Deconstructing Penguins: A Review

One among many homeschooling goals I have is to help my children become thinkers: to be able to engage a book, movie, lecture or any other aspect of culture and discerningly embrace the good, noble and redeemable from that which is false or ungodly. I realize this road I desire to lead my children down is one I have just begun to journey myself as I was not given these tools in my education.

I was your typical memorize and regurgitate the facts kind of kid. I would figure out just what the teachers wanted from me in order to get the grade I desired, and unfortunately thinking was rarely a part of the equation. Specifically, when it came to reading I was typically given a book and then asked to do a report or answer a series of basic comprehension questions – again, no real thinking, just spitting out facts.

In comes Desconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids and the Bond of Reading. This book is an account of the authors’ experiences leading literature discussion groups with second through fourth graders at their local library. In these groups they taught the participants (and through them, now us) how to determine the protagonist and antagonist, analyze the setting, identify the climax and ultimately to discover the hidden meaning in a book. And all this was done with seven through nine year olds! In addition they showed the children how to “grade” the author: Did s/he achieve his/her objectives and did they break any rules doing so? There is also a wonderful chapter (possibly my favorite) on poetry.

I learned these terms (protagonist, antagonist, climax, setting…) in school and probably was even tested over the material in a “match the word to its definition kind of way”. Unfortunately, I was never taught that most books (at least most good ones) have great underlying themes that I could discover on my own using these elements as a type of road map. I thought the protagonist was simply the good guy and the antagonist the bad guy, and the main significance of the setting was to identify what genre of literature I was reading. After reading this book I feel much better prepared to walk my children a little farther on down the road to becoming real thinkers and I will be journeying right along beside them!

If you could use some help teaching your children how to do real and meaningful literature analysis then read Desconstructing Penguins! You won’t be sorry. Also, leave a comment if you have other books you can recommend that would help me on my journey to become a thinker. I’d love to add a few to my wishlist for Christmas. Next, I'll be reading Mortimer Adler's classic, How to Read a Book.