Read Alouds

From the time Grace was small I have read to her. In the beginning because she couldn't read herself, then when we have challenging books for our school curriculum, but mostly to share fun books. I love to read. I will read anything: magazines, blogs, Internet articles, catalogs, non fiction, fiction and of course the Bible. With as much reading as I have done independently and with Grace you would think that Grace would have also caught the reading bug. But it is not so. Occasionally she will find a series of books that she wants to pick up and read for pleasure. For example I started us on the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan and she finished all of them on her own as well as his new series, The Lost Hero's. Now that she is older I require more reading from her during the day for her school work which in turn makes her really not want to pick up any other books during the day for pleasure reading. Here is what she reads independently each day for herself:

• History - The Golden Goblet (Ancient Egyptian History), Bible, Oxford's First Ancient History, and Pharaoh's of Ancient Egypt (Of course not all on the same day)


• Literature - Right now she is finishing up The Hobbit


• Science - Galen and the Gateway to Medicine

Even though she is reading quite a bit each day I still want us to enjoy some fun books together. About three days a week I read several chapters from a pleasure book for us. Since the beginning of the summer we have been working our way through Peter and the Starcatchers series. Today we finished the third book Peter and the Secret of Rundoon. This series takes you through all the back history of Peter Pan. The authors take alot of liberties with explaining where all the characters came from and what their back stories all. It is all great fun. Great series! Can't recommend it enough. Grace loves read aloud time. She says the reason she enjoys me reading the story is because I read each character with inflection and she can really visualize the story. She normally does her drawing art challenge for the day while I am reading. We have two more books in the series to finish before jumping to something else. I am looking at a series that starts with Theodosia and Th Serpents of Chaos. This series is about a young girl whose parents are archaeologists that specialize with ancient Egyptian artifacts. This would actually go great with our year long study in History of the beginning of history through Ancient Egypt. The other books in the series include: Theodosia and The Staff of Osiris, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus, and Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh. So I guess the meaning behind this post is to remind everyone that it doesn't matter how old your children are, reading aloud to them is a special time that you both can still enjoy. I plan on doing read alouds with Grace until she graduates.