HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS Invisibility—is it a blessing or a curse? According to Irish legend, wearing green makes you invisible to leprechauns and their pinches and tricks. But wearing green is not the only way to become invisible. The scientist Griffin, in H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, makes himself invisible by experimenting with formulas and…
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS Mr. George McWhirter Fotheringay doesn’t believe in miracles. At least, that’s what H. G. Wells tells us in his short story “The Man Who Could Work Miracles.” First published in 1898, it tells of a man who didn’t believe in miracles but ended up doing some anyway. One day, Mr. Fotheringay argues…
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS You are a doctor, and you have been told that you must assist a patient with their suicide. If you don’t you will be breaking the law. Doctors in some American states, in Quebec, and in some Scandinavian countries are facing this increasingly ethical dilemma: Help patients kill themselves or be punished….
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS You’re writing your essay and everything’s going great until you realize you need to let readers know where you got a certain fact. You aren’t using a bibliography, footnotes, or works cited page because this is just an essay, not a report or research paper. You don’t want to plagiarize. Putting someone…
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS Many exciting stories have come from scientific ponderings. Take, for instance, Frankenstein. It was written by Mary Shelley while the scientific world debated the idea of reanimation. Could something dead, a frog, perhaps, be reanimated by electricity? And if a frog could be brought back to life, what about a human? And…
Choosing a literature program for your teens isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and neither are actually having the class and getting them to read the books. Making these tasks even harder, I’ve found, is that homeschool moms and co-op teachers often have some ideas about literature that sabotage all their good efforts.
Read the rest of this article to see if you have avoided believing these three myths about homeschool literature.
You know that boring description in that last book you read for school? No, wait. You didn’t read it. You skipped the description because it was so dull. It’s time to fix that. Here’s a paragraph from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Notice the specific and powerful verbs he uses to keep this description of refugees moving along:
There were sad, haggard women tramping by, well dressed, with children that cried and stumbled, their dainty clothes smothered in dust, their weary faces smeared with tears. . . . There were sturdy workmen thrusting their way along, wretched, unkempt men, clothed like clerks or shop-men, struggling spasmodically.
