Tracking Read-Alouds

Since I began "formally" homeschooling the sweet girl last August, we've read a number of longer read-aloud books, in addition to all the regular reading we do each day (picture books, Bible reading). Read-aloud time has become one of our favorite times of the day!

I've been keeping a running list of the books we've read together, but with the new calendar year upon us, I thought I would at least try a more creative approach to keeping a record of what we've read...one that will help "cement" the story and our shared experience of reading it more firmly in our minds.

I spent some time yesterday browsing some new blogs and websites that really nourished my homeschooling heart and mind. On one of the sites, the blogging parent/teacher is utilizing the Five in A Row books. I've got both Before Five In a Row and the first volume of FIAR on my shelves, and have used them as resources: good book recommendations, fun and creative teaching ideas. I've not used them fully as a curriculum unto themselves though, and it had been a while since I'd revisited them.

Seeing this woman's enthusiam for FIAR made me get them back out this morning. One of the things she mentioned doing was utilizing the "story disc" idea. FIAR provides little paper "buttons" or discs designed to represent each of the picture books they recommend. The idea is that your child can collect a series of discs with these simple pictures on them, and those will remind them of the books they've read and experienced. It's a fun idea.

I like the discs, but they've always seemed a bit small. This morning I got an idea to make a larger disc (tracing around one of our largest cups on colored cardstock). Just yesterday, the sweet girl and I finished reading Little House on the Prairie, the second book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's wonderful series about her pioneer family. I thought perhaps we could create a "disc" together -- on one side, we could paste a picture that represented the story for us, and on the other side, we could write the title, author, month/year we read the book, and the place we visited via our imagination through the book (in this case the prairie in Kansas territory).

The sweet girl really liked the idea. We found a photo of a mockingbird online, cut it out and pasted it onto the cardstock disc. We chose a mockingbird because Laura hears them a lot on the prairie, including in the final, poignant scene as they leave their little house and head back out into the prairie in their covered wagon. We spent some time reading about mockingbirds yesterday and listening to their call here.

I've not required formal "narrations" from the sweet girl during this, her kindergarten year, though we often talk about the stories we read. But I thought it might be fun if she could tell me something she liked and/or remembered about the book so we could write it down and keep that with the story disc. I'm trying to gently move her toward responding to story questions in fuller sentences, rather than just one or two words, or helping her to "think" in sentences more. I just planned to write down a sentence or two on regular paper, but my earlier search for an image of a covered wagon turned up this appropriate covered wagon journal page from a Laura Ingalls Wilder site. We had fun recording her thoughts on that page in colored pencil.

In the end, we had three things to put into the colorful plastic binder I've now designated our read-aloud notebook: the story disc, the journal page, and a neat map of Laura's travels we found online a few weeks ago (I can't remember where, unfortunately!) which we've been referring to from time to time as we read.

All this took only a few minutes, but it was great fun...it helped bring "closure" to a great read-aloud, and helped us think about why we enjoyed the book. I'm looking forward to adding to our notebook as we continue on this year.

This morning we started The Story of Dr. Doolittle!