Story Time!

This week's theme from Stephanie at Ordinary Life Magic is Reading tools.

I've already written about how much books mean to us. As a mum, I feel really, really lucky that both my kids enjoy reading so much and learnt to do it relatively easily. Reading is so important to my husband (in fact, he's off reading a novel right now!) and I have a compulsive book habit too. So from a very young age (probably 2 or 3 months old), our kids were read aloud to. And I have to say, that one of the best benefits of homeschooling is having time to read aloud even now (at 11 and 12 years of age). I loved reading all those picture books that I had enjoyed as a child and found lots of new exciting ones (including a lot of Australian authors):

• Eric Carle - The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brown Bear Brown Bear, etc
• Little Golden Books (which now have an iPad app, I note - squeee!!!)
• Dr Seuss
• PB Bear
• Slinky Malinki (Lynley Dodd)
• Come On Daisy (Jane Simmons) (link includes teaching resources!)
• Guess How Much I Love You (Sam McBratney) (oh look, colouring-in sheets!)
• Richard Scarry (now has iPad app too! double squee!!!)
• Daisy Allsorts (Pamela Allen) (in fact, all Pamela Allen books!)
• Possum Magic (Mem Fox) (and all of hers too - her website is a treasure trove of "how to read aloud" glorious information!)
• Pete the Sheep (Jackie French)
• Are We There Yet? (Alison Lester - fabulous book about travelling around Australia)
• Graham Base books (you have to get the Animalia iPad app, no matter how old your kids are!)
• Sebastian Lives In a Hat (Thelma Catterwell/Kerry Argent)
• Wombat Divine (the gorgeous Mem Fox again!)
• and my own personal favourite When Mom Turned Into a Monster! (Joanna Harrison) 

Ahh, makes me nostalgic for those early days! I wonder if Wombat Girl will let me read them to her now? (of course she will!).

I'm pretty sure (and my memory is a bit fuzzy) that Video Boy was able to sight read lots of words before starting school and could read a few of those simple picture books. Once he started Kindergarten and got those much discussed "readers" he took off like a rocket and whizzed through the levels, so that by the end of Kindy he was allowed to bring in his books from home, because he had outgrown the readers on offer.

Taken just this morning...when he should have been getting ready for "school"

Wombat Girl was, of course, reading those readers too and soon loved to read to fellow pre-schoolers! The teachers were quite amazed (and quite frankly, relieved because it kept multiple children amused at one time). They test reading levels of kids entering Kindergarten, and she scored at Level 20 (the test only went up to Level 20 in Kindergarten) and soon had outgrown those readers by Term 1. The school was pretty good at letting her read her own books at school too. I got lots of questions from other parents ("Did you teach her how to read?").

Did you remember to eat?

The librarian at school was not so accommodating, refusing to let either child borrow "chapter books" at those ages, because "they should be enjoying picture books". Which they were, but they also enjoyed more advanced fair too:

• Dragon Rider (Cornelia Funke) (Video Boy read it in Yr 1!!!)
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Kate DiCamillo) - you cannot read this and not cry! (and oh look! A teacher's guide! yay!)
• Hugo Pepper (Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell)
• Deltora Quest (Emily Rodda)
• How To Train Your Dragon (Cressida Cowell)
• Georges Secret Key to the Universe (Stephen and Lucy Hawking)
• Clemency Pogue (JT Petty)
• Clarice Bean (Lauren Child)
• Geronimo Stilton
• the "Just" series (Andy Griffith)
• Captain Underpants (Dave Pilkey)
• Wicked! (Paul Jennings)
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Jeff Kinney)
• Choose Your Own Adventure series
• Enid Blyton
• Roald Dahl

As the kids got a bit older and moved into the latter years of primary school (and homeschooling - yay!), the books (and the series) got a bit bigger:

• Harry Potter series (JK Rowling) - well, duh.
• Inheritance (Eragon) series (Christopher Paolini)
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flammel (Michael Scott) (woo hoo - new book on they way!!)
• The Dragon Keeper Trilogy (Carole Wilkinson)
• Artemis Fowl series (Eoin Colfer)
• Skullduggery Pleasant (Derek Landy)
• Septimus Heap series (Angie Sage)
• Ingo chronicles (Helen Dunmore)
• Ink trilogy (Cornelia Funke)
• Magic Thief series (Sarah Prineas)
• Wolven series (Di Toft)
• Alex Rider series (Anthony Horowitz)
• Guardians of Ga'Hoole (Kathryn Lasky)
• The Last Dragon Chronicles (Chris d'Lacey)

There are of course the classics, that should be on everyone's bookshelf (or iPad or Kindle):

• The Secret Garden (Francis Hodgson-Burnett)
• Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
• Peter Pan and Wendy (JM Barrie)
• Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Graham)
• Black Beauty (Anna Sewell)
• Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
• Heidi (Johanna Spyri)
• Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi)
• Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling)
• A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
• Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stephenson)
• Gulliver's Travels (Jonathon Swift)
• Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

As they grow older and move into the teenage years (arrhhh! No! Tell me it isn't yet!), their choices get a bit more grown up:

• Hitchhikers Guides to the Galaxy (a Trilogy in Six Parts) (Douglas Adams/Eoin Colfer)
• The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (JR Tolkien)
• Discworld series (Terry Pratchett)
• Agatha Christie (all of them!)
• PG Wodehouse
• Matthew Reilly
• The Hunger Games Trilogy (Suzanne Collins)
• Twilight series (Stephanie Meyer)

AND we have LOTS of non-fiction! Just a few of the faves include:

• Horrible Science (Nick Arnold and Tony de Saulles)
• Horrible Histories (Terry Deary)
• A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson) (in fact, I love all of Bill's work - and the audio book of A Short History of Nearly Everything, read by Bill himself, is very entertaining)
• The Dangerous Book For Boys (Conn Iggulden)
• The Usborne Internet-Linked Science Encyclopedia (I believe the history one is good too)
• Time Machine (Bernard Walton)
• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Charles Seif)
• The Guiness Book of World Records
• Ripley's Believe It Or Not!

I realise that we are very lucky to have kids who learnt to read easily and enjoy their reading (I wish I was able to say that about their writing, but that is another post for another day). I know that not everyone's kids do (and I know that the child has be developmentally ready). However, reading is soooo important in this world - to be able to unlock the code of the written word is the key to so much - understanding, learning, enjoyment. If my child were struggling with reading, I would be checking for any underlying learning difficulty or vision issues before anything. Then enjoying the written word together (in whatever form takes your fancy) and searching out books (any sort, fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, fart-jokes - whatever floats their boat) that your child can enjoy.

Books and reading play such an important (possibly the most important) part of our homeschooling. Even if the kids never "produce" anything else, they could read stories and peruse non-fiction (and indeed the internet) and they would still be learning and loving it!

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