Several Read-alouds: Encouragement needed

Does your DS (in K) like to do things while you read? I find my kids, especially my boys, shock me by what they hear as I read when they are coloring or doing legos quietly. I used to think they were not listening, but then was so surprised to hear what they remembered. My sister’s girls love to sit and will sit for a long time as she reads, my kids like to be doing something with their hands quietly as I read.

I struggle with too many books going at once, it is a personal thing. I struggle with reading more than one book at a time for pleasure, so with school it has taken some time to adjust 🙂 What if instead of the extra bed time story you do some of the school books – history, burgess book, family literature book… It would keep those rotations a bit fresher on the mind for little ones and might not feel like quite as much going on

Also wanted to mention, last year my DD was in 2nd and my older son in K. I did not “require” him to sit in for readings for school. I would tell him “We are going to read …. do you want to join us?” Sometimes he did and other times he did not. At the beginning of the year he sat less for readings, but over the year he started to join us more and more. I knew that the information would come back around again, so was not concerned with him joining us for everything.

I had images of us snuggling on the couch to read, but that did not happen how I thought it would, but we are enjoying reading and learning and that is what matters 🙂 We also have a toddler, so yes rading time is always adjusting

Oh and we don’t have any books that we read just a chapter a week. I try to do at least two times/week or my kids have a tougher time engaging and getting interested in the books. If I can read them at least twice a week it keeps them fresh in their minds and they tend to be more excited about the reading.

I think “detached” is a perfect word to explain it, Angie!

I think I just found the perfectly worded reason for not doing more than 3 read alouds per week.  I think I’ll put our Paddle reading in with our Winnie the Pooh / Victory on the Walls / Brighty when one of those is done.

I’m marking this thread as a favorite, to remind me when I am tempted to “spread the feast”.  I guess there is such a thing as being spread too thinly.

Michelle – I wonder if by reading, say 3 books each week (instead of 5 or 6), you’d be done those books quicker.  So, you’d start new books to replace those original 3.  That way, you’d fit your composer bio (or whatever) into a term – it just wouldn’t take all the weeks of the term to read it.

Did that make sense?

I’m starting to wonder if we’re maybe translating “spreading the feast” as “graze all day – eat a bite here and a bite there, all day long.”.  Rather than eat all the appetizer, eat all the salad, eat all the main course, eat all the dessert.  Then digest.  Then eat the next meal.

I find that in my family, we sometimes like to hear two or three chapters – instead of just one.  It seems like we enjoy our books more when we spend quantity time with them – time in a clump, not spread out over days or weeks.

I can see value both ways – which leads me to think there’s got to be an “ideal” middle ground.  Solidifying it in my mind is the tricky part!

Hi again, ladies.  I had a reply all written the other day, then I got side-tracked by the kids, and suddenly it vanished – sorry!  To the point on “how, then, do we spread the feast”…

Basically what I decided for my family is that I would spread the feast over the length of a “term” instead of over a week long list of books.  In making this decision, I also began to think of my term as having two distinct parts, as follows: 

The first 9 weeks of the term we have:

– Literature, History and Science. 

– Literature is read daily. 

– History read on Mon/ Tues/Thurs/Fri. 

– Science read on Tues/Wed/Fri  – or –  Mon/Wed/Thurs  (depending on when we have outside activities..I just pick whichever day(s) make sense). 

After the nine week “term” is finished, the next 3 weeks we move to our mini-term schedule:

-we put down our History and Science books altogether. 

-we continue with Literature, just carrying on as usual, 5 x per week. 

-we do Shakespeare 3x/wk and Poetry, 2x/wk (simply reading and reciting poetry, not necessarily a Poet Study).  

-Ideally, we do a composer study.  I say “ideally” because the goal is to have a composer from the period of history that we’d just been studying.  This is fairly important to me, because – it if works –  it means we aren’t really “leaving” history…we were just studying it in a different way for three weeks, and not referencing our spine while doing so.    If I don’t have resources for a composer from the period we have recently been studying, then we do one of two things:  option 1:  hymn study.  I do this by asking our Church Music Director for a list of the hymns we’ll be singing over the next three weeks (3 per Sunday) and we focus on these.  Option 2:  choose a composer from a period we studied previously and in the study, enjoy the music (of course!) and, while reading the biography, compare “life” in that period with “life” in the period of our current study….nothing formal, just fun things that we pick out (you can tell I’m a history geek, eh?)

– Artist Study, 2x per week, same rules apply as above with composer study.  I rotate six images over the three week term and if we manage to get a good resource for a biography, I’ll divide the book into six readings.  If we don’t have an artist that fits our period, but there is a poet who fits decently, then we’ll do a true Poetry Study instead, complete with a biography of the Poet, etc.

For our family, this mini-term at the end of each main term works well for the spreading of the feast.  It’s a little bit of work organizing it, but I only have to do it 3x per year.  The frequency per reading is a good amount within each area and again, it seems to mean that the content stays top of mind for the kids the whole time because there’s never a “gap” of a week between hearing the next chapter of a biography, a Shakespearean play or what have you.  I can honestly say at the end of these three week mini-terms my kids come out feeling refreshed!  Cultured!  Feeling artsy!  Ready to get back down to the business of our core history and science.   In getting back to business, I like that I only have the ONE day of preparing a really decent “recap” from our history and science, we spend one day just doing the recap – expect nothing else – and then we’re back on track.  That is a good thing because I really didn’t like the constantly recapping when we were doing things the other way. 

Hope this helps some of you, and thanks to everyone else for all the ideas too, we can all share and benefit from what’s here! 

Blessings,

Angie

PS -to mama_nickles – yes, I would do as you suggest.  Or, if it were me and I’m on the term outline I follow (above), I’d keep history daily (or 4x per week) and do ONLY science for 9 weeks and then only geography for 9 weeks.  I guess it sort of depends on how you’re doing geography.  It’s not really required to be done rigorously for early elementary.  Another thing I’ve done – and again, it’s going to depend on your geography resource (I use only living books)  — I would do science 3x per week, and geography 3x week, scheduling one of the geography reading for Saturday (gasp!)…and not requiring a narration for the Saturday (which, to me, is not a deal breaker).  He’s still narrating his geography book 2x per week, still (I assume) doing map drill.  Incorporating this idea, you get to have all three subjects (Hist., Sci., and Geo.) and ALL read at the kind of frequency that I think keeps it “fresh”.  It just takes a kid being willing to sit for a 15 minute reading on a Saturday.  The schedule would be:  History, Mon/Tues/Thurs/Fri;  Science, Mon/Wed/Fri;  and Geogr. Tues/Thurs/Sat.   To be honest, I’ve done this schedule quite a bit over the years…(mind you, my kids don’t have any other Saturday activites, i.e. outside the house, so it probably makes it easier for us….every family different, just thought perhaps this idea might help someone out there.)  Blessings!  Angie

Angelina, thanks for posting the routine your family follows.  Like many people posting here, my children and I prefer more intense focus on fewer things at a time (instead of spreading many subjects thinly over time).  I’ve been playing around with ways I can arrange our time to better facilitate our own learning style but nothing seemed right.  Your routine is just the thing I needed to read to inspire a way to make that work for us.  Thanks!