Both Lit. and read-aloud?

Well, I do both. Our ‘literature’ read aloud is what I think of as children’s classics, and we read at night before bed and usually in the morning when they wake up as well. It is a peaceful start to our day. We do not usually narrate these, although we may discuss them. The ‘reading’ we do now is from Grimm’s Fairy Tales – she chooses one a day to read and narrate and illustrate in her journal. Then of course we are reading other books pertaining to science and history and picture study and whatever, and sometimes those are read aloud and sometimes independent reading, and always with some form of narration.

My daughter is 8 years old, and the line between ‘literature’ and ‘reading’ is not well defined, but I suppose if the child were younger and working on the mechanics of reading, it would be more clear. I’m sure I’ll see this happen as the 4 year old starts to read (I hope).

Gem

Well, Christina, we started this year (our first year homeschooling, by the way, so don’t get any ideas about these being tried and true methods, we are just flying by the seats of our pants LOL) with a waldorf inspired packaged curriculum, and the reader was a book of fairy tales(which I no longer use since I figured out that they are abridged) and their exercise was to read 3 per week, narrate or retell the story, write 3 sentences about it and make an illustration in their Main Lesson Book. Now, the MLB is a waldorf thing, but it is what I am calling a journal. Ours is like a big square sketchbook and I ordered it from Paper Scissors Stone, a waldorf art supplies provider.

My daughter is a fluent reader, but not wanting to read recreationally. She would rather play – and since one of my goals for my children now that they are out of public school is to increase time for self directed play, this is fine. I just want her to read each day. So, since she was already used to the DEAR time at school (Drop Everything And Read, a special 15 minute time when the whole school reads independently and no classrooms could be disturbed) I started that at home with chapter books. It just wasn’t feeling right, and what I was hoping would happen – she would get engrossed in a book and want to read on her own time – never happened.

So I’ve switched to my old Grimm’s Fairy tales, and replaced the three sentences that she was to compose with copywork from the story (that I choose, usually just one line) and cursive practice (usually the title of the story). She narrates the story to me and then illustrates it in the MLB. That is kind of her reward for all the hard work, because she loves to draw.

The fairy tales are short, but challenging. I try to do this each day, but in reality it is probably more like four days a week. I don’t demand anything from her as far as the pictures go, but I do this as our final sit-down activity of the day or else she will spend so long on the picture that I have to make her stop to do other work.

Whenever I can, I do additional segments of independent reading throughout the week, like a short book from the library for science or history, but only if is appropriate for the lesson. But I usually read these books aloud. And my new idea for getting her to read aloud is to use the one minute mysteries – I have a sample for science and math, and if this works out I will order the books. She reads the mystery aloud and we try to solve it together, then read the solution. She hates to read aloud!

Anyway – this is probably more than anyone wants to know about our reading practice! I have faith that the desire to read on her own for fun will come.

Good luck! Gem