Do we really need to read Shakespeare? I thought all of the books were read during morning lessons. Upper elementary literature lessons in a Charlotte Mason curriculum may just surprise you. Join us today in the podcast to find out all the details.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
Heroes of Asgard by Annie and Eliza Keary (black and white or color)
The Age of Fable by Thomas Bullfinch
Shakespeare (Folger and Oxford Editions)
ADE Literature: Forms 1-2 Breakdown
Episode 135: Shakespeare Immersion Lesson
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
Last time we discussed the details of Form 1 literature lessons and today we’re moving on to Form 2. This form includes grades 4 through 6. Children are between the ages of 9 and 12 roughly in these grades and as in Form 1 this form is also divided into the very confusing B first for the first year, B for beginner and A for the last two years or A for advanced. And so fourth grade for 2B, fifth and sixth grade for 2A.
Nicole, will you tell us what types of literature Form 2 students read?
Nicole
Yeah. OK, so we see we have 38 programs in a row that we can look at. And on those, we see that Charlotte Mason assigned, or whoever is doing the program at the time, between three and seven titles each term. But don’t be afraid. The average for one was four.
But we’re going to go over what things were actually assigned. So from nine years old onward, the children listened to or read one play from Shakespeare every term. And let me clarify there, because I just said they listened to or read right there at that very beginning. And that is because in Form 2B or fourth grade Charlotte Mason specified that the children still hear some of the heavier works read aloud, meaning, and I quote her, she said, Twelfth Night, Rob Roy, and Gulliver’s Travels. And so some of these are a little harder.
However, by Form 2A, so our fifth and sixth graders, they often read the play in character, each being given a part. So that needs to be kind of a quick transition that’s happening there if we can. Charlotte Mason found their ability to understand, this is her words, understand, visualize, and narrate Shakespeare very surprising. So they can do this.
In addition, mythology continues as a spine, drawing a thread from the heroic world of Form 1 into the classical studies that are to come down the road. And in Form 2B, again, fourth grade, they read from Heroes of Asgard, which included a two-year rotation, even though the kids would only be at that level for one year.
Liz
So they didn’t read the whole thing all in one year.
Nicole
And then in Form 2A, so fifth and sixth grade, they read from Bullfinch’s Age of Fable, which rotated on a three-year rotation?
Emily
A four-year rotation. This is new news to us. We thought for a long time it was only two years and then we found it hidden in the Form 3 programs.
Nicole
Yeah, so it continues on past this form.
Emily
Yes and and for just a little spoiler for next week, Form 2 and 3 were reading the same sections of Bullfinch in a four-year rotation.
Nicole
Yeah. Okay, so poetry is also present every term because Shakespeare counts as verse, each program already contains one substantial work of poetry right there. But in addition, about half the terms had a second piece of narrative or lyric poetry such as Scott’s long ballads, Southeast ballads, Kipling’s poems, Tennyson’s The Foresters or The Charge of the Light Brigade. So it’s something like that.
Now, Scott becomes a near constant companion with the Form 2A students. A novel or a long poem by Sir Walter Scott shows up in every, let’s see, two of every three terms. So two of those would be read every year. And that, I think that’s really helpful as a bridge, again, between those fairy tales and the historical fiction that’s coming later.
Okay, also, I thought this was fun. In the fall term, we sometimes see something that’s like a festive Christmas holiday type thing, A Christmas Carol, something like that, because the fall term would end before the Christmas break, so something they could read over that break.
I mentioned that some of the heavier works were read aloud to the Form 2B beginner, the first part of that Form 2 students, but Charlotte Mason clarified that the transition to Form 2A is marked by more individual reading as well as by a few additional books. So the average, though, so she says a few additional books there, the average went from 4.2 to 4.5. So like actually what she was assigning wasn’t a whole lot more for that different change. But it’s important to note that while these works are stiff, students should be trying to read them by themselves at this point, or with a parent, maybe co-reading something like that, in preparation for what is to come.
