reading to kids

So. Reading lists. We didn’t do so well last month, I’m afraid. Actually, I suppose that’s not entirely fair. I didn’t do so well. The children did wonderfully. Allow me to elaborate. And explain.

First, our read-aloud didn’t happen. Don’t get me wrong; I tried to read it to the kids. But Elijah of Buxton wasn’t a very good book. (My apologies to Christopher Paul Curtis.) It was one of those books that is written from the point of view of someone with bad English, and so the book itself was riddled with bad grammar and pronunciation (afore instead of before, for example). I just have a hard time respecting books like that. I don’t have a problem with the authors – unless the book is badly written due to incompetence. Just the books. The point behind reading is to help the kids learn to read, write, and express themselves properly, and when authors write bad books on purpose, they don’t accomplish any of those things. So, even for book club, I wasn’t going to endorse that book. And for the record, the kids didn’t go to book club in January, either. I have a rule that if they don’t read the book, they don’t go to book club. Even if it wasn’t their fault this time, we still didn’t send them. (Not all of the parents have this rule. Munchkin says that any given month, only about half or less of the students have read the book.) [Read more…]