Creation Curriculum: "God Made the World & Me" Review

What is even more exciting right now than getting free books? Getting free educational materials! This book, God Made the World & Me by David and Helen Haidle and Susan Laurita is a 13 lesson curriculum unit on the Creation Story. It goes hand in hand with the book I reviewed a few weeks ago: The Creation Story for Children. You can read my review for that book in the post before this one.

Anyway - I have read through this curriculum and I will definitely be using it. Though most of the material is preschool-oriented, I may even use some of the ideas now with my 2-year old. And I felt that the material would scale well - you could use this with older kids (not tons older, but definitely anywhere in the 3-7 range), which would be nice if you had two children in that age range and wanted to use the same curriculum for both of them.

Pros:
-Cross curriculum activities. For example, each lesson has ideas for a Physical Center, Science Center,  and Art Center. Each lesson has songs that you can sing with the kids, a memory verse, and quite a few game ideas. Each lesson also has at least one Older Children idea and one idea for Younger Children, which helps to make the curriculum scale well depending on the age of your children.

-There is a parent note for each lesson if you were to be using this in a larger classroom as a teacher.

-There are discussion questions for each lesson.

-There are extras for each lesson as well if the other ideas aren't enough to keep you busy.

-I like that they have large group vs. individual instructions for some of the activities. I also like that there are often multiple options for the same type of activity (e.g. two art options in Lesson 2, two physical options in Lesson 3).

Con:
-The only thing that I found to be a con was that there was a graph that the kids were supposed to make during the week for Lesson 2, and I thought it would have been nice if the curriculum had a sample graph for the kids/parents to look at. I know that it would be an easy thing to figure out, but I'm so very visual and graphs are not my strong suit.

Overall, this seems like a great, hands-on, curriculum that is very cross-curricular. It's not just a set of science lesson plans, it also includes art and music, PE, critical thinking, some writing, and it is not at all just a workbook. It is very home-school oriented, but I like that it would also be very easy to use in a classroom full of kids. This is definitely something I will use with my children.

Many thanks to New Leaf Publishing Group for providing this curriculum for review. The FTC requires that I inform you that NLPG did not ask for a positive review, merely an honest one. Therefore, I like NLPG more than I like the FTC... but I also like not being fined... so I include the disclaimer as ordered.

School Reading

I was just perusing facebook and a status update caught my eye. It concerned "Summer Reading" for high schoolers and the change from 10-15 years ago. Summer reading when I was in high school consisted of such books as:

Dracula - Bram Stoker
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

And so on and so forth.

Today, apparently, we have authors such as Nicholas Sparks (gag me), Tom Clancy, Jodi Picoult, and John Grisham on the summer reading list.

Now, I'm not saying that one is better than the other (although I am a tad bit biased against Nick... sorry. Romance just isn't my preferred reading genre... and I really hated The Notebook (movie version)).

The question that all this raises, however, is not the one you may think it is. The question is: who makes the decision that certain books are "better" than others for academic reading? Why do we place such importance on a book like The Scarlet Letter or The Hobbit or even Romeo and Juliet?

Having been an English teacher, where I had the ability to write my own curriculum a few times, I know what the criteria was for the books I picked for my students to read. They had to be well-written. They had to be age-level appropriate. They had to have good themes to discuss. They had to be good examples of literature. They had to be books I enjoyed reading (because I wasn't about to ask my students to read and discuss a book I found boring or obscene). But what is the criteria that makes something a school "Standard"? Why are some books just taken for granted to be on the reading list and others not? Especially in public high schools? I can understand a Christian school choosing books that have themes of morality and ethics, but in a society where we want to kick God out of the schools, we can't have it both ways. We can't say, "No pledge of allegiance or prayer in schools" and then choose a book like "The Scarlet Letter" because it addresses the sin of adultery (well, without God, what makes adultery a sin?) that's a double standard. That's saying that we want God gone, but we want to keep some of His rules.

Er. Ahem. Tangent.

So, back to my question: what makes some books acceptable and not others? Because if Nick Sparks is allowable, then that means Stephanie Meyers is not far behind... and while I liked the Twilight books,  I don't think they're academically viable options. The big problem that I face with this whole question is... I'd LOVE to teach a course on Fantasy fiction. I think there are books out there that are academically sound.

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
The Death Gate Cycle - Weis and Hickman
Perelandra - C.S. Lewis
The Icarus Hunt - Timothy Zahn
The Giver - Lois Lowry
Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
The King Raven Trilogy - Stephen R. Lawhead
Inkheart - Cornelia Funke
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
even
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton (more sci-fi than fantasy, I'll grant you)

and of course, those are just a few. But even when we add "popular fiction" to the list of school reading material, these books are not considered. These books are what my jr. English teacher would have referred to as "high class trash." Why? Because they're "genre fiction." Genre fiction is getting a bad rap and has gotten a bad rap for years. Why? Because it's actually something people enjoy reading? Because it deals with fictional settings and creatures? If that were the case then we wouldn't teach mythology in English classes either. Only a few authors (Lewis and Tolkien) have managed to break through the hoity-toity English teachers' association and onto the school reading lists. While I knee jerk away from anything on the NY Times best seller list, I also don't think popularity is a good reason not to read a book.

So, if the standard for high school reading is that they only read the classics, and "classics" are defined as being popular only after the author is long dead then Shakespeare and Dickens definitely shouldn't be allowed in the classroom. If having literary merit is the definition, then I don't believe Jodi Picoult should be on the list (her being the only author on the previous list that I've read, I can't speak to the other three). And if telling a good story in a new and different way is the only standard then why do we revolve around the 10 books or so that seem to be the only books that are ever on the list (Dickens, Bronte, Austen, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Twain)? Are they really the only authors who have managed to tell a compelling story in a new and different way while intertwining literary genius into their stories? Dickens (and for that matter, Shakespeare) weren't even really novelists - how does that affect the standard? Especially when we start teaching their writings as "books" in the classroom? What is the criteria? What should the criteria be? Should we even consider *gasp* whether or not a student may want to read the book? Should promoting a love of reading be on the list of criteria? I think it should. I don't think it should be the only criteria though. And I don't think that, plus being on the NY Times bestseller list should bump a book to the reading list either. But what should the criteria be? English, being a subjective subject already, is hard to pin down, hard to define. What makes something a good book and therefore worth reading, especially for academic reading, may be even harder to define...

Questions? Comments? Smart Remarks?

Anybody have an opinion?