What's on the bookshelf?

We do A LOT of reading each day.  Using Sonlight as our core, which is a literature based program, ensures we'll never be short on books.  We have a book we are going through for our Bible time, we have a literature based science program so there's a book we read for science, usually more than 1 book we're working through for history, and then our read-aloud also ties in with what we are learning for history.  If that's not enough the girls have a book they have to read on their own for history and then they have a fun book of their choosing that they need to spend at least 30 mins each day reading.  We also like to read as a family so we almost always have a read-aloud we are going through together in the evenings and or an audio-book we are listening to.  If you're counting that's upwards at 8+ books at any given time.

I love that reading together and on our own is such a huge part of our family and something we all value.  I'm so thankful that over the last few years the girls have truly developed a love of reading.  We tend to check out library books by the stack and work our way through them each week.  I'm so thankful for an amazing library system that we can utilize to incorporate so many great books into our lives.

For the past two years the girls have really loved American Girl books.  At the start of the summer they had gotten to the place where they had read almost all of them and were ready to move onto something else.  I was excited that they were finally old enough to read well and enjoy the classics so I started ordering a ton of great classics for them to read from the library.

Although we only require 30 mins of reading each day, it's not unusual to find the girls curled up for a few hours getting through their next great adventure.  And drives in the car are usually very silent as they each tend to read everywhere we go.  I can't tell you how happy that makes my heart!

These are a few of the books you could find the girls reading over the summer...

Stuart Little – E.B. White
The Whipping Boy – Sid Fleichman

Emily’s Runaway Imagination – Beverly Cleary

Ginger Pye – Eleanor Estes

Socks – Beverly Cleary

Misty of Chiconteague – Marguerite Henry

Ralph S. Mouse – Beverly Cleary

Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell

The Incredible Journey – Sheila Burnford

Dear Mr. Henshaw – Beverly Cleary

Lumber Camp Library – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne

The Trumpet of the Swan – E.B. White

Number the Stars – Lois Lowry

My Father’s Dragon – Ruth Stiles Garnett

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Sword in the Stone – T.H. White

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Cheaper by the Dozen – Frank B. Gibreth

The Toothpaste Millionaire – Jean Merrill

A Llama in the Family – Johanna Hurwitz

Frindle – Andrew Clements

The Hundred Dresses – Eleanor Estes

The Railway Children – E.Nesbit

Pollyanna – Eleanor H. Porter

The Swiss Family Robinson – Johann Wyss

What was on your bookshelf this summer?

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

At the end of our last school year we read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (which is a free kindle download on Amazon.)  The girls really love our chapter books and enjoyed the adventure we took together to the Emerald City.  Before we started reading it I added the movie to our library queue so we could watch it for family movie night when we were done.  Sadly, it took 7 months for it to finally be our turn so it was just a bit delayed.  We got our movie on Thursday so I figured Labor Day weekend would be the perfect time to watch it.

We all snuggled up on the sofa for family movie night and watched the movie as the girls eyes lit up and they squealed with delight as each new song was sung.  We compared and contrasted the differences between the book and the movie as we enjoyed the silly antics of the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion.  The girls loved the good witch and thought she was SO beautiful!  It was such a fun evening and great to remember watching this as a young girl with my family.  I'd definitely recommend the Wizard of Oz to anyone else starting out in chapter books with their kiddos.

Now we're on to our next chapter book adventure... it's hard to believe  the girls will be reading them on their own before long. 

Elephant & Piggie

The girls already own an Elephant & Piggie book by Mo Willems which was given to them by a dear friend. They love their book and it's such a cute fun story. We've since starting to check them out from the library from time to time and they really are all cute stories. My favorite was "My Friend is Sad" which is all about Piggie doing funny things to cheer up Gerald the Elephant. Piggie disguises himself as all of Garald's favorite things, but it doesn't cheer up Gerald, he only gets more sad. Piggie finally shows up as herself and Gerald is so happy becuase while all these cool things showed up, it wasn't his best friend Piggie so he was so sad. It's such a sweet story about friendship and teaches a really great lesson! So go check it out, you won't regret it!

Oh Charlie!

With the start of school, and our weekly library visits I was itching to read some chapter books to the girls. I had no idea how they would do and if they would be able to focus without pictures. I thought it would go well though so I figured we would give it a try. A few months back I had DVR'd the old school Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and we hadn't yet watched it so I figured that would be a great first book. We spent about 2 weeks going through it. We read it a bit during our 30 minutes of reading time for school, but we often just curled up on their beds at night to read a few chapters before bed.

The girls actually did much better than I expected. Av would get a bit fidgety from time to time, but that's just how she is and she was always paying attention so it didn't seem to matter. Each day before we read any new chapters I would ask them questions about the previous chapters. I wanted to see how well they had understood and remembered what we read, as well as remind them where we were before starting off again. I was kinda surprised at how much they grasped. They always knew the answers to the questions and would often ask me smart questions or think aloud as to what might happen next.

They absolutely loved the book and looked forward to it every day. It was especially fun to finish because we got to watch the movie together with Daddy for Family Movie Night. We had pizza and piled on the sofa and watched the movie together. We talked a bit throughout about what was different from the book. They started pointing out things they noticed and it was fun to watch them compare and contrast on their own. I'm so glad we did this and I'm already looking forward to the next chapter book we read!

Checked Out

One of the things I'm loving most about our school day is reading with the girls. We've always read together, but having a set 30 minutes a day (or more) set aside to read as part of our school day, and the fact that they are new books from the library each week... it makes it that much more fun! It's fun to watch the girls walk around the library searching the shelves for their perfect stack of books. They are of course looking for princess books (which seem to be few and far between) but they have pulled quite a few fun stories from the shelves.

Last week we ran across a cute little book called "What's the Magic Word?" It's about a newborn little bird who gets swept around a farm meeting all the animals. It was a cute little story and fun to read.

Friday Funday

Yesterday at around 3:30pm we had a huge blackout. Not only did our little city lose all power, but the entire county of San Diego stretching down to Baja CA, across to AZ, and up to Orange County... all lost power as well. With no explanation and no return of power in site we enjoyed a dinner of PB&J, fruit, and veggie sticks and sent the girls to bed early. The house was quickly heating up and at 80 degrees outside at 8pm it wasn't cooling off the 85* house very quickly. We eventually went to bed early which is something I haven't done in weeks and I definitely regretted not hanging on a bit longer when we were awakened by the power returning at 1:30am making it really hard for me to get back to sleep.

The entire county cancelled school today and the girls were in a funk this morning after not having slept well due to the heat and noises outside. I decided to make it a Friday Funday so I let them play a bit into school time and then they cleaned up and we played a few games together and then read library books for about 40 minutes instead of our usual 20. It was so much fun and something I'll definitely have to schedule from time to time.

I wanted to take a minute to highlight one of the books we read today which ended up being such a sweet story. It was a random library checkout that I knew nothing about, but both the girls and I ended up really liking the story and it led to a good discussion afterwards. The book was called Pete & Pickles by Berkeley Breathed and was a wonderful story of the adventures of a perfectly predictable pig and his new friend Pickles. Definitely a story worth checking out!