New read-aloud blog

I've linked to Jill's readaloud blog, Jill's Favorite books, in the sidebar. Check it out!

Karen over at Just One More Chapter? is taking a break. Hopefully she'll be back posting soon.

If you've got a readaloud blog you want linked, let me know. Part of my goal in creating this blog was to find/create a community of parents who read to their kids.

Newbery Award winners

I'm about halfway through The Silver Chair with Jaymie. She's very anxious to finish it -- she asks every day if we're going to have time to read. Unfortunately, we were very busy today, and didn't have a chance to read tonight.

On Sunday I started a little project. The family of one of my college roommates had a big chart hanging in their kitchen listing all of the Newbery award winners, and who in the family had read which of the books. I decided to try this for myself. Unfortunately, it turns out that there aren't any convenient tabular lists of Newbery award and honor books to be found using Google, so I spent an hour and made one myself. If you're interested in a copy, let me know how to contact you in a comment or an email, and I'll send it to you. I've got it in an Access database, but I can send an Excel spreadsheet, a tab-delimited text file, a .csv file, or any other format you can imagine.

I've read surprisingly few of the Newbery award winners. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that award-winning children's books are not necessarily the most fun books for kids to read. They may be great literature, but they may not be great reading. I think I'll try using the Newberys as a source for read-alouds. One thing I notice in looking at the list is that most of the books deal with themes and issues that are worth talking about with my children, and reading these books with them will create opportunities to have discussions about them.

I read Robert Lawson's The Great Wheel (1958 Newbery Honor book) last week, and I may try it as a read-aloud. It tells the story of the first Ferris wheel, which was also the largest ever built (I believe this is still the case). The story focuses on an Irish immigrant who comes to America to pursue his dream -- along with the detailed descriptions of the building of the Ferris wheel, which was an engineering marvel, there is much discussion of immigrant life, the American dream, and class mobility. I think the subject matter is just about right for Jaymie, but the level at which the story is told is probably too difficult for her to handle on her own, so reading this book aloud seems to make sense.

I gave Jaymie The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli (1950 medal winner) to read this morning. We'll see if she makes it through. I remember starting this book several times as a kid and never making it to the end.

My Sonlight quest, and another used book sale

Durham Academy had a used book sale last week -- I stopped by three times, and bought probably close to 80 books. The last day books were going for $1.00 per grocery bag -- I got two bags full. Probably the best find was Art Fraud Detective. It's an interactive book -- 30+ paintings from the National Gallery in London have been replaced with forgeries, and your job is to compare the paintings with the images from the museum catalog to determine which ones have been changed and how. Jaymie has been working on it every waking moment for the past three or four days.

I've started to keep track of how many of the books in the Sonlight catalog we can collect by going to library sales and other used book sales. We have about 115 of roughly 670 books in the catalog -- about 30 of them were bought at the Durham Academy sale.

I started reading The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis to Jaymie tonight. Stanley is surprisingly interested in The Magic Schoolbus books (Joanna Cole, illustrated by Bruce Degen) -- he will sit through an entire reading of one, and then ask for it again. I tried reading Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith to Julia, thinking that she might be ready for some longer format books, but she wasn't really interested.

Some books

Well, I've neglected this blog long enough. We haven't been very good about reading to the kids over the past few weeks -- lots of sickness and busyness.

Kristen started reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley to Jaymie, but they decided that it was "too old" for her, so they ended up reading The Cat Who Went To Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth instead (both are Newbery Award winners, if that means anything.). Jaymie really liked it a lot. It has cats and artists -- what's not to like?

Jaymie has been reading Dick King-Smith lately (The Mouse Butcher and Jenius, the Amazing Guinea Pig), as well as lots of Boxcar Children, and another Amber Brown book. I went to the library book fair last week and came home with a bunch of new books for her to read -- she's been plowing through them.

Julia and I have been reading whatever she pulls off the shelves at night. The last few nights she's asked for Animalogies, a book of analogies about animals written by kids, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, and McBroom's Zoo by Sid Fleischman. Other reads include Arthur books by Marc Brown.

Stanley has grown attached to Night House, Bright House a picture rhyming book. It's a fun book, but can be tedious to read over and over again. He also recently discovered Whose Mouse are You?. He really likes Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie as well.

Kristen scored big at the library book sale -- there were three boxes full of Christmas books, and I brought home about ten of them, including a couple on her wish list. I'll put up a list of our Christmas books later.

I think I'm going to read The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis with Jaymie next. I keep thinking that Julia's getting ready for longer books, but I haven't tried one yet. She enjoys listening to books on tape.

I tried reading A Visit to William Blake's Inn to Jaymie and Julia tonight, but Julia lost interest -- it may be too much for her. The book is a series of poems about an inn run by William Blake. There is a very loose narrative structure that runs throughout the book, but not enough to engage Julia, apparently. I may try again in a couple of weeks, since I really like the book.