A couple weeks ago, I was browsing a website with advice for homeschooling parents, and one of the suggestions was to schedule time for the parent to read aloud to the child(ren) daily. Of course we read picture books to Peter on an almost-daily basis, but I realized that at four and a half, he is old enough to understand “chapter books” now, and almost all kids love to be read to. So I decided I would try it.
The first book I chose was The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong. It’s a Newbery Award-winner, so definitely a quality book, but the story is also quite simple and easy to follow. It’s about schoolchildren in a small Dutch village who want to attract storks to nest on their roofs, and what they learn and the friends they make in the process. I got the book from the library and we read a chapter a day. We settled into a routine of doing our read-aloud after lunch; depending on the chapter, it took from about 45 minutes to about an hour and 15 minutes a day (usually on the shorter side). The first couple days, Peter protested that he didn’t like read-aloud when I told him it was time. I figured he was upset because he wanted to play, so I assured him he could play with his toys while I read, as long as he was quiet. He would play for 5-10 minutes, then hop up on the couch next to me to watch me read and look at the pictures on the pages that had pictures. After a few days, he gave up protesting and would climb right up onto the couch for read-aloud time. As I read, I stop periodically to explain vocabulary that he doesn’t know and ask him questions to check that he understands what’s happening.
We finished our first book yesterday morning in the car on the way home from my parents’ house (it was a great way to make the drive more enjoyable). Then we went to the library and got our second read-aloud book. I chose Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. The language is relatively simple and it gives him a good introduction to what life was like in the “olden days” (an expression he has picked up). I was going to wait until today to start since I’d already read the last chapter of the other book, but Peter wanted to start the new one, so we did. He is very interested in it; he liked the stories about making a smokehouse out of a hollow log and about bear in the woods. The book has 13 chapters so it’ll keep us occupied for the next two weeks. I haven’t decided which book to read next. So far, we are both having a great time with our new read-aloud routine. I’m not sure if we’ll have time to continue it when the school year starts, but we’ll see.
