Thursday, January 24, 2013

A cry for Help!

I have a dilemma... My children are missing something.... It's called Literature!  haha!  Seriously though, it's that time of year again where I go crazy trying to figure out what the heck I am going to teach them next year.  "I" is going to be in Grade ONE this coming fall!  He's breezing through his kindergarten year.  He's already reading small books and doing addition and subtraction like a pro.

This year I am taking a more classical approach to their language arts and history programs.  In order to do this, I need to get my hands on some classic books.  I would love to own these books so that I don't have to scramble around looking for them for the upcoming kids.  So I created a book list, researched them all online for prices and found that some of them I can't even buy anymore.  The ones that I can buy will get pretty expensive if I have to buy them all new. 

So then I had an idea... what if some of my lovely friends and families had some of these books just laying around not being used?  What if those said friends and family members would love to get rid of those books for a small price.  I am going to put my book list out there and hope that someone somewhere has at least a few of them and is willing to let me take them off their hands.    I will try to link as many of the books to Chapters or Amazon as I can so that you can see which versions I need.  Keep in mind that these books are going to be read to a 6, 8 and 11 year old so the versions that I need have to be adapted for those ages.  Here goes!!

Book list
Stories and Poems by, about or from…

Ancients  

The Odyssey by Geraldine McCaughrean
Pandora by Robert Burleigh
Pegasus by Marianna Mayer
An IllustratedTreasury of Read-Aloud Myths and Legends by Joan C Verniero and Robin Fitsimmons
Favorite GreekMyths by Mary Pope Osborne
Aesop’s Fables
Anything about Plato
Anything about Aristotle
Anything about Confucius
The Five ChineseBrothers by Claire Bishop
Ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry
Anything about Cicero or Virgil
Traditional Irish Fairy Tales by James Stevens

Medieval/Early Renaissance 

Beowulf: A NewTelling by Robert Nye
The CanterburyTales by Geoffrey Chaucer (retold by Geraldine McCaughrean)
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (Translated by Nevill Coghill)
Dante’s Inferno (Translated by Robert Pinsky)
Saint George andthe Dragon by Edmund Spenser (retold by Geraldine McCaughrean)
The Sword and theCircle by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Boy’s KingArthur by Thomas Malory
The Sword in theStone by T.H. White
Le Morte D’Arthur (Audiobook version read by Derek Jacobi)
Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield



Late Renaissance/Early Modern  
John Milton
Perrault's Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.  adapted by James Riordan
Pilgram’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo and Marc Cerasini
The ThreeMusketeers by Alexander Dumas and Debbie Felder
Songs of Innocence by William Blake
William Wordsworth
Jane Austen
Poetry for Young People by Lord Tennyson Alfred 
The Pied Piper ofHamelin by Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Grimms Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens  (Illustrated by Dean Morrissey)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Monica Kulling
Christina Rossetti (Children’s poems)
Through theLooking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Any stories by Mark Twain
Last of theMohicans by James Fenimore Cooper  (or any of his novels)
Any novels by Jules Verne especially 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Norwegian FolkTales by Peter Asbjrnsen


So there it is.. there you have it... If you could be so kind as to look on your bookshelves for any of these books, Please contact me through email, facebook or comment on this post!