Read Around Here: January/ February 2014

This post contains affiliate links. Your purchases help feed our book habit! Thank you.

 

 

The librarians at our local system are highly amused by how often we visit and how many books we take home. My card pretty much stays maxed out at 50 books as I check out books for the little boys and books for our current unit study so I got each of the big children their own cards as well! We bring a couple of bags and a milk crate to the library and we fill them all yet I constantly hear “I don’t have anything to read!”

 

Jack: Currently loves any book with trucks, fire engines, snow plows or buses. OK he loves any book with any kind of vehicle and will find a vehicle to tell you about even if the book is about ?counting book structured around a family’s vacation trip to Maine! He loves to sit on the couch with any of his siblings and look at his books while they read and is quite good at getting Mouse or Buggle to read to him. He is starting to like simple stories and got quite excited over Jan Brett’s Hedgie’s Surprise as he has a stuffed hedgehog that looks like the one in the book and is named Hedgie!

 

Bull: Lots of picture books dealing with trucks, construction, and transportation. If a book has plumbing in it that is a wonderful book and he will request it over and over. ?Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry get read over and over and he will look at them and study the details in the pictures for a long time. He’s supposed to have a reading time with me after lunch while the big two clean up. It’s a little hit-or-miss since we sometimes need to go straight to a nap, but I’ve gotten a couple of Carolyn Haywood books to read to him so we’ll see how having chapter books read to him goes.

Mouse: In the past couple of months she has reread all of the “Little House” books, plus a number of the books about Caroline’s growing up years. She has started showing an interest in doing some of the things that they do in those books like sewing and wearing aprons. She also enjoys mysteries and has been reading Trixie Beldon, Bobbsey Twins and The Boxcar Children.

Buggle: reads the books I find the most interesting right now. He loves stories that either did really happen or could have and those that involve animals and survival are particularly favored.

For Christmas we gave him Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons

which he has read several times since then and declared it “the best book ever!” until he read My Side Of The Mountain and its two sequels. The rest of his list for the past months looks something like this:


The Mysterious Benedict Society (read twice and the occasion of much laughter. It’s the story of four children and their benefactor who must solve a mystery to save the world. There is a great deal of word play and the reader is encouraged to pay attention to the details in order to get the jokes.)


My Friend Flicka (read once)


The Black Stallion (read several times)


My Side Of The Mountain and its sequels (multiple readings)


Hatchet (read twice, he was very worried on the first reading whether the protagonist would survive (It’s about a boy who is the sole survivor of a private plane crash in the middle of nowhere) until I pointed out that if he was only halfway through the book and the guy died what would the other pages be about?)

Everything Mouse read at least once.


Shiloh (twice that I know of)

Poppy (Tales from Dimwood Forest) (twice)


Hoot (twice (the story of a trio of preteens who band together to prevent a developer from building a pancake house in the middle of a desert owl nesting ground. There are some tricky family dynamics as two of the three are step-siblings and don’t get along well with the mother, while the father is not very present. I thought it was a reasonable portrayal of a family with serious issues and that the normal family of the main protagonist was portrayed as being much better with parents and child having a good relationship and trusting one another. Buggle already knows that some families are not happy and I was happy for him to read this. )


The Penderwicks (A book that I had apparently read as a child but don’t remember at all except for the title and I just found out is a trilogy written by a local author! He’s reading the sequels now and I’ll read them when he’s done.)


Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Usually when I go into the playroom after our quiet period in the afternoon, there are half a dozen books in various stages of being read on the floor. He goes from one to the other as the mood strikes and generally has at least three books going at once just like his parents!

 

Now that we’ve finally finished up our unit on Explorers of the New World (seriously I think it holds the record for most interrupted unit study ever!) we are moving on to the first three settlements in what would become the thirteen colonies (Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth) and I am going to be giving him some serious biographies to read and report on as part of his contribution to the study. I’ve got a bunch of books on hold and am working on skimming through the books I have and writing notes for discussion for them, who knows maybe I’ll actually have the time to pull them into an ebook someday!

This entry was posted in Book Review, homeschooling, preschool educcation, Reading, Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *