Literature

My kids and I are always reading!!

We read books for fun: "The Tale of Despereaux" by Kate DiCamillo-- we are having a hard time reading this one right now because Kurt wants to listen too!

We listen to books in the car: I almost always have an audio book for us to listen to, mostly because I don't want my kids listening to the radio all the time. We have times when we do listen to the radio, just to let everyone know they aren't completely sheltered, but when I turned on NPR the other day and the discussion was about sex services (nude house cleaning- isn't that just creepy?) found on Craig's list, I thought "What else can we listen to?" and thankfully we had a book! We just finished "The Vacation" by Polly Horvath, which I will review on my book blog soon, and we just started "Charlotte's Web" which we have read/listened to so many times I'm starting to have it memorized.

And we read books for school:
1. Chapter Book: We are currently reading/listening to "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" by Howard Pyle. We read one chapter a week, over three days.
2. Fairy Tales: We are reading "The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde" by Osacr Wilde- I found a great version illustrated by Michael Hague at a yard sale for a couple dollars- yard sales and thrift stores are my friends :) We read a couple of these a week.
3. Shakespeare: I know what your thinking- HOW? We are reading/listening to "Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare" by Edith Nesbit. Here is an awesome website- "Shakespeare for Kids" which lists tons of online resources for reading Shakespeare with kids. My favorite part? The Librivox free online audio recordings of the book!! We use this with so many of our books- anytime they have one we are reading. We are using it with Robin Hood right now too. We only do a couple Shakespeare stories a month.
4. Poetry: We use Ambleside Online's poetry selections because they are grouped together and free!! So our selections for this year are on the Year 2 Booklist- We are reading Christina Rossetti right now. I also pick a poem each month for us to memorize, which is on the sidebar- "The Falling Star" by Sara Teasdale.
5. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan- Now this is one of those classics often recommended by other homeschooolers, its on both curriculum lists that I use (Ambleside & Milestone's), but when we started reading it at the beginning of this school year, none of us were very interested in it, so I stopped and figured we'd pick it up in later school years. But I think we are going to give it another shot using the Librivox recordings. I can be a horrible read-aloud-er (??), especially with books I'm not familiar with and those that have an older style, which describes this book. So hopefully with someone else reading we may come to enjoy this, we'll see.
6. And of course we read books for other subjects too! Morning Devotional, Phonics, History, Science, Nature, Geography, and so on.

Happy Reading to Everyone!!