Literary Child (emagazine) Review - Eclectic Homeschool Online

Once your child is reading well, you may prefer to skip typical reading instruction and instead have your child read excellent children's literature. You're then faced with either eliminating entirely extra activities to accompany the reading or finding your own resources to supplement the books you choose. Literary Child's book of the month literary activity magazine may well be the easy solution to the problem. It's available on a subscription basis or you may purchase individual issues or three-pack bundles. As of November 2006, there were ten issues available with new issues available each month.

Each issue focuses on one book, which are most often classics, old and new, read by upper elementary or junior high school students. My sample issue offered activities for accompanying by Kate DiCamillo. Most of the activities were various forms of word puzzles such as word search, crossword, and word jumble. Additional activities included uncoloring, writing a poem, writing a fairy tale, and a mad libs style story. These are all standard fare, their value being in their convenience. The family fun, crafts, games, recipes, and doing more sections offered the most creative ideas. For example, in the same issue there were activities for doing fairy tale improv, drawing to music, making your own flower garland crown, and a rope game that has you using a rope much as Gregory the jailer did in the book. You can plan a soup luncheon fixing one or more of the four soup recipes in the issue. Soup plays an important role in The Tale of Despereaux. An answer key is provided for all the activities.

Literary Guide is not a replacement for an academically oriented literature guide. Issues do not include discussion questions, vocabulary lists, or literary analysis activities. The activities provided are meant to engage young readers in the books they are reading by providing fun activities, not academic content. If you have a child who is especially fond of word puzzles or crafting or game playing that ties in with their studies, then Literary Guide is a good resource for you.

Each issue is emailed to subscribers the first week of the month. At $5.50 per issue, either as an ongoing subscription or for back issues, each Literary Guide issue is a bargain. Since these are e-magazines, you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader to read and print the pages. Each issue comes in Adobe pdf format. The file size for The Tale of Despereaux issue was 556 KB.