Literature As Curriculum

I went into this year in literature mode, and more and more I've been thinking about how pretty much any work of children's literature you pick up can become -- with almost no effort or forethought on your own part -- a curriculum unto itself.

In fact, while forethought can be a good thing, right now I've been rediscovering what fun it is simply to offer children a book and let them run with it. Here's what Helier, Crispina and I did today: we read The Wheel on the School. The story, in case you haven't read it yet, is that a group of school children in a tiny village by the sea in Holland begin to wonder why storks never come to nest on roofs in their town. Their wondering becomes action to make stork-nesting -- which brings good luck -- a reality. In the course of things, as the children search for a wheel to put on the school roof for the storks to nest on, the people of the village are drawn into deeper friendship with each other. In particular, a bitter legless man, Janus, emerges from his despair to embrace life again. All the characters are dimensional and lovable, and like Epiphany and Amicus before them, Helier and Crispina have taken an almost incandescent delight in the story.

So how's it a curriculum? Well . . . right now we seem to be doing, among other things, geography -- the way I like to do geography (and history, and science, and pretty much anything else). Reading about a village in Holland, and about the things that the people do in the village, makes Helier and Crispina want to do the same things, especially when food is involved. Today we read about the schoolchildren's drinking hot chocolate milk with Janus while a storm raged outside, and also playing dominoes. Out came our own dominoes, and I made some hot chocolate (even though it was about 80 degrees and sunny outside instead of storming and cold). Maybe we'll try out the idea of a closet bed, too. We've got a big deep shelf in the study that's wide enough for a small child to at least pretend to sleep on. In the chapter we read tonight, somebody was eating "bread and syrup," so now that's what Helier wants for breakfast tomorrow. Hearing about these details of daily life in another place and time, and then being so enchanted by them that you want to play them out yourself, is the kind of learning that will stick.

You also learn, along the way, that Holland is a monarchy and that its capital is Amsterdam.

The kids also wanted to know whether we could put a wheel on our own steep, sharp roof for storks, so we had some conversation about the migratory habits of storks and the routes they follow, and about birds which come our own way. So there was some science/nature.

I always have Helier practice reading chapter titles, so we get some phonics/reading practice in. And reading excellent literature exposes children to the sounds of good prose, and to a wide range of challenging words. For pre-writers, that's a language-arts curriculum in itself. Also, because the names are Dutch, and the sounds are different from ours (J pronounced the way we pronounce Y, for example), and this is interesting to point out, they also get the sense of how other languages operate, that people hear letters differently in other languages from the way we hear them in English.

Given time, we'd probably think of even more to do using this book, but I'm very please with what the children have generated on their own as responses to the story. This is the kind of child-led learning I love: it's not really entirely child-led, because I choose what books I present to the children, sometimes overriding their clamors for Dora the Explorer, or for books we've already read a hundred times. In the case of Dora and her ilk, there are things which are meant to be "educational," in the vein of PBS children's shows, which means that everything about them is one-dimensional. Somebody's decided on an objective, and everything in the show, or the story, is designed to produce a certain learning outcome. Real literature, on the other hand, resonates in the mind, and it's in the imaginative reverberations that real learning takes place. You, the grownup, don't have to have an objective in mind. It will come to you; your children will teach it to you. And if the best way to learn something is to teach it . . . well, I think I'm having a little epiphany here (small e -- I had a little Epiphany a long time ago, but now she's taller than I am and stalking around looking for her purse).

Amicus is doing his usual complement of subjects and reading Rascal this week; Epiphany is doing her usual complement of subjects and struggling to master Beowulf so as to write a 5-paragraph essay about how the title character manifests the Anglo-Saxon heroic ideal. Good stuff -- but of course I think that, since I assigned the paper.