that does not coordinate their literature with their history. 

Emily
Form 1. 

Nicole
Form 1, yeah. But there’s still great intentionality of what is chosen at this stage. In Form 1B, those first graders, the literary focus is on fairy tales. Miss Mason consistently included three fairy tales from Andersen or Grimm and three fables from Aesop. These are read aloud during their regular morning lesson time.

And then in Form 1A, so second and third grade, the child’s literary diet expands. Now two major works come into regular rotation. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, read in its original language, and Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. And they are read in steady portions across all nine terms of Form 1.

Emily
Six terms. 

Nicole
All six terms left of Form 1. Yeah. That’s right. All through 1A is what I mean.  Charlotte Mason said the books assigned in Form 1 are used with great success and that they feed a child’s sense of wonder and are very good to tell.

And by tell she means narrate. Children at this level are learning to narrate stories that are not their own. They’re naturally great little storytellers, but here they learn to focus their attention and tell back what they have heard after a single reading, a skill that will really serve them for years. 

Now, admittedly, these texts are more challenging than your average family read aloud. It’s true. But your Form 1 students are up for the task. Miss Mason reminds us that these are exquisite classics that are written for children, but not written down to them. And then Agnes Drury echoed this. She said, children who become familiar with the best writings find inferior work distasteful. The value lies not in the story alone, but in the telling of it. These stories really feed the moral imagination and they lay a foundation for a future life of excellent reading.

And this is only the beginning, the caliber of literature is going to rise sharply in the years ahead. So students must begin building that confidence now, they really have to grapple with this stuff. So let us not underestimate their ability to grasp these works and find beauty in them, even if we don’t see it right away. That was my personal experience with Pilgrim’s Progress. The kids got it, I did not.

One more important note is that as the children reach the upper part of Form 1, Charlotte Mason noted that students need to start reading as much as they can in preparation for Form 2. She said, therefore it is necessary that two years should be spent in Form 1A. So that’s those last two years. And that in the second of these two years, third grade, the children should read a good deal of the set work for themselves. 

Emily
If possible. 

Nicole
Yeah. 

Liz
Which isn’t to say silent reading. Just to be clear, this is reading aloud, but reading it for themselves instead of teacher doing it. 

Nicole
Yeah. Maybe you’re just write there on the couch with mom or at the table. 

Emily
Okay. Well, the lesson format for literature in Form 1 for both A and B is twice a week for 20 minutes each lesson. And that in Form 1A means they have, you know, Pilgrim’s Progress one day and they have Tales of Troy and Greece the second day. 

In Form 1B though, they only had to read three fairy tales and three fables, which have you ever read an Aesop’s Fable?  It’s very short. I think I went through and intentionally chose the longer ones. But do keep in mind that these lesson times are maximum quantities at this age and that they need to with the first year, particularly as they’re learning to tell, as Charlotte Mason said, you’re going to be stopping more frequently for their narrations because they need, it’s hard work, right, to tell another person. So really this is the training ground and we don’t want to overload and schedule more in there. 

Charlotte Mason actually gives us a wonderful format for how to, the method of lessons it’s right in the conversation about reading good literature. She talks about before the reading for the day begins the teacher should talk a little and get the children to talk about the last lesson. Okay, so we’re going to recall just like we’ve done in other subjects. We’re recalling what we read about last time. It’s crucial in literature because we’re usually leaving off in the middle of a story. We really need to get back to what was happening before we read again. 

And then she tells us the second thing after we recall last lesson, she says with a few words about what is to be read in order that the children may be animated by expectation. But she should beware of explanation. Don’t, as a teacher, explain what they’re about to read. And she said, and especially of forestalling the narrative. So we don’t want to give anything that would be a spoiler. We just want to whet their appetite a little bit. And this could be very simple, like, well, I wonder what Christian is going to encounter today? or something like that and they’re like what, what is it? You know, so it really doesn’t have to be anything in depth but just get their attention. 

And then she, the teacher, may read two or three pages enough to include an episode and as I was saying before when talking about Form 1B, this requires some discernment. New narrators do need shorter passages but if we get too short with them, like every sentence as we’ve heard some people try to do this, then our children just subconsciously think that we want a word perfect narration of exactly what we read. 

Liz
Then they become mimics. 

Emily
And they’re just going to be parroting it back, which is not doing the work of narration. It’s not fixing something into long-term memory, right? 

Okay, so our fourth thing after we read is after that, let her call upon the children to narrate in turns, if there’ll be several of them. So if you have more than one student, they’re each going to take a turn narrating.

Liz
Not that same passage though. 

Emily
Well, what I was about to say is we don’t let children re-narrate what has been told by another child. So it is perfectly fine as a teacher, parent, mother to stop one child in the middle of their narration and say, thank you. And give the other child a turn to narrate and they pick up where that child left off.

Charlotte Mason is very adamant about this, that every child must be prepared to narrate because that is where the work happens, right? It’s not just actually getting to tell it out loud. And if we are all prepared to narrate, then we get the benefit of narration, of fixing what we have read into our long-term memory. 