She did not lower the bar for this subject, and she clarified that we spread an abundant and delicate feast, and each small guest assimilates what he can. I think that helps us to understand the goal in these lessons is not that they will necessarily know and understand every bit of the reading.
And maybe sometimes it’s good that some of it goes over their head, right?
Emily
Right, for sure.
Nicole
However, Charlotte Mason trusted the children to rise to the ideas in the book. And she said they would tell back or narrate with not only accuracy, but with spirit and originality. So again, it’s really a bridge. I feel like an important bridge. It’s varied. It’s demanding. I feel like it’s a really important and good time in their education.
Emily
So Nicole, you’re saying…well let’s just round down. Four Literature books.
Nicole
Yes.
Emily
Four books a term, or a year if they’re reading a whole book over the course of a year. So it might surprise you when I tell you that they only had one 30 minute lesson a week. How are we going to get all this reading done?
Well, there’s a note that the literature assigned included their holiday and evening reading. And then we have this other further quote that gives us a little hint. The lighter portions of the literature, the novel, okay, Sir Walter Scott. It’s pretty, pretty light. Yes, the play, which their play is Shakespeare, okay, also light, and the poems. Right, all right, Charlotte Mason, I’m with you there. Okay, these are read for amusement in the evenings and in the holidays.
Now, I will say that exams included questions on these lighter portion books, but always there were multiple options of questions that you were asking on a book or play or poem, there were multiple options. So if the child had not yet read that because their holidays are going to be after the exams, right, in between term holidays. So they may not have gotten to it. And so there is expectation that the children are reading these things. But there is allowance that they may not have gotten to all of it in the term. But they would have had it right on something, it’s not like they could just not have any of those as their option, right?
So that leaves their one lesson for their mythology, right? That’s what they’re reading and they needed that whole time to get through the quantity that was assigned so there really wasn’t room to be reading the other thing.
The other thing I was going to say for those lighter portions is that means they’re not being narrated on a daily basis or whenever they’re reading them. This is their first foray into managing their own time with worthy reading, filling it with a worthy occupation, reading worthy books and they’re maybe narrating to themselves in their head because they are going to have to have an exam question. So they have to have thought about it and been familiar with it, but they’re not going to be coming to mom every time they finish their reading for the evening or whatever and telling you everything that they read.
Okay, so changing gears to the individual lessons. These are much the same as in Form 1. They’re going to before you begin reading, we need to recap or recall what was going on in the last lesson. And really the students should be doing this by habit. You know, we’re developing that habit. They’ve been doing it for three years now. And then the teacher should say a bit about what will be read in order to excite anticipation for the lessons. We can still do that part. And then there’s the reading for the day.
Now for students in Form 2, there is no literature as a subject on the program, right? Nicole, what did you find all of those books listed under?
Nicole
They’re listed under reading.
Emily
Reading, right, because reading is the skill. It’s not just the mechanics of reading the printed letters and words on the page and deciphering or decoding what those words are. It is also the process of reading aloud with good enunciation, volume, breath, you know just reading with expression. Yes, being a good reader you have a little experience with good and bad readers, Mom, having read so many audio throughout your life.
But it is not just them reading silently, right? There still needs to be lots of practice. So even if they’re doing the lesson independently, they do need practice at reading aloud. And then comes the narration, of course. There’s nothing in between them reading and doing their narration. But in Form 2, they’re doing one to two written narrations a day. Form 2B needed to write one narration a day. And Form 2A needed to write two written narrations per day. So by sixth grade, they would probably almost always be doing written narration from their mythology, right? As that was one of the two to three lesson books that they had every day that would need a written narration.
