Getting My High Schooler Reading.

I think I’ve mentioned a number of times that this is my first time actually doing homeschool/high school. Calvin attended the local school district’s digital academy and I had absolutely NO input into his curriculum.

But for Sam it’s all on me. One of the things I really want Sammy to come away from his high school experience with is a knowledge and love of literature. I want him to have read from a wide variety of sources and I want him to have a lot of experiencing analyzing what he has read.

For us, Bravewriter’s Boomerang subscription has been a great fit. It pushes Sam to read at least one great book a month and spend some time analyzing the writing while sharing his observations and reading the observations of his peers.

A subscription includes a digital newsletter with four dictation passages selected from one novel each month. Julie Bogart, the director, explains why she chose each passage and then delves into the grammar and punctuation in a way that makes illustrates for the students why grammar and punctuation matter! I love how in this month’s selection,The Diary of Anne Frank, the passage selected focuses on Anne’s use of the semi-colon and patterned sentences to really emphasize some of the injustices Jews were experiencing in her country before WWII. I think that was very important for Sam to see.

After May 1940 the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use streetcars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops an beauty parlors…

The subscription also asks questions so that the students will think on a deeper level about what they are reading. They are also asked to copy some of their favorite passages into a notebook.

I did make some adjustments. We did not join Boomerang until November with The Scarlet Pimpernel. For September and October I purchased one of the back issues of the Slingshot while I gave Sam two months to read and do the work for To Kill a Mockingbird. I will probably rely on back issues next year as I bring Gabe up to speed with reading a book a month and doing the accompanying copy work and writing assignments.

Next year, I hope to move Sam up to The Slingshot subscription in addition to one of the Bravewriter writing courses.

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