Reading Chapter Books to the Little Guys

For the record, this post is not intended to convey Charlotte Mason's views on reading to young children - these are my views ;) If the child has plenty of time to play (especially outdoors), though, I see no reason why this post would conflict with Miss Mason's ideas for children six years old and younger. So, that said...

Have you started reading chapter books aloud to your young children? By "chapter book", I mean a real, honest-to-goodness work of fictional literature. Not a reader. Not a picture book. A chapter book :) I have no way of knowing how influential reading difficult books aloud has been with my children, but I can at least say that reading great books aloud to them early on certainly hasn't hurt ;)

We begin reading chapter books aloud to the children somewhere between age three and three and a half. At first, the readings are very short (especially when the book has no illustrations to speak of). Gradually, we build up until we're able to finish a chapter of average length in one sitting. Books with longer chapters may be spread out even more. Sometimes we stop and talk about what I'm reading. Sometimes I ask chatty questions to help them follow along. Sometimes we just read. There's no schedule to our readings and no laid out plan. We just read the book here and there until we finish it. Right now, for instance, I'm reading Mr. Popper's Penguins to Punkin. We've been reading it for about 6 weeks now, only about twice a week. At this rate, it will be a while before we finish it, but that's okay :) Even at only 3 and 1/2 and even with days between chapters, she is able to remember where we left off and will offer guesses about what might happen next. Her mind is working on this book :)

I have no proof, but I imagine that reading chapter books like this does quite a lot to prepare a child for the sort of books used in formal Charlotte Mason lessons. More than that, though, it helps the child develop a real interest in reading challenging books... one of our primary goals for their education. In case you're wondering, the difficult vocabulary doesn't seem to put the children off - it intrigues them. Complicated story lines thrill them. I'm continually amazed at how my really young children become enthralled with books most children don't meet until they are much older. I say "meet" because the children really develop a relationship with a book read like this over a long period of time. The Little House in the Big Woods becomes one of the most exciting parts of the day and is remembered with fondness months after the last page is read :) I have wonderful memories of snuggling all together reading The Long Winter on a February afternoon while snow fell softly outside. Quality chapter books add a whole new dimension to the world of reading with your children... even your young children! I highly recommend giving it a shot :)

Below are a few good choices for beginning chapter books with preschool children. None of them are required reading for Ambleside Online, although a few do show up on the free reading lists. I hope they are a blessing to your family! Enjoy reading with your little guys :)

Mr. Popper's Penguins - Atwater
Little House in the Big Woods - Wilder
Farmer Boy - Wilder
Capyboppy - Peet (rather short and silly, but fun)
Stuart Little - White
Ginger Pye - Estes (I love this author!)
Pinky Pye - Estes
Misty of Chincoteague - Henry (read this when my oldest two were 3 and 4 and 1/2)
The Cricket in Times Square - Selden
The Boxcar Children - Warner (we've only read the first one)


I'm sure there are many others!

Psssst. Lindafay at Higher Up and Further In (great blog!!) has a terrific post about reading aloud to children. It's called "How Is Your Read Aloud Voice?" and you can check it out here. Enjoy! :)

Charlotte Mason Distinctives: What Really Reeled Me In

What are the distinctives of a Charlotte Mason education? What makes the CM method so unique and why are so many homeschoolers choosing this route for their children?

When I first began reading about Charlotte Mason and her educational philosophy, I was already implementing some of her methods unknowingly. For instance, I knew I had a strong preference for using living books instead of textbooks in the areas of history, science, and literature. I had never heard the term "living book", but I knew that there were some wonderfully well written books available for children, and textbooks seemed unnecessarily dull and dry to me. I was interested when I heard there was a whole approach to homeschooling that used nothing but books likes these.

I took my first steps toward CM, and barely even knew it ;)

So, what exactly is a living book? In Miss Mason's third volume, School Education, she illustrates how a child's enjoyment of a book may be one measure of whether or not the book is living: "The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea" (p. 178). Here, I think, we find what we are trying to get at with living books. Impact. Ideas. Intellectual stir. There is no yawning and glum turning of page after page. These books are interesting. The thoughts that they stir up both feed and exercise the young minds of their readers. They must also be challenging, well-written, and able to be narrated. This is what is meant by a "living book".

