The Homeschool Minute ~ Teaching Multiple Levels

Multi-Age Lit Classes: Pipe Dream or Piece of Cake?
 
Literature can be one of the hardest subjects to teach to multiple levels. Not only do the kids decode the language at different levels, but the range of emotional development among students of different ages makes it almost impossible to meet the literary needs of more than one at a time.   
 
If you understand a couple of key principles, however, you can solve this problem instantly and set up an efficient multi-age class in your own homeschool right away.
 
The first principle is this: Literary analysis, even at the high school and college levels, is nothing more than recognizing the structural, stylistic and contextual elements that make up a particular story and understanding how an author uses them to make his point. In other words, you analyze a work of literature by examining its structure, style, and context in order to understand its meaning.
 
The second principle is this: All stories, regardless of reading level, have the very same structural, stylistic and contextual elements. In significant ways, that is, all stories look the same.  They all have a setting, for example. Each story takes place in a particular time and location and in a particular social, cultural and economic milieu. All stories have characters as well, of course. Each one features a protagonist, whose effort to accomplish a goal despite various obstacles is the central conflict of the story. All stories describe this event in a plot, which proceeds through phases such as exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. Finally, all stories articulate a theme or main idea that represents the author’s contribution to an intellectual conversation with the reader.
 
There’s no such thing as a story without all of these things. Even bedtime stories, the simplest books in the world, have them all. 
 
If this is so, shouldn’t you be using bedtime stories to teach literary analysis?
 
Think about it: Russell Hoban’s A Bargain for Frances (written for second graders) has all of the same strucutral and stylistic components as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Which story do you think presents these components most clearly? Which story is the most accessible? Which story can you read and discuss in one sitting? In short, which story will best help your tenth grader learn literary analysis?
 
I suggest that all of your students, regardless of age, will be best served by learning to analyze bedtime stories as literature. 
 
This will have at least two powerful benefits. First, the skills your students learn from analyzing bedtime stories are immediately applicable to books at their own reading level, whenever you choose to assign them. Learning to examine well-written children’s literature and read it closely will make better readers out of every student in your home school, regardless of his age. 
 
Second, the use of bedtime stories makes a multi-age classroom a piece of cake. Remember: If literary analysis is learning to recognize and understand the building blocks of stories, and if all stories have essentially the same building blocks, then all kids can learn literary analysis with the same stories, at the same time.
 
Hopefully, this idea can help you to meet the literary needs of all your students simultaneously, freeing up valuable time and energy for other, equally important things!
 
Adam
adam@centerforlit.com