Reading Aloud

I have been making it a goal to do more reading aloud this year for school. It's really something I've gotten away from. I'm also trying to be held more accountable in terms of our school. So I'm going to attempt to link up to Debra's weekly link up over at Footprints in the Butter to share what we have been reading.

Each Tuesday we do a lot of driving. It's our day out of the house day and we are in the car at least two hours. Driving time is when I try to have some sort of audio book going. I have a captive audience and it helps make the drive time go by that much faster.

Today we listened to Ben-Hur. This wasn't a word-for-word audio book, but rather an audio drama from Focus on the Family.  It was excellent!!!  I had only heard "Ben-Hur and chariot race," but no more information than that before listening to the story today. We were all captivated by it and, of course, hearing it as an audio drama with various actors and sound effects made it all the better. I do see us reading this one at some point though. Just like watching a movie based on a book, they can only cover so much and I'm sure much was left out of the drama.

I am also working through The Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit. We are about half-way through this one. I read anywhere from 2-3 chapters daily to the boys - depending on how antsy they are getting. I sometimes think I enjoy these books far more than they do.

We also recently listened to Edith Nesbit's book, The Railway Children while driving. I was able to download that from LibriVox.org. The woman that read it had a lovely British accent and did a wonderful job with it. If you aren't familiar with it, LibriVox is a free place to download audio books. They are all books in the public domain (i.e. the copyright has expired) and read by volunteers. This past fall we also listened to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from here as well. All very well done.

I have found that while I want my children to be exposed to the classics, in reality it's sometimes difficult to read them as they get bogged down in the older language style. Even I have found this to be true for myself. However, it's much easier to listen to them so this is one way I have found to have them not only learn from them, but to enjoy them as well.

We are also doing a literature based history program this year. I have a number of books going for that particular program, but I will share those titles next week.

Happy reading!