And then after the narration, there can be a little talk or discussion asking their thoughts on the work that they read. We might look at pictures or maps, you know, look up a pronunciation for one of the Greek or Norse names that we didn’t know how to pronounce or something like that. But again, these are not comprehension questions that we ask. They should just be subjective to the student to give their thoughts. And as far as objectives for these lessons go, Ms. Drury said, the object of our literature lessons is to let poems and books themselves speak to the children.
And again, Charlotte Mason said, our books introduce them to a score of thinkers who meet the children mind to mind in their books. So we as the teachers and parents are just simply making the introduction for them to meet these great teachers and world thinkers.
As far as our teacher prep, our work is to look over the work of the term and to spread it out over the course of the term so we can accomplish the reading. This is usually very doable, very logically, but we might not want to divide exactly by however many pages a week because we want to not end up in the middle of a cliffhanger. You know, we want to read a full episode. And they only have 11 lessons to do this. Their 12th week of the term was given over to exams.
Another thing that we need to do as teacher prep is we need to make time for them to have daily reading outside of their lessons and we need to carve out time to do at least once a week Shakespeare. I mean we have no problem once a week getting through our play a term in 20 to 30 minutes so it doesn’t need to be multiple times but you also might want to skim or pre-read even and make notes on your thoughts about what you could do to arouse their attention or any notes about maps or pictures or diagrams that might be helpful to bring the lesson more to life or to give fuller understanding.
And I will say that I pre-read a book if I have one or more students who’s going to be reading it independently or with one another and I’m not going to be present with them in the lesson. So that’s kind of my rule of thumb. Thus far I’ve been able to keep up, but it is getting to be hard.
Okay, as far as resources go, here is a copy of Heroes of Asgard. This is a paperback copy from yesterday’s classics and I just want to mention that there is a paperback copy, I’m assuming it’s on Amazon, but we’ve heard tell from time to time that people finish the book like in one or two terms and we’re like…how is this possible? Because Charlotte Mason read it over two years. We could read it over one. I have a breakdown that reflects that, but it is a lot of reading and I question it. There is an abridged version that doesn’t say this. So this is one I know for sure that is not.
Nicole
So the Yesterday’s Classics is the one to go with.
Emily
Then I have the Age of Fable by Thomas Bullfinch. There are many, many editions. You don’t have to have this one. Again, it’s Yesterday’s Classics. I list page numbers in our literature breakdown for these two editions, but especially the Age of Fable, it’s very easy to tell by the chapter and sub chapter heading where it is, so you don’t need to have that edition. But we do have breakdowns that forecast the lessons out over each week of the term, how much to read each time.
And then as far as Shakespeare, I will just tell you our family’s two favorite editions. We really like either the Folger Shakespeare Library or the Oxford School Shakespeare. These actually have photographs of actors from famous scenes from you know, famous productions of Shakespeare. And both of them have a little bit of a synopsis before you start the scene. So you kind of have your grasp of what’s going on that is really nice. But we like having a copy for each person who’s reading apart so we can all be reading along. I think that Shakespeare was one of the books that Charlotte Mason expected every student to own their own copy of. So they would have a whole library of Shakespeare plays when they finished their education.
And we do have another teacher help available on our website called the Shakespeare Planner and it just goes through which plays Charlotte Mason assigned at which form level because they do vary on which ones are appropriate for Form 2. There’s some different ones she never assigned in Form 2 but did in the older forms. And they also tell you, there’s a couple that she always assigned during specific historical time periods so that’s in there and then there’s just it’s editable so you could keep track of all of the plays that various children have to help make your life a little more simple.
Liz
To help with decision fatigue.
Emily
Yes. And just, mom, we already read this, as if reading Shakespeare play once is sufficient.
Liz
It’s like the Bible. You can read it all your life.
Emily
Well, what challenges or common questions do you hear?
