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…
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!
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.
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.