In my last post, I talked about the early days in our homeschool, and of slowly building up to longer and more frequent read-aloud times, which have been the source of much fun and learning. In this post, blogger Teresa McEntire offers some great tips for growing in confidence with read-alouds, and this forum thread affirms the wisdom of using read-alouds to help nudge a budding reader along in the learning process.
Books have been part of our family life since before we had a family. My husband and I were both English majors who came into the marriage with minimal furniture, but an excess of books. (Books are still my main decorating motif.) We regularly read to our children for the pure pleasure of it long before I began contemplating homeschooling. And, now that we homeschool, reading aloud together makes up a large chunk of what we do. It is often difficult for me to separate pleasure reading from educational reading because we so enjoy the many books we read, whether they are “purely for pleasure” or “for school.”
And that is one of the core benefits of reading aloud to our children. Enjoying books, showing our children how much we enjoy them, and savoring them together, instills a love of the written word as nothing else can. I could preach to my kids for years about why they should enjoy reading … or, I could show them.
We’ve chosen to show them and so far it seems to be paying off. Our eldest daughter, who was an early reader, has had her nose in some kind of book for almost 13 years. Our middle daughter, though she was a later reader, needed only to gain confidence before she began firmly planting her nose in books on a daily basis. And our four-year-old can often be seen carrying her sisters’ chapter books around, announcing to all who will listen that she’s “alweady on chapter five!”
Around here, read-alouds are as vital as breakfast, lunch and dinner – which just happen to be some of the times that they happen.
Related articles:
Family Reading Blocks
Top Ten Family Reading Books