Name: Thrive! NCHE Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-24T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Winston-Salem, NC

Tagged: literature, read alouds, scheduling, year one

This topic has 5 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 11 months ago by Kayla.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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May 18, 2015 at 12:44 pm
Melissa
Participant
I am working on our schedule for the first year and using the “Planning Your Charlotte Mason Education in 5 Simple Steps” book and DVD. This question is probably addressed in there as it seems incredibly thorough and very helpful, but my head is spinning at the moment and I can’t find the answer. My daughter does not read yet, so I will be reading all of our books out loud. If I have three books chosen as literature read-alouds in term one, am I reading from all three during the week, or reading them back-to-back during the term? Would the same thing apply to other subjects where I am covering more than one book during the term? I see some sample schedules in the book and online, but they are listing subjects rather than the specific book/chapter on each day.
May 18, 2015 at 2:56 pm
butterflylake
Participant
I would say to read the Literature books one after the other, but many other subjects can be spread over the terms. For example we are currently reading Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors throughout the year, and our current novel we read daily until we are finished. Boy of the Pyramids is a chapter book for Module One that we will read daily, and will also count as a literature reading.
Does that make sense?
HTH
Vanessa
May 29, 2015 at 1:47 pm
Leslie
Participant
I’m late to reply to this, but thought I’d add some thoughts.
We enjoy reading more than one literature book at a time. Often I have 2-3 going at a time, and we read one at lunch and one at dinner (and maybe another at bedtime). The kids love looking forward to a certain book at a certain time of day. And we don’t necessarily read every book every day, depending what’s going on in our day. We just keep on until we finish it, slowly savoring the characters and the story and having the suspense of waiting to see what happens next!
For other books, we really spread them out and only read one chapter per week. These are usually the heavier or more stretching books.
Hope that helps!
Leslie
May 29, 2015 at 2:45 pm
eawerner
Participant
There is no right or wrong here. Some prefer to finish one book before starting another. Some like to have more than one going at a time. Take your pick! 🙂
May 29, 2015 at 3:09 pm
Melanie32
Participant
From what I’ve read, Charlotte Mason preferred to have her students spend more time with good books by reading them slowly and spreading them through out a term or a year, and some books were even spread over multiple years! We read our school books (which are the ones I really want my kids to remember) slowly-usually 1 chapter or so a week. My daughter reads from the same book every day for literature until she’s finished it and then moves on to the next one. We also have our just for fun books that we read in the evenings and we read as much as we have time for of those, often gobbling them up in a week or so.
While I agree that there is no right or wrong way to handle this issue, if you are asking how Charlotte Mason handled it, then the answer is that she had her students read their books slowly so that they would have time to savor and digest their readings-to form relationships with them. Therefore, she had her students reading from several books each week.
May 29, 2015 at 8:57 pm
Kayla
Participant
We seem to like having more than one literature book going at a time. Right now we have The Trumpet of the swan 2 days a week and Winnie the Pooh 2 days a week, the days are not always consistent, sometimes it the weekend sometimes it is m/w and t/th, just depends on life. We are also working through the little house books, but alternating those with a different lit book. So that was Little house in the Woods, then Stuart Little, little house, Charlottes Web, little house, trumpet of the swan. This way we don’t burn out on the Ingalls family and it will take us 2 years to make it through them.