Summer Reading Fun {Family Connections Summer 2012}
Once again I’m joining Aurie, Lisa, Amy, and Connie to share ideas for fun, family activities for the summer. We hope you’ll stop by every Wednesday to share in our theme or link up your own posts about great summertime fun for the whole family!
This week we’re sharing about Summer Reading Fun…which is something I feel like I’ve already been talking about endlessly around here! {grin}
But I love reading, always have. And I’m just overjoyed to have rediscovered both the value and enjoyment of it lately. As a busy, working, farming, mother, reading was a “hobby” that I had really started to set aside. I had actually gotten to the point of giving away almost a whole bookcase worth of books to make room for toys.
Granted, I have 3 others, but still…
This is one of our bookcases. The books are double rows on each shelf.
Then I read a post about training your children away from twaddle by Amy over at Raising Arrows and decided that I needed to work on that. Llama Llama is good stuff, but there should be more to my children’s literary life. So I picked up our beautiful copy of The Jungle Book (you know, the real one from Rudyard Kipling, not the Disney adaptions) and started wading through it out-loud for evening story time.
Our first family read aloud we got through 2 pages. I discovered 2 things.
First–The Jungle Book is actually a collection of short stories about Mowgli, and Rikki Tikki Tavi others, not just one big “book” at all.
Second–I was the one that had been wasting away my time reading twaddle. It was hard for me to concentrate and get through the formal style of writing!
Friday and Saturday nights it’s a special privilege to “have a book in bed.” We go up later and turn the lights out.
What a blessing that we kept plowing through!
By the end of the book, my kiddos were sitting for an entire “story” in one sitting–equivalent to about two full chapters at a time. I’ve taken to breaking up our “real” classics with some easier but still quality stuff. We read Gentle Ben and then Swiss Family Robinson and then Farmer Boy. Now they’ll sit for 2, 3, even 4 chapters at a time.
And I’ve realized how many classics I haven’t actually read! The Jungle Book obviously being one of them. King Arthur and Treasure Island are others I’m excited to get to soon. My love of reading has been turned on again.
I found this awesome, full-color encyclopedia-type book at our thrift store for $0.47!!
Here’s a few tips if you want to do more reading with your kids this summer…
- Read good classic fiction or good historical fiction.
- Pick something that’s either a great adventure, or of great relevance to your kids. The Jungle Book? Adventure. Farmer Boy? We farm. Pocahontas and Jamestown are big interest for us because that’s right here.
- Start slow, but don’t give up. And if it’s quality literature, don’t think it’s too advanced for them. Even if they don’t get everything in the story listening will still have value for them. I tend to narrate as we go along if I see something I think it over their heads. Before starting each session, I also usually have them each narrate the previous chapters for me to see if they’re getting it.
- Dive into the stories from many angles to make it really come alive for them. Right now we’re reading The Stout-Hearted Seven. We’ve also got our hands on a copy of Daily Life in a Covered Wagon and the movie Seven Alone to watch together after we finish the book.
Anyway…
What summer fun have you been up to lately? Link up a new or old post about your great summer family activities. Please keep it family friendly and link to you post, not your homepage.
And be sure to come back next week and join us. The theme will be Celebration Fun and I’ll be talking about Holiday Traditions and the 4th of July.
I have the complete set of Harry Potter books (mine) in Wesley’s room and he keeps asking to read them! I tell him that he’s not old enough to read/understand them yet (he’s only 6!) and he says but Mommy they’re in the library at school.
By the way, I love the bookcase…where did you get it?
Ikea scratch and dent corner, $30! 🙂
We’re much more careful about magic and mythology right now for similar reasons–they’re still forming what they believe in and understand as “real” and “pretend.” Mr. Fix-It was a little hesitant about King Arthur even, but it’s not a whole different world, it’s just fiction within a historic time period. In a few years when they understand a little more clearly, then we’ll introduce fiction with the concepts of “other worlds.” I haven’t even read C.S. Lewis to them yet. I think movies are a little different because we are trained from a young age to take books more seriously than movies.
I’m a fan of fantasy and mythology myself, so I’m looking forward to it. And I’m excited to check out the new series The Peleg Chronicles from the Vision Forum soon.
Glad you’re breaking free of the twaddle–good for you! As to the family library/personal copy question, I can’t imagine having more than one copy of a particular book in the house. Our house is pretty small, so I always have to take that into consideration. Also, my kids love reading our old books and even one or two of their grandmother’s! We’ll buy replacement copies when the old ones wear out!
We have multiple copies of favorite books. I have a list that I bring with me to books sales and have been able to get some awesome steals for books that we like to read over and over again. The girls already have their own “library” in their room – as well as in the living room!
I think we’ll see what they seem to love best as they grow and make sure to get them copies of those…and I think if I was to come across a steal on something like another set of Anne of Green Gables or something I would pick it up for the Ladybug. I do hunt in our thrift stores but I’ve been staying away from book sales for a while since I was “out” of reading and buying books. Now I’m keeping my eyes open for our library’s summer sale though! {grin}
Great lists, great ideas! We have been loving some of the classics as well – even better that they’re free on kindle! 😀
My mom would buy us our own sets of books to take with us when we got married – not sure if boys would care (I have 2) but you could always ask them when they’re older!
I’m AMAZED by the freebies with Kindle! We don’t have an e-Reader, but I’ve been downloading lots of them “to the cloud.” 🙂 My parents didn’t have many books at all, so most of the ones they bought for me were the first copies in our house. And I kept most of them because I love them! Maybe we just have a family library for now and I buy books for each of them in their own “library” that we don’t have copies of until we see what they really love. Like my daughter’s American Girl books. I don’t have any of those, so we can buy those just for her without getting into duplicates.
I just love love love when they fall asleep with a book in hand (and not because its boring)
I think sometimes making books a “special privileged” like having a book in bed and staying up late to read, helps them learn to value reading more. I’ve got book lights on the Christmas lists this year too. 🙂