February Read Alouds

Making our way through the big beautiful volume of all of the Narnia books which my parents gave to Peter for Christmas....

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian (finished today)

January Read Alouds

We STILL haven't finished listening to
Hans Brinker on cd, but we will by the end of the month!
I had to take a break from it though so we just read

The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis
Willy's Trunk (Lamplighter)

and tomorrow we'll start our second time through
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

November and December Read Alouds

I have to admit, Hans Brinker has taken us FOREVER. It moves pretty slow so I often can't handle reading it for long. We coninued to plug away at it.

October read alouds

I really was planning on posting our books each month and here I am way behind! In October we had several weeks of fighting a nasty cold with a lingering cough so we did very little reading. We read a

biography on Martin Luther and started

Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.

We had learned some things about the Netherlands for History so I thought Hans would be a good read. And it is a neat story and really teaches a lot about the culture and life of Holland, but it is SLOW going! I was thrilled to find that the library has it on cd.

September Read Alouds

For the month of September these are the books we enjoyed together-

The Village of Noisy Children by Astrid Lindgren (the author of Pippi Longstocking)
Mrs Piggle Wiggle by Betsy McDonald

Circle Time

This school year we've started a new routine. Each morning when breakfast and chores are complete we have "circle time." The children and I gather in the living room and I read several things to them, we discuss a little, and we sing a hymn or two. They're still learning how to do this without moving off their carpet square and without whining about who sits next to me (there is a weekly rotation, but it never fails that a certain little girl cries because she doesn't understand how it works!). We begin circle time with prayer. The children take turns praying for our school day. Then we read. These are the things we are reading:

First, a few Bible verses. I read the same passage every day for the month. As they hear it over and over, they memorize it and they say it with me. Now that Sunday school is back in session we'll also use this time to practice their memory work. And for Classical Conversations they are learning Ephesians 6 so we'll go over that as well.

Next I read a section from the Heidelberg Catechism.

Then we read a couple of pages from this book

After that, I read a page from a book in this series:

If everyone is still with me I like to read some of this. It's a beautiful book that I borrowed from the church library, but will have to buy one of these days because it's going to take awhile to get through.

I look forward to the day when the little ones have gotten so used to this that we can all really enjoy our time of sitting together and learning from this treasury of books!

Looking Back at our Books

One of my favorite things to do with the kids is read to them while they draw or fold laundry or just relax. I really wish I had kept track of all the books we've read. I decided to make a list of all of the ones I can remember and I'm also going to try to remember to add new ones as we read them.

various Aesop's fables
various Greek myths
Charlotte's Web
Stuart Little
Trumpet of the Swan
Summer with the Moody's
Indian in the Cupboard
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Boy and the Samurai
The Hundred Dresses (to Kate)
Little House on the Prairie
Black Beauty
Misty of Chincoteague
Sarah Plain and Tall
Caddie Woodlawn
A Cote of Many Colors
The Inheritance(Lamplighter)
Hedge of Thorns (Lamplighter)
Buried in the Snow (Lamplighter)
The White Knights (Lamplighter)
Ten Boys Who Made History