She does say though, here, after their narration, it is not wise to tease them with corrections. So if they get something wrong, we generally leave it and they will correct it themselves. And usually if there is a sibling working with them, we don’t have anything to worry about. Their sibling is going to say, no, it was such and such. 

OK, so we are not interrupting their narration. There should be no talk between their reading and their narration. Remember, this is really how they are learning to narrate, particularly is in this subject. And we don’t correct facts and we especially don’t correct their style. She says, you know, I’m paraphrasing here, but she says,

The child may start off with a string of ands, like starting and then, and then. We all probably have this. I feel like I can remember some of my brothers, you know, if they would just always say the same phrases. But gradually, she said, they leave those off. And they’re taking in the syntax and the language of the authors that they’re reading of these excellent books. And that becomes part of their own style. 

And then she says, when the narration is over, there should be a little talk in which moral points are brought out, pictures shown to illustrate the lesson, or diagrams drawn on the blackboard. So we’re not asking comprehension questions at this point, but we can ask subjective questions. What did you think about how Christian, you know, or what this character was saying or whatever like that? 

And likewise, we’re not giving any vocabulary quizzes. The child is learning vocabulary through context and let me tell you how many times my kids have astounded me at the word choice they use, even in dire situations. But if a child were to ask, hey, what does that mean? Feel free to answer them, right? We’re just not preempting in giving that, and we don’t want to give more than what they’re asking for. 

As for objectives of a literature lesson, Ms. Drury said, the object of our literature lessons is to let poems and books themselves speak to the children. That’s it. Our objectives are pretty easy here. So they are getting in touch with great minds that have gone before them. And they are also entering into this great conversation that humanity has had with the world, you know, since time began. So their books teach them that knowledge is supremely attractive, Charlotte Mason said, and reading is delightful. 

So our teacher prep is, also in the same section, she tells us our job is to look over the work of the term or look over the work of the day. And I think that needs to be like, how much are we going to read each day? We need to know. Look over the work that was assigned for the term, spread it out over the 22 literature lessons that you have. So don’t read three fairy tales and three fables in your first three weeks of school, or you will have nothing to do for seven weeks after that.

And then before the lesson, you may want to skim to be able to say something to arouse their anticipation. But even if you don’t get to that, like I said, you could just say, I wonder what’s going to happen next. Which should be easy because you’ve just spent a few minutes recalling what has been going on before. And the largest part of our preparation is to restrain ourselves from trying to be the showman of the universe to explain everything that they might not understand and to let the students do their own work.

So just to show you a couple of our favorite editions of some of these books, I mean, there are myriad, these are children’s classics. So really you can use any edition that is not abridged or, as Charlotte Mason would say, told to the children, like paraphrased or talked down to them. I was going to say dumbed down because it might just be doing both.

Okay, so here is our favorite, the Aesop for Children. Milo Winter is the illustrator and this is just really nice font and beautiful pictures. And of course there are many, many editions of Grimm and Andersen. This one I think is Illustrated Junior Classics. This is a really beautiful, illustrated by Edmond Dulac…Stories from Hans Christian Andersen. But again, really you can use any for those fairy tales. And the choice of which fairy tales to read are completely up to the parent. And I will just tell you for anyone who thinks fairy tales have to do with fairies and magic or whatever, The Ugly Duckling is one of Andersen’s fairy tales. And there’s no magic in it other than the animals are talking. And they’re just talking to other animals. 

Then, moving into Form 1A, Tales of Troy and Greece. This is an edition by Yesterday’s Classics. Their reprints are really well done. The font is a nice size and they do hold up really well. 

And this is Pilgrim’s Progress, just the Penguins Classics. It includes both Part 1, Christian’s Journey, and Part 2, Christiana’s Journey. And you read one part each year and it’s both in this volume. I pulled this one out because we made some literature breakdowns that really do forecast how much to read in these works because they were so set. These were always the ones chosen. And that is the edition I use because Pilgrim’s Progress has no chapters. Some editions have little headings, but you have to kind of look through the whole book until you can find the part that you’re supposed to stop at. 

And then lastly, I just wanted to show what is my children’s very favorite part of Pilgrim’s Progress and it is these beautiful maps and I will include a link to the Etsy shop and they are expensive. Like it’s a digital file you get, I think it was like $30 for these four beautifully drawn maps. But I will tell you this, these made Pilgrim’s Progress their most favorite subject. They’re just beautiful. So then I just had them printed at our local print shop on cardstock paper and I just hang them from one of those little magnet clip holders and that was their favorite thing after we got done reading was to go find where Christian was on his journey. And I will tell you that not just my children, but everyone that we hear, say that Pilgrim’s Progress and Tales of Troy and Greece are some of their very favorite books in all of school.

Liz
High school kids that can still tell me verbatim on both parts. 

I get a lot of questions about literature in this age, interestingly, because obviously, as you said before, they have such harder works later. But this is hard for a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old, right? 

