Last school year, we managed 37 read-alouds together. This year, with only 25 books, was not the epic read-aloud year that I had hoped for, mostly because of Annie! It’s hard to read together with her around, so we had to wait and only do it when she was napping. She and I were gone 2-3 times a week for appointments, cutting even more into our family reading time. Daddy did a lot more reading picture books to her and the big kids, which is great, but harder to keep track of. Derek and I are also doing one-on-one read-alouds with some of the kids, but those don’t count for family reading purposes. We still did a lot of audiobooks in the car (marked with an *), and the girls listened to all of the original 19 Boxcar Children books and the complete works of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, repeatedly, at bedtime. We’re getting to the stage where the big three are all such fast readers that a lot of our school novels were just easier to hand off to each of them to read on their own than to read aloud or listen to together. But hopefully as Annie gets more tolerant of listening to chapter books without “helping” me turn the pages, we’ll get to read aloud together more again this coming school year.
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal 1830-1832
The Adventures of Reddy Fox*
The Great Turkey Walk
Rabbit Hill*
The Wind in the Willows *
Frederick Douglass: Young Defender of Human Rights
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Justin Morgan Had a Horse*
Little House in the Big Woods
The Yearling*
The Swiss Family Robinson*
My Side of the Mountain*
Sarah, Plain and Tall*
Skylark*
Caleb’s Story*
Rascal*
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland*
The Good Master
Esperanza Rising*
The Singing Tree
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry*
Treasure Island*
Sweet Home Alaska
Minn of the Mississippi
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm*
Need to finish: By Secret Railway, The Burgess Animal Book, and Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers