Some Of Our Favorite Books

My favorite homeschooling activity to do with my children is reading out loud with them.  More specifically, reading fairy tales, fables, myths and legends.  Children are naturally drawn to creative make believe stories, but more importantly, even though the stories are completely fantastical, they teach profound truths.  Tonight as a family we read from Aesop's Fables and The Very Best of Aesop's Fables

Our favorite fairy tales lately are the familiar stories, with a twist.  For example, there are so many Cinderellas!  We love The Egyptian Cinderella and Cinderhazel.

At the library today we found this beautiful book, Sugar Cane: A Caribbean Rapunzel.

In A Fairy Tale Feast after each story, is a related recipe.  For example, after reading Snow White, we followed the recipe for, and ate, baked cinnamon apples, then after reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears, we cooked porridge.

Hooray Isabel!

Isabel read over one thousand pages!  To celebrate, Joey took her out to The Cracked Egg this morning for breakfast.  She let me know that she never wants to do a reading chart ever again.  She said that she doesn't like it when she HAS to read.  Hmmmmm.  That is fine that she didn't like the chart.  It was merely a try on my part to get her motivated to read.  She is a very good reader, but doesn't crave books the way Luke does.  If I could only find what genre she likes to read.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  Some kind of nice and easy chapter books for girls?

Las Vegas Kids Marathon

Joey had the brilliant idea to have reading charts for Luke and Isabel where the more pages they read the closer they get to the finish line.  At the end they get to pick a restaurant for our family to go out to.  I am not very crafty, so this is the best I came up with.

Yes, I named their charts, "Rainbow of Reading."  Sorry LeVar Burton, I totally ripped off the name of your PBS show.  Luke needs to read 10,000 pages and Isabel 1,000.  Her pages include me reading to her.

A friend told me about this Las Vegas Kids Marathon.  Running is probably the perfect sport for Luke (no contact) and Isabel will probably like it because she enjoyed watching the women's marathon on TV from the Olympics this year.  Twice a week they get together at the local elementary school with other kids, and a couple of teachers get them running (I assume.)  Then once a week they are supposed to do it at home and after 10 weeks they will have acrrued 26 miles. Today at 3:45 is their first class? session?  I think Luke and Isabel will gain a sense of accomplishment from this and have a lot of fun being with other kids.