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.

Favorite Day!

I'm was so excited this morning to wake up and head to church for the women's Bible Study. Sadly, I missed the first week last week because of our trip so I was really looking forward to today. The study starts at 8:45 and goes until 11:30. They have a kids program, so I've decided to just do that as our school for Tuesday since they have a story, craft, song time, etc. It works out great and they had so much fun today. The study we are doing is on the book of Hebrews and I'm so loving digging in and seeing what God has to reveal with all these amazing women. I was shocked today to walk into the sanctuary and see a couple hundred women filling the seats. There are 18 women (that were there at least) in our group and it will be great to get to know them over the course of the study.

On our way home we stopped by the library. I was originally planning on going to the library on Monday's, but seeing as how it's on the way home from church and we're already out each week I decided we would do our weekly library run on Tuesday's. The girls were thrilled to drop their books into the slot and pick out new ones for the week. It's so fun picking books out with them and even more fun reading the little gems we often find amongst their stack. I think Tuesday is going to be one of my new favorite days!