‘Parallel Reading’ to Deepen Understanding

There are so many, many ways to teach your children. So many different styles. I recently discovered a way to deepen understanding about history and the world around us using something I call parallel reading.

What it means, really, is that you can choose exactly what you need for your kids. You can choose an educational style that fits your family. Why your family? Your child might be a classical education-kind of kid, but what if you know that you will go crazy with the scheduling and tracking and, oh yeah, learning Latin and Greek? Well, then you have to find a happy middle ground that fits your whole family.

We started our homeschool adventure on the classical education track. Everything was wonderful the first time through the cycle of history and literature. We started with ancients and made it all the way through the three year cycle that took us to modern times. Then when we went back for the middle years version of the ancients, my kids balked. “What? We already know that!”

Yup, they did. They were paying attention, unlike me. I was so busy following the plan that I did not stop to realize that they understood everything I had been teaching. They learned the people and the dates and the places. It was all in there in their minds. We were done with that.

And so we took a trip through myths and fables of the world for a few years, recreating the path blazed by C. S. Lewis. And when it was time to begin high school I had a new plan.

For high school, my kids are revisiting history and literature but this time through the hearts and minds of people who were actually there. I dumped the history texts and anthologies and translations and found primary source material for everything, including science.

Also I realized that for my kids, reading one particular book only until it is complete (like a serial circuit) does not work. My kids, unlike myself, are multi-taskers. They learn better if they are engaged in more things simultaneously. They are parallel learners and thinkers. It can actually be disconcerting to deal with for a slow-minded mom like me, but 2e kids can be that way I am told.

So now we read first person accounts across ALL the time periods at once. This is a parallel way of reading.

The crazy thing is that it ends up feeling like it all fits together. As my children point out, if you read first person accounts from similar time periods this is bound to happen, but sometimes it makes me feel like an accidental genius.

An example is reading John Steinbeck’s Log on the Sea of Cortez side by side with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s arguments against Communism. One is a piece about taking a marine biology expedition down to Mexico, and the other is a series of descriptions of life in Russia. But they reach out and touch one another. Every so often they refer to the same event or idea. The result reinforces the history and ideas for my children in a way that is so much stronger than reading a history text.

You can see we are looking at a wide range of history and across the entire globe. My kids (and I) are filling in details we haven’t learned yet.

Now, what do you do with your children? Do you follow a set educational style, or do you have your own approach?