Last summer, as I was planning for the school year, I knew that I wanted to revive our Read Aloud time. Like most homeschooling mothers of many children, I used to read aloud a lot when my oldest kids were little. As they grew and things got busy, reading aloud usually went out the window. Oh, every once in awhile we'd grab a book and read it together, but never with any great frequency.
This year I was determined to bring it back for my youngest two. Mr 10 yo has been a struggling reader so I new that reading aloud would be another way that we could help him along the reading path.
I didn't want to be overly ambitious knowing how our schedule can be, so I set out to read the following books this year. We began with "Kateri Tekawitha, Mohawk Maiden" by Evelyn M Brown. This is one of the Vision books on the saints and it was a great way to get our year started by learning about the early years of our country and the lives of the Indians.
Next up I chose "Archimedes and the Door of Science" by Jeanne Bendick. This was a great book. We learned a lot and it was very entertaining at the same time. This corresponded to us learning about the ancient Greeks during our history time so it really helped to bring that time period to life. I would highly recommend this book to add to your Greek studies.
To continue to tie in to our history, I decided to go to another Vision book and read "St. Paul the Apostle: The Story of the Apostle to the Gentiles". What a fascinating book. I loved being able to tie together the events of all the Epistles from the Bible and trace out the life of this fascinating Saint. It was a very interesting story and it did a wonderful job tying together our history and religion.
Our final book of the year was "Crusader King" by Susan Peek. This book was FANTASTIC. By far it was the best book we've read in a long time. Talk about a page turner. We would forgo other school work just so we could read one more chapter. The story was about King Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, and the Crusades. I was so intrigued by the story that I did some additional research on him and that time period. I knew a bit about the Crusades from the perspective of Rome and the Pope but not from the perspective of those in Jerusalem. If you are studying this time period, I would highly recommend adding this book to your study. It was so good that, as I was reading aloud to my youngest two, others in the house would stop by and sit down to listen, too.
So that's all I had planned for read alouds for this year. I'm thinking that it might be nice to do one over the summer but I have yet to pick one out. If anyone has any great recommendations that they'd like to share that would be a fun and engaging summertime read, I would love to hear it.
God Bless!
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