Before I began reading Charlotte Mason, I was already beginning to see the benefit of short lessons in our home. My older two girls were learning to read early and well by means of just ten minutes a day. They were, similarly, learning to write their letters in just as little time. When I read that Charlotte Mason advocated short lessons for all of the school subjects, I was immediately intrigued. After reading more, her method made so much sense to me! With short lessons, children remain fresh, attentive, and engaged. Time is not wasted on dawdling, wandering thoughts, and discipline issues that arise from fatigue. Lessons are crisp, focused, and - short. The result is plenty of free time for playing outdoors and pursuing other interests, as well as a positive attitude about school work in general. Who wouldn't want that?

Around the same time that I was looking more carefully at CM, I was also reading Teaching the Trivium, which actually references Charlotte Mason here and there. I was initially confused when I read Laurie Bluedorn refer to Charlotte Mason as the Habitual Method. Why would she call it that? I had just started reading Home Education for the first time, and it did not take me long to find out why the CM method could easily be just what Bluedorn suggested. Charlotte Mason focuses a great deal on the importance of training our children in positive habits. In the same vein, she writes about preventing the formation of negative habits. We are all creatures of habit, she writes, everyday tracing the paths of habit more and more deeply into our minds. Habits are critical in the proper raising of children and they are foundational to a proper education. Miss Mason's advise regarding habits has been every bit as valuable to me as the best child training books on the market today. I have been continually challenged and encouraged by her writings on this topic. Habits are the backbone of the CM method in our home. As I read more of Volume One, I was beginning to really get hooked.

Then, with my interest peaked by living books, habit training, and short lessons, I read Miss Mason's thoughts on the out of doors life for my children. I know it sounds dramatic, but every page I read left me so joyful, so thankful that I had found this woman so early on in our home education! Miss Mason writes in Volume One, "The chief function of the child- his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life- is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses; that he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge got in this way; and that, therefore, the endeavor of his parents should be to put him in the way of making acquaintance freely with Nature and natural objects" (p. 96). I cannot tell you how much these words resonated with me. In my heart of hearts I knew that true education in the early years could not be divorced from the natural world, and here was Charlotte Mason encouraging me to let long hours in nature be a purposeful component in the education of my children! "Never," she writes, "be indoors when you can rightly be without."

Hooray!

Now, before you think that I was ready to just read a living book for fifteen minutes a day and then go run around in the woods all afternoon, let me assure you - there is a final distinctive that really drew me to a Charlotte Mason education. Charlotte Mason's method is academically rigorous. If anyone doubts that statement, one look at the average PNEU curriculum puts all concern to rest. Second graders read Pilgrim's Progress, fourth graders read Shakespeare and Tennyson, and sixth grade children are delving into Don Quixote! Unabridged! There is poetry, nature study, classical music and composer study, challenging history accounts, and more. This is no slacker curriculum. In fact, for some mothers, it can be rather intimidating. I am so thankful for the wonderful women who have collaborated and put together the free CM curriculum resources at Ambleside Online. They have taken so much of the potential stress and confusion out of applying Charlotte Mason's methods in the 21st century. What a tremendous blessing!

There are, of course, many other wonderful aspects of Charlotte Mason's approach. I have left out narration, copywork, dictation, drawing, handicrafts, and foreign languages. This entry is long already, though, and I couldn't possibly touch on all of them. If you have more interest in learning about these and other distinctives of the CM method, please click on the buttons in the sidebars of my homepage. I hope to be continually adding to my store of posts on these subjects.

I hope you have been blessed by something you have read here :)

So, I Made Her Cry On Purpose

My children don't get much screen time. I've already hinted at that a little here and there in previous posts. When they do watch something on the television it's always from a DVD. Every once in a blue moon they watch a live football game, but the TV gets turned off during commercials. You never know what's going to pop up on that screen. I've seen gorey previews for some of those forensic-type shows in the middle of the day. Um, excuse me, but my five year old is not accustomed to seeing bloody crime victims, thank you. So, commercials off.

