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Literary Littles
Reading and Writing in the Little Years and Beyond!
Give your family the foundation of literature in 25 weekly lessons. Develop your child’s narrative and linguistic skills by discussing the books your family is already reading.
Studying literature is simply reading, talking, and asking questions about stories.
As parents, we do this every day when our children bring us their favorite books to read. Literary Littles Elementary Curriculum is designed to give you the tools you need to guide your literary littles in intentional, thoughtful conversations about stories.
Reading and telling stories is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human. It is a central cornerstone of communication, learning, and growing. When children listen to stories, they absorb the patterns and structures of language and narrative, a prerequisite for the development of ordered and critical thinking.
The heart of this program takes essential questions that writers and professors use and makes them accessible to very young children. By asking thoughtful questions over and over again, children learn the patterns of questions and the mental skills of considering answers. When we give children the vocabulary to begin talking about what they are reading, they can begin to synthesize ideas and defend their ideas with evidence. Essentially, we can teach them the foundational elements of critical thinking and rhetoric from earliest childhood.
The primary goals of studying literature at any level is not really to make sure that our students understand Chaucer or Shakespeare, as wonderful as that is, but rather to teach their brains how to read hard texts, to analyze, and synthesize information, and perhaps, to learn something about the human condition along the way. So while this program does teach literary vocabulary, the primary emphases is on making abstract concepts accessible and engaging.
My hope is that in sharing this curriculum with your family, you will be encouraged and equipped to have meaningful conversations with your children, and that your discussions may be rich and rewarding.
Literary Littles aligns with the Classical philosophy.
This curriculum emphasizes a deep enjoyment of literature as we create habits of thoughtful engagement and response. Because of the depth and richness of the ideas presented here, this curriculum can be used in a cyclical fashion — each time you return to repeat the lessons with your children, their take-away will be more complex as their level of thinking grows and develops.
Literary Littles aligns with the Charlotte Mason philosophy.
The provided book lists help to direct families to the highest quality children’s literature of the modern and contemporary eras, and the lessons are designed to be used with the books your family is already reading. New concepts are presented with beautiful illustrations that capture children’s imaginations and invite them to feast on the richness of good literature.
Literary Littles aligns with the Montessori philosophy.
Each unit is introduced with a set of story cards. These cards are laid out on a rug one at a time as new ideas are introduced. These cards can be displayed in a basket, and a child can review the lesson independently by laying out the cards to recreate the story. The essential questions used during reading are also presented on cards that a child can access. Kinesthetic elements and activities make abstract concepts more accessible to young children.