Review and Giveaway: Any Novel Study Guide

You know all those little study guides you can buy to go with novels? Have you ever thought about how much you'd spend on all those guides over the course of your kids' high school career? Sheila Gregory thought of it...and she decided to come up with a better solution -- a study guide that could be used with any novel. Since I have a soon-to-be high schooler who'll be doing several lit classes, I was so excited when Sheila gave me the opportunity to review her Any Novel Study Guide and to give one away!


I was really impressed with the Any Novel Study Guide.  It's a .pdf download that comes in four parts:  the student guide, student charts, parent guide, and optional marking scheme (that's a grading chart for those of us in the U.S.) and is designed for middle and high school students.


The student guide walks the student through each step of studying a novel.  It's broken into four weeks, with the first three weeks for reading the novel, taking notes and studying it, and the last week for looking at the novel's themes.  Each week is further broken down into assignments for each of the five days, with the fifth day of each week being a project day.


The first day begins with showing the student how to figure out how much they'll have to read each day to complete the book in three weeks and an overview of what they can expect from the study guide and teaches them how to set up a notebook and organize their work.  As they go along through subsequent days, students learn additional skills in analyzing the novel and its characters, finding the theme, and expressing what they're discovering.


I love how the study guide takes into account a variety of learning styles and preferences.  The project days offer three different options:  one for the more analytical learner, one for the creative learner and one for the literary learner.  There's even a handy chart so that students can easily find the option that would most likely interest them.


The student charts section provides the student with a variety of helpful tools to organize their thoughts concerning the main characters, the minor characters and the novel them.


My favorite section of Any Novel Study Guide is the parent guide.  It's one of the most parent-friendly resources I've seen in awhile.  The parent guide is broken down by week and day just like the student guide.  Each day tells you exactly what your student will be working on that day an offers handy tips on how to help your student get the most out of each assignment.  It made following up each day with my reluctant reader/writer simple.


Finally, there is the optional grading guide.  I chose not to grade my daughter's work on this first novel, since we were both getting a feel for how the guide worked and she was just learning how to really analyze a novel. However, the guide offers a detail, objective, and fair grading scale that looks at the mechanics, the assignment, and the style of the overall project, as well as suggestions for grading the daily work.


Overall, I was very pleased with Any Novel Study Guide and we will definitely use it again for future novel studies.  I'm not sure that we'd use it for every one since the material in the study guide would always be the same, but we will certainly use the basic premise.  I didn't have my daughter do all of the assignments toward the end of the guide, simply because I knew they would be overwhelming to her, at this sage, but I like that  this means she'll have room to grow with the study guide.


If you'd like to win a copy of the Any Novel Study Guide, simply leave me a comment telling me you'd like to win.  I'll draw a winner, at random, on Friday, September 4.  Please make sure that you include a way for me to contact you in your comment since I'll be contacting the winner via email.  Entries without contact information will be disqualified
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