Homeschooling High School: The Slow Read

Reading together has been a touchstone in all of our years of homeschooling. As our kids have entered high school we’ve embarked on some spectacular slow reads together.

In 2023 we read War and Peace together as a read along. The book just happens to have 360 chapters, so we read a short chapter each day. A few times we got behind because of travel or other responsibilities. We used a combination of audiobooks, ebooks, and printed books in 3 different translations. We read together with Simon at Footnotes and Tangents. It was such a wonderful experience that at the end of the year, my daughter turned to the first page and began the book again in 2024. It’s been a real pleasure to get to revisit the story through her narrations! The kids even dressed up as the Rostov siblings for Halloween.

In 2024 we read The Divine Comedy and The Brothers Karamazov. Again, we each read separately and then talked about what we were reading. These books don’t split so cleanly as the Tolstoy, but we still kept the pace quite slow. If I were reading the books on my own, I would have plowed ahead. The more measured pace was a wonderful help with these meaty books! It meant that I could be reading other, lighter books at the same time. And having that variety helped my reading stamina.

We’re going to a local Russian restaurant to celebrate Dostoyevsky’s birthday (and sample the horseradish vodka!) before we begin our next year long reading project. In 2025 we are stepping away from Russian literature to tackle Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. It’s such a thick novel! I think it’s longer than War and Peace! We’ve done our research on translations, have a guide for the reading, and even a podcast to listen to along the way.

Reading slowly together is a wonderful gift in high school. It builds a common culture in the family at just the time when externals might pull us in different directions.