One question I get commonly is, why do we only do three Aesop’s Fables? If you’ve read through Aesop’s Fables, you would know the answer to that. They’re all very similar and after a while they just become a blur. Plus I personally think Mason threw them in as a little reprieve between the long ordeal of getting through a long fairy tale because those take like a month, right? Yeah, they’re not the Disney versions. 

Another common question I get is what if preschoolers have already listened in while older kids were reading? What do they do when it’s their turn? As far as fairy tales go, I don’t think that’s even a problem. And the Aesop’s, good thing there are so many. You can just pick different ones. Same with the fairy tales. And the other thing to remember is they’ve never narrated it before, right? So it is a different experience to listen to something and then to make the effort to retell it is a whole different thing. 

Emily
And even different, I noticed this with my second, when I was reading Pilgrim’s Progress to my first, he was chiming in. He was sitting at the table drawing with us and he would chime in and even give me little narration parts or correct his brother’s narration. And we got back to him reading it for himself and it was like he had never heard it. I mean, he would, I remember this or whatever. But it was not the same when he was expected to narrate every single time. That narration makes the difference. 

Liz
Yeah. Here’s a very common question. Is it OK to read a children’s version, Little Pilgrim’s Progress or Dangerous Journey? And I think we grow by moving from what we know to the unknown. That was the whole trajectory of Charlotte Mason’s education, wasn’t it? That’s what education means, is being introduced to things you’ve never thought about before and learning about them. And we’re never going to become familiar with something if we’re unexposed. Children already have done the hardest work of language before they even begin school. And that is learning how to speak it. So we don’t need to sell them short. They can learn to cope with the more challenging language. And like Nicole said, her girls did better than she did. 

Emily
And Charlotte Mason was very adamant these were not to be retold for the children. I mean, Tales of Troy and Greece technically was, but it was a classic in its own right because it didn’t talk down to children. But it is taking Greek myths and the Iliad and the Odyssey and retelling them for children. 

Liz
And she said they love finding different names and they find the newness of things exciting because they are still curious about everything. And if you think about how many things puzzle them in a day, which is why they’re always asking us why, right? This is just normal for them to be confronted with something brand new to investigate. 

So have the patience, just like you do when you’re teaching them to print their letters better or learn their multiplication tables. Give them time to comprehend language in the same slow meaningful way. Mason said they love the unusual names and they don’t have to remember every single name that they encounter, you know, they will remember the ones that interest them the most. And then always like Emily said take time at the end to talk to them a little bit about what’s going on and who is who, and that will help them a lot. 

Another thing I really feel like we should address is mythology, because a lot of families are very concerned about this. And well, I won’t go there, but all the obsession with fantasy fiction should be just as concerning, I think. But mythology is the oldest stories. They are very obvious for moral instruction without giving you a sermon. They clearly portray good and evil. They show the motives of men are not pure before a child discovers that in their real life, which they definitely will. 

And I think the myths actually magnify the goodness and beauty and truth of God that we honor, whom we honor. They help the children to recognize the gods of our culture because we certainly have them and serve them as well. That is the plight of the human heart. But mythology has all the basics of good story, the setting, the rising action, the climax, the denouement is all there. They’re learning that characters can be symbolic, which is a very important concept in the study of literature so that they begin to understand how ideas can be represented in the novels they’re going to read in the future. And they’re going to encounter references to these mythological figures and events in poetry and prose constantly throughout their life. 

Emily
And I have now read through Tales of Troy and Greece two times and I can tell you neither I nor my children find anything remotely attractive about the gods in the mythology. I think it makes a sharper contrast. 

Liz
That’s what I’m trying to say. It magnifies what they believe about gods. 

Emily
The gods are not…they’re mercurial. They change their mind. They’re fickle. They’re mean. There’s nothing attractive about them. So please don’t be worried that they’re going to lure your children into worshipping gods from ancient Greece. 

Liz
And I know our time is about up, but I just want to say a little bit about poetry. Read them all kinds of poetry. There’s no end of it. There are thousands of poets, but this subject is for delight only. They don’t have to understand what it means. And most of the children’s poems that we read are on topics like frogs or oceans or driving a truck or something like that. So, but the whole realm of poetry expands our understanding of words and how words can be used in a myriad of ways to evoke emotion, to convey meaning. And if you choose a poet for each term to get to know a little better, you could read him or her more frequently, but read them all kinds and don’t make one exclusive poet who’s the only thing you read that term. 

Emily
It is in the earliest forms that we see how Miss Mason did not underestimate the intelligence of children. She offered them a literary feast of books that we parents sometimes struggle to understand, yet the children themselves delight in and narrate them with ease.

Next week we turn our attention to upper elementary literature lessons and see how the early programs lay a foundation for a deeper enjoyment of literature. If you’d like to listen in on a sample lesson using Pilgrim’s Progress with the three of us, you can check out episode 130 and we hope you’ll join us next time as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.