Reading

What a busy, challenging year we've had!

After the birth of our beautiful daughter (who will be one this week already!!) we lost my husband's grandfather, decided to move, and lost my grandmother.

As life continued to change around us we proceeded with our homeschooling journey.

The boys have made great strides in their education this year, particularly their reading!

 After discovering that this boy has a passion for historical readers he took off (especially when I told him that after he read me the book he could watch a documentary).  It has been a lot of fun exploring several different topics in depth with him.

 Here he is reading about Babe Ruth while we waited for his brother to finish his choir rehearsal.

His favorite is reading (or listening) to books in front of the fire place on a cool morning/evening.

 I am reading Teaching from Rest with the book club I recently joined and I LOVE it! The author, Sarah, is so inspiring. After I began reading the book I did a search online for her blog and discovered that she has a podcast (something of which I did not know much about until recently and now I can't get enough! I'm listening in the car when I'm by myself, while I do dishes, fold laundry, etc.). Her podcast is called Read- Aloud Revival and it's all about building your family culture around books. In March we joined a lot of the families that follow Sarah and had a D.E.A.R. day for Beverly Cleary's 100th birthday. The boys and I had a great time reading to ourselves and reading aloud and then baking a cake :) We have now joined in the reading challenge for the month of May; if the boys read to me every day for at least 15 minutes they can enter into a contest to win some pretty cool stuff. We haven't missed a day yet, the boys have been extremely motivated (especially since they get to choose coupons periodically with some fun activities).

 Recently Josh decided that he wanted to start reading me the Magic Tree House series. The first book in the series was only his second chapter book he's completed (this was the first he chose willingly :) The historical readers he's been reading have "chapters" but they're about two pages long. He is doing so well, reading with great expression and really enjoying the stories. Going through these books with him again is such a joy, he LOVED listening to each of them as read alouds when we went through them a a few years ago and it's fun reminiscing about what he remembers.

 This boy is never to be outdone by his brother, I've said several times since he was born that his goal was to catch up with Josh from the moment we brought him home... he's catching up alright, once Josh finished the first book of the series Nathan decided he needed to read it. He doesn't read with quite as much expression and he still likes choosing other readers as well but he's doing a great job! He's six reading at a second grade level as well as doing second grade math.

With our Sonlight books and stacks of library books we bring home often we'll continue to "build our family culture around books" (books in hand or audio books with Dad), will you? :)