Taking Story Time up a notch

We love reading! Not only does it let me sit down and relax, but the kids have a blast. Emilie is still warming up to story time and comes and goes, but George just soaks it up. It's really good that George soaks it up, because we will be doing a heavily literature based homeschool program called Wayfarers by barefoot ragamuffin. I'm preparing George for homeschool by nurturing and growing his love of books, which isn't proving a problem at all. Just yesterday, we read for a whole hour together! We're aiming at having three story times, with the morning story time after lunch, being the longest. The second story time is soon before dinner prep, and the last one is at bed time. Wayfarers does have a preschool program, which is basically a reading list, but we really don't want to force ourselves to read books we don't have to yet. Right now we're just having fun and growing our vocabulary. Our favorite books are classic fairy tales and fairy tale renditions, books that encourage a love of nature, and Madeleine (because she's just funny, you know!). I'm also ordering tons of books from across the San Diego county libraries, and then just picking them up at our branch. We're gradually filling our list of favorite books, which is exciting, and also finding a whole bunch of books which we don't like. So many sites have their lists of "best books" but some of them are very unimpressive, disagreeable, or even teach inappropriate actions like arguing or unkind speech (why the heck am I having to sensor kid shows and now even children's books? This is ridiculous people!). Not a single list on the internet has a list of books that I agree with for even half of the books (wither it's because it's mildly innopropriate or just not beautifully narrated or illustrated). Okay, so I'm picky. So... we're making our own list! ;)

Before each reading, we are reviewing the letter phonograms as well, using Barefoot ragamuffins reading curricula, Reading Lessons Through Literature, which teaches reading with the Orton phonogram method. The curricula basically teaches reading with 75 phonograms and about 30 spelling rules and makes up most of the english language! English actually makes since, though they don't teach us this in school. We've learned all the basic phonograms of the alphabet A-Z (holding off on the letter combinations until a little later) and are reviewing them several times a week. While we do this, I have George pretend to be the "letter monster" which gobbles up the correct phonogram after I lay out three or more letters, asking him to match the phonogram sound I gave to a letter. Anyway, it's a nice review.

Another plus of story time for George, to get him excited, is having milk (and in a bottle). Only at story time is he aloud to have milk in a bottle, and it's a big draw of getting him running to story time! As he's older, he'll probably outgrow this want of a bottle, but in the meantime he's associating story time with security and love. What better association can you have with sitting down and reading a good book?!