Liz
Well, just a couple little things. I think you guys have covered things pretty thoroughly here, but Charlotte Mason did acknowledge that children in fourth grade, 2B, are still often gaining a lot of reading skills. And they still are widely varied in their abilities at that age. And so she said, let them try to read aloud, as Emily made a great point about. All through Form 2 they were reading their lessons aloud for the most part because they had learned how to read. Now they were learning how to read to others. So she would have them try simple poems, occasional lines in Shakespeare, even in fourth grade, and this allows them to build their confidence.
You know, Shakespeare wrote plays. He meant them to be spoken aloud and enacted. They’re plays. So divide the characters between you and your children and when she said “or listened to” she meant by real person reading because they didn’t have recorded books back then right?
Emily
But I don’t think she would have–
Liz
No, because I think listening to professional readers is only going to prolong your fearfulness about getting started in the first place. Education means individual effort. And you know, the lines in Shakespeare are short. There’s like 10 syllables per line. So you can give them little intermittent lines to read. And the other thing is it’s not like them even reading down one whole page unless you get stuck on a long soliloquy. But anyway, just some little things to think about.
And again, poetry is meant to be read aloud and you don’t get comfortable reading poetry until you start doing it every day and reading it aloud. So obviously, their term novels they would be reading on their own but what about that child that I was mentioning that is still not competent in reading and honestly even some really strong nine-year-olds, you know I mean strong readers who are nine years old, have a tough time with some of the jargon in say Treasure Island or Kidnapped or something like that.
But it is best to leave them to manage how and when and they’re going to read through this novel. I mean, at most you can just ensure that they are tackling it every week, but it would be okay for them to listen to an audio and if possible, have them read the print copy while they’re listening. That is going to help them a lot. I think the big thing to understand is we don’t swap it out for something easier. These are classics that all people should have read. They’re the best known things out there in literature and they were mandatory. They were not optional. So if they don’t get through it in the term they do have that holiday she mentioned. But it was part of the curriculum and even though they weren’t narrating it in the morning lessons, they definitely had to do it and there definitely would be some exam question about it.
Emily
I also I feel like I want to add just two things here as I’m thinking about it. You said almost always they had Sir Walter Scott and I would just say our history rotations are different than England. And she was she was assigning those that fit into the historical time period, right? Because their literature in Form 2 starts to match their historical time period. So we would probably have fewer Walter Scott but maybe still assign some.
Nicole
Something that’s that caliber, that’s the main point.
Liz
So a serious historical fiction if and we do see that most every year one of the classic children’s novels would be a historical fiction. But it wasn’t like the silly kind of fun thing that they would pick up for themselves after school.
Emily
Yeah. And then Nicole, I wondered if you could just share what your dyslexic children thought about Shakespeare.
Nicole
Yeah. Well, here’s the funny thing about Shakespeare is he made up a whole bunch of words.
Emily
Oh yeah.
Nicole
So the people who were listening to him at that time didn’t necessarily understand what he was talking about either. So I think it’s totally a fun thing for kids who do struggle to read because that’s just kind of the nature of it. You know, it’s not this perfect thing that can just so easily flow off your tongue.
Emily
Yeah there’s lots of times I have no idea how to pronounce how he’s the words.
Nicole
So it kind of levels the playing field a little bit is what I was saying and I think that it can be a good one for the dyslexic kids to tackle and what I did is just picked parts that weren’t so long for some of the kids that had a bigger struggle.
Liz
And I’ve discovered that with two children with reading difficulties too, and I thought it was just my particular odd children, but I’ve talked to hundreds of moms who have verified that your weakest reader is often your best Shakespeare reader.
Emily
So, well, I hope that gives you some hope to tackle the Bard.
In Form 2, we see students start to have some independence and control over their use of time. While Shakespeare and Bullfinch may be intimidating to us, rest assured that your students are up to the challenge. You can find links to episodes 38 and 135 if you’d like to learn more about Shakespeare and listen to an immersion lesson in our show notes, along with links to all the other resources that we mentioned in this episode. And we do, as always, invite you to read along with us and join us next week for Literature in Forms three to four, grades seven to nine, as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.