Thursday, April 10, 2008

quiet time...

Another new experiment in our house... quiet time. It's just a half hour of free (with disclaimers...lol) reading right after lunch. The disclaimer on the "free" is that they have to choose books to read from the stack I provide. The don't have to read every book from the stack I choose but their book has to be from the stack. So far, so good.

Here are a couple of shots from yesterday...

I haven't really worried about Alex's reading because at night he's barreling through the Harry Potter series (which on Book Adventure is listed as around 6/7 grade reading level). He's currently about 400 pages into book four. But, I felt like he needed exposure to other books without taking away his free reading time at night. So, I pulled a bunch of books from our various Sonlight cores and let him pick something to read during quiet time. They're not all big challenging chapter books... just a variety of quality literature for him to choose from. I think in order for this to continue to work, I'm going to need to have a stack of books on hand at all times. The library isn't an option for this (at least for me) because I don't want to have to worry about taking the books back before he's through with them or even before he picks them. I would love book suggestions and/or links to good quality reading lists. I tried to find a few on my own yesterday and didn't fair so well. The ones I found seemed to be more of what you could read versus what is worth reading... if you know what I mean. A friend from our homeschool group has been giving me some suggestions that look fabulous, but I would love to have more suggestions!

The challenge with Clara is keeping enough books around. She's at that level where she needs the "level one" books but she can go through 4 or more in a sitting. I don't want to buy anymore so I guess I'm stuck hauling home bags of books from the library each week :-)

The quiet time is working well for us... lets just hope we can keep with it!

3 comments:

Jessica said...

You always share such great resources with us Thanks! I bought a book called "Honey for a Child's Heart" by Gladys Hunt last year and loved it. She has a great resoure list in the back by catagory and the first part of the book talks about reading and why it's important and how to read to your kids, etc. Really good stuff. I know you can get it on Amazon. Check it out!

Anonymous said...

I am a former teacher and a book that I LOVED and used extensively to find quality reading material for my students was How to Get your Child to Love Reading by Esme Raji Codell. She is also a former teacher/childrens librarian and her love for books oooooozes out of every word she writes. HTH!

Annie said...

When I purchase books for the elementary library I work in I go by Dr. Peggy Sharp's recommendations. You can find her online. I also like Esme's suggestions and she has a useful blog at www.planetesme.blogspot.com
Lastly, I use a couple of Read-Aloud guides written by Judy Freeman who also is a literature expert. You might be able to find those in your library. She has a web site at judyreadsbooks.com.
Annie