In our last, ‘haphazard’, 3 weeks we had to take a more ‘relaxed’ approach to our homeschooling due to the many events/celebrations that occurred. I purchased some time ago A FAMILY PROGRAM FOR READING ALOUD developed by ROSALIE JUNE SLATER. This has been a wonderful, very rich resource of classic reading selections and how to teach certain categories of literature from the Principle Approach. I decided to go back to the beginning of the book and start there with my read aloud selections. We don’t read aloud as often as I want to..our days seem to get away from us. I guess I feel like Literature is not priority on our list of subjects to study but in the last several weeks we have managed to investigate several of the suggested books in this wonderful resource written by Ms. Slater.

POETRY: We started with THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE FOR YOUNG FOLKS for our poetry introduction. We started with this in July. We are also using Abeka’s spelling workbook and they have a poem assigned for each month for the student to memorize, to use expression when reciting, to practice reading with alternately with Mommy. DD’s favorite poem in THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE is TREE’s by Joyce Kilmer. It goes like this:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A treee that looks a God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

We’ve also recited Robert Blake’s THE LAMB which is the poem in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text.
Little lamb Little Lamb Who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
………..etc.

We worked on this one also in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text…A THANK YOU PRAYER..author unknown
For milk to drink and food to eat;
For eyes and ears and hands and feet;
Thank You God

For mother, father, and their care
For our house and clothes to wear
Thank You God

For friends with whom I run and play
For sun and rain and night and day
Thank You God

For all the things You give to me
Help me to always thankful be
Thank You God.

We will study Psalm 23 as poetry as well as the other literary genre found in the Bible.

PICTURE BOOKS AND STORIES: We got from the library and read the following:

THE RUNAWAY BUNNY
THE GINGERBREAD BOY
**TIME OF WONDER
**THE BIG SNOW
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
MADELINE-this is turning out to be one of my dc’s favorite. We found a ‘pop-up, 3D’ version of this book’

** we did not read these as they were due back to the library before we any interest was aroused in these books. They were kind of slow moving I think for my dc. TIME OF WONDER was very descriptive(which is good) but at the time I started to read it my dc had blank faces and were not really interested…so back to the library it went..maybe we’ll try again with it later.

We also have ‘zoo-billion’ other picture books, easy readers, and easy chapter books on the children’s shelves and also in our schoolroom that have been given to us(free! Praise God!!) by other parents and such…some were going to be THROWN out by the school my dh works for…some of these were BRAND NEW, STILL IN THE PLASTIC books that my dh found in the ‘throw away’ pile at his school so God has blessed us to have a home library already. I just need to make MORE use of these books, i.e. take the time to look thru them myself b/c the dc choose the same ones over and over and when dd is feeling lazy she’ll choose one with as few words a possible

So that is the beginning ’smathering’ of our read-aloud program. Sometimes I wish we could do all of study from one literature book..I guess you would call that a literature unit. I wonder if somehow I could teach reading, spelling, grammar, history, geog, science, etc. from one classic novel. This is kind of burning in my heart to do this so I think I will look into how to write lessons for these subject areas after choosing a children’s classic…just something very basic but still cover the important areas.

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1. You can’t go wrong with all that terrific literature.

   Comment by momof3feistykids — August 19, 2006 @ 4:58 pm

2. Hey there! I’m trying to catch up on your blog here (looks like much is being learned and fun is being had! )….but I’m writing to ask you about a post on your other blog that I saw when I googled Moms In Touch Homeschool….so if you get a minute can you email me about how you work out the time of day and who watches the children and such. The thought of starting a homeschool MITI group keeps coming to my mind, so I’m praying about taking action on it, and I don’t quite know how to approach the scheduling……I have thoughts but don’t want to ramble on here! (And I’d email you, but I don’t have the paper I wrote it on awhile back from our PA chat.) THANK YOU!!!!!!

   Comment by Kim W. — August 19, 2006 @ 10:45 pm

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