One of the (potential) downsides of limiting television viewing is that my children seem hyper-sensitive compared to their more media-savvy peers. Two years ago we were visiting friends in Virginia. Their oldest daughter, with good intentions, popped Nemo in the DVD player while I was elsewhere. You know it doesn't get too far into the movie before Nemo's mom and all her little babies (minus one) get swallowed whole and Nemo's dad is in a fit of hysteria. My children know about the food chain. They know big fish eat little fish. However, they had never before seen a fish with human thoughts and emotions lose his beloved wife and children to violent deaths. My kids were screaming their heads off. At Nemo.

Hmmm. This might be a problem.

Husband and I saw the trend. The girls, then ages 4.5 and 3, didn't want anything to do with tension in their storybooks, either. They wanted me to skip whole sections of The Little House in the Big Woods (Grandpa and the Panther). Of course, they were still awfully young. We did realize, though, that we didn't want them to get around to school age and still be avoiding anything uncomfortable in the world. What were we communicating to our children? Were we attempting to create a childhood apart from The Fall? When were we going to break it to them? The world is not a cozy, rosy place. Gradually, we began adding books with more tension, more suspense, and yes, even frightening episodes. We've done this on an individual basis. Shug is still rather sensitive to "scary" things like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, while SweetP is completely entranced by the more intense fairy tales right now. Maybe it's just that she's a little older. Not sure. But, they have both come a long way. Oh, and we watched Mary Poppins with them until they were okay with flying people and children lost in alleyways ;)

Just reading through the Bible has helped a bit, too. The Old Testament can be very interesting, to say the least, to read to the younger set. People get run through, eaten by dogs, decapitated, you name it. I admit, old habits die hard for us. We still avoid Jael and Jezebel, edit some storybooks and leave out passages when Punkin is around. She can't handle as much as her older sisters can. I'm not in the business of giving people nightmares. She can certainly handle a great deal more than the older two could at her age. She might even be able to handle Nemo ;) Maybe just because we stopped trying to create that perfect little dream world. Or, maybe because Shug is regularly launching assaults on imaginary Indians in the family room. Punkin has a much different childhood than her sisters had ;) Admittedly, there are still books that I reserve for when they are just a little older. Did you know people get quartered and sewn back together again in the real Aladdin? Yeesh! I do want to stretch them a little at a time, though. We'll get to it. Baby steps.

Besides reading the Bible and fairy tales, we've also added in missionary biographies. We hope to read about a different missionary each term. The lives of these missionaries are often heart-breaking. Would I really want to shelter the children from that kind of sadness, though? Not for all the world. These are, by God's grace, the best of all those who will become their personal heroes. These are stories I want them to know, to remember, to feel. We are reading about David Livingstone this term, and Shug has been listening in since Chapter 2. (I decided the first chapter was okay for SweetP, but a bit much for her younger sister - lion's teeth ripping flesh and other graphic language). Yesterday, we read of young David leaving home, likely to never see his ailing father again.

"It was a sad parting in Glasgow for David and his father. Mr. Livingstone's health was failing, and David was on his way to the white man's grave. Neither of them expected to see each other again, and David stood on the aft deck for a long time watching his father disappear from view as the boat slipped down the Broomielaw and out to see."

I looked down at sweet little Shug.I knew what to expect. I had a little catch in my voice as I read. She looked up at me, holding back the tears in her eyes. She did not cry, but she was having to fight it. I gave her a gentle squeeze and smiled at her. "It's seems hard, doesn't it? Leaving his father when he knew his father might die soon?," I asked slowly. She nodded silently. "Missionaries have to leave quite a lot behind when they go to the mission field," I continued, "but, for those that go, it's always worth it, isn't it?" Another silent nod, and she wiped her eyes dry.

That's good, Shug. That's good.