Learning from Literature

There is a link on the sidebar to another great post about The Chronicles of Narnia. In my 5th & 6th grade class, I pointed out one of the reasons The Chronicles are deemed great literature: the themes. C.S. Lewis takes great themes such as obedience, faith, loyalty, duty, and forgiveness, and dresses them up in a moving story. The message gets to our heads and the story gets to our hearts. Children can learn from these stories how to have faith, how to deal with temptation, how to recognize good and evil, and many other treasures of wisdom that they’re not likely to find in the latest Disney movie. If your children lack wise role models, they can still acquire wisdom from the characters found in carefully-chosen works of literature.