14 Comments

  1. Thank you for all the recommendations, Amy — you know what is funny? I JUST finished Unbroken in January!! I’m trying to make my way through Fall of Giants — it is really good, but it’s 1,000 pages!

    Someone at our literature fair did a whole project on The Hiding Place. I think I NEED to read that one first! 🙂

  2. My middle son isn’t quite at this point yet, but I think he would love these when we get there. Thanks for the recommendation. I remember always wishing for more good books at that level with my first.

  3. Thanks for these recommendations. Hannah has a very odd lack of confidence about reading books out loud lately and I have been looking for really entertaining books that will be good practice. It’s frustrating because she is a good reader when she’s not paralyzed by fear of being imperfect (she used to read out loud out of chapter books and her Bible but has recently refused if she thinks she won’t be able to pronounce every word perfectly the first time). I’ve noticed that she’ll read when she’s very engaged in the subject because she forgets that someone might hear her make a mistake, so I put two of these books on hold at the library to try. Hopefully the story will interest her enough to overcome her perfectionism. I struggle with perfectionism in the sense of putting inordinate amounts of effort into things to make them perfect and being self-critical, but Hannah just refuses to do something at all if she fears it won’t be perfect. I’m at a bit of a loss since I sympathize with the problem but don’t quite know how to help her with her manifestation of it.

    Well that turned into a long digression when I started out to just say thank you!

  4. The Richard Scarry books have to fall into this category. They drive me nuts to read, especially the ones that are just little snippets of text all over and mostly pictures. But the kids love them so I just grit my teeth and try to enjoy it!

  5. I don’t know that I could bring myself to even touch a book with a character of a cockroach on it. That’s . . . pushing my limits. I almost consider you brave.

    =)

    I read Thomas the Tank engine stories out of love. The stories can be repetitious and annoying sometimes, as they lack significant plot. But Bookworm2 loves reading them so we do.

  6. My younger son had a time when he loved “The Runaway Bunny.” I hated that story! Also, my kids enjoy fantasy books and I they aren’t really my thing, but I read them (and sometimes enjoy them). Right now I’m gritting my teeth through the Princess and Curdie.

    Is Maybelle too girly for a boy? I am trying to encourage my ds to read more on his own.

    • Amy

      Beth,

      I don’t know if it’s too girly. I’ve thought about it, and the only reason I can think of that a boy might be turned off is that Maybelle IS a girl and the fact that she wears a pink bow in her hair is sometimes emphasized. Her main activity is getting out and getting to the food.

      Fantasy isn’t your thing, huh? I haven’t read Princess and Curdie, though I did really enjoy an audiobook of The Light Princess a few years ago. Maybe that’s the way to go with fantasy for you–audiobooks!

  7. Angie

    Fortunately, my girls are over their fascination with Magic School Bus books. I detested reading those aloud!

  8. We read a full range of books here from twaddle to classics…I know I read plenty of twaddle as a kid and I appreciate that I was allowed to do that (the only thing I remember my mom telling me I was not allowed to read were some books that were just too mature for me as an elementary age child). Eventually I got to reading and enjoying Shakespeare and Jane Austin even though I read Sweet Valley Twins and Babysitter’s Club as a 2nd grader. 🙂

    So, I think I read Miss M about 50 “Rainbow Magic Fairy” books before she was a good enough reader to read them herself, though they didn’t really drive me crazy until toward the end. Right now I am trying very hard to get “Mater’s Tall Tales” back to the library, but this week Mr. K took it out of the library bag when I wasn’t looking. He keeps telling me it is his book, NOT the library’s!!! I am torn between just holding firm and bringing it back, and just ordering him his own copy from Amazon because I know he will be so heartbroken when he doesn’t have it any more (even though I am SO sick of reading those stories!).

  9. You asked on my blog if I used Ambleside Online or just the reading lists. Yes, I used Ambleside for our curriculum, especially for history, literature, geography, natural history and free reads. When my oldest was using it I modified it quite a bit and didn’t use all the books, but with my two middle kids I following more closely to the book list, thus Hawthorne’s tales (which I skipped the first time).

    I am all for audiobooks and we use them quite a bit, but it seems that my kids have more of a relationship with a book read aloud to them than with an audiobook. Plus, it kinda forces me out of my reading box!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
https://hopeisthewordblog.com/2012/03/08/read-aloud-thursday-the-maybelle-books-by-katie-speck/
hopeisthewordblog.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-26
77844
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NDVWUWCDHOZY2YXFTEK2HYSNJ6366F2I
<urn:uuid:9618e466-9c8d-4aa0-80be-55832035aef9>
2019-06-16T06:57:44Z
151.101.194.159
text/html
sha1:L3EOI43VMPYYLUOZMQBODBVSTLJAWMFG
<urn:uuid:fe341a81-c7c2-4dbf-859a-8539af64b12e>
https://hopeisthewordblog.com/2012/03/08/read-aloud-thursday-the-maybelle-books-by-katie-speck/
response
<urn:uuid:49b2a344-05dc-46c7-80aa-2f34ceada965>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-187-26-184.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/