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Read out loud for high schooler?


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I love great literature and the boys are voracious readers. Do you still do read aloud a for middle and high schoolers? Someone posted about training the ear and vocab development with reading out loud. I'm sure that's still true for high schoolers but practically does it happen.

 

Any good suggestions for 7/ 10th graders. We could even do audio books

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I agree with RAs, even for the olders. We really slipped this year when the DC went to brick-and-mortar school, but DH has committed to reading Carry On, Mr. Bowditch and something else to them this summer. I'm planning to read two Shakespeares together then watching the associated movies.

 

Looking forward to other ideas.

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I read aloud daily, and the high schooler is free to listen in if she has time. She attends school 3 days a week and has a heavy workload, but she will make time to listen in. Finding the time is the biggest challenge. Next year I will have 2 high schoolers - 1 will be attending school part-time - and I plan on read alouds. Reading aloud gives us great opportunities for discussion. It's not unusual for us to only get through a few pages before we stop to talk about something that must struck us and can't wait. Is my favorite part of homeschooling.

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Reading aloud is a family activity here. Everybody is involved. I read aloud in the morning before schoolwork, again at lunch, and in the evenings with dh when we can. My 3yo labels our current books as our 'lunch book' and our 'dinner book' (breakfast books are on Kindle....tricked her...;) ) and my oldest dd would absolutely NOT want to be left out of reading time. It builds togetherness and family culture. Winner!!!

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Besides bedtime reading, which I am holding on to for as long as possible! I find that much of my read alouds with my rising 8th grader are now nonfiction books.  I read aloud the books that are on topics she's interested in, or that I know will spark fruitful discussion, but that I know are a little over her head, or she'd struggle with on her own.  I read aloud more nonfiction with her than I do fiction these days.  We do read Shakespeare aloud together, and sometimes we listen to classic audiobooks together.  But mostly read alouds are stretch nonfiction books, where her ability to stop me and ask a question, or my ability to stop for discussion or to make sure she's getting an important point are especially useful.

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I read aloud daily, and the high schooler is free to listen in if she has time. She attends school 3 days a week and has a heavy workload, but she will make time to listen in. Finding the time is the biggest challenge. Next year I will have 2 high schoolers - 1 will be attending school part-time - and I plan on read alouds. Reading aloud gives us great opportunities for discussion. It's not unusual for us to only get through a few pages before we stop to talk about something that must struck us and can't wait. Is my favorite part of homeschooling.

 

 

This is our issue. Both boys are part time in public school and its incredibly hard to sit together. I feel it might just be a few pages at a time rather than a couple of chapters.

 

Also need some suggestions for good reads for both ages. They've pretty much read every book out there but open to suggestions.

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Yes, we read aloud to our kids almost every day until they start college.

 

Of course you need to be reading aloud above their independent reading level if you want to develop their vocabulary, complex sentence structure and expose them to more weighty ideas.  For most high schoolers that would mean books read in late high school or college level.

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Yes, and I plan to continue reading aloud to both my kids for as long as possible. In addition to their personal reading, we do a family lit study most years (that I put together, not prepackaged), and we read aloud nonfiction from our Afternoon Basket. The Afternoon Basket is a lot like Morning Baskets around here, but I am not home in the mornings, so there you go!

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Yes, we read aloud to our kids almost every day until they start college.

 

Of course you need to be reading aloud above their independent reading level if you want to develop their vocabulary, complex sentence structure and expose them to more weighty ideas.  For most high schoolers that would mean books read in late high school or college level.

 

 

Could you give some titles that have been hits for this level?

 

Thanks

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Fun family read alouds here all the way through high school -- and into college! :) Although, the older the students, the harder to fit in casual/family read alouds -- it dropped to just 1-2x/week by 11th/12th grades… However, we always scheduled some of the high school Lit. to be done aloud together, so we still read aloud daily throughout high school. 

 

What kinds of books does your family like -- classics, contemporary, sci-fi/fantasy, realistic/adventure, mystery, humorous, non-fiction...?

 

What kinds of books have you already read -- like, most of the books from the usual homeschooling book lists? Or what's currently on the shelves at the library? All dystopian and sci-fi? 

 

Here are a few absolutely at-random ideas that are short, or can be read in short bites at a time:

 

short story collections

- Best Shorts: Best Short Stories for Sharing (Avi)

- Hercule Poirot's Casebook (Christie)

- Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)

- R is for Rocket (Bradbury)

- Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)

 

discussion starters

- The Pig Who Wanted to Be Eaten (Baggini)

- Sophie's World (Gaarder)

 

fiction

- Watership Down (Adams)

- The Never Ending Story (Ende)

- Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)

- short books in the Bromeliad trilogy: Truckers, Diggers, Wings (Pratchett)

 

non-fiction

- Kon Tiki (Heyersdahl)

- A Short History of Everything (Bryson)

Lies My Teacher Told Me (Loewen)

- Salt: A World History (Kurlansky)

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers? (Roach)

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I continued reading aloud to my kids into high school, but eventually, the schedule just became too difficult. We would start a book we all enjoyed and only be able to read it once or twice a week. It was too frustrating. We haven't read anything aloud in about a year now. Maybe we'll find time this summer. It is still a very positive experience on many levels!

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We're still doing read alouds, with no plans to stop. They are no longer every day, though. Usually 2 or 3 times a week, depending on our schedule.

 

One of our current long term (over several years) read alouds is Doubt: A History (The Great Doubters and their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.)

 

We also have books we are both reading, but we aren't reading aloud together straight through. We read aloud passages to discuss or that strike us for one reason or another. We are doing that with Don Quixote. We also used that approach for Machiavelli's The Prince.

 

With the decreased time spent on read alouds, it's sometimes hard to make progress through complex books. It can also be hard to start and stop and only visit the book a couple times a week. Doubt has been a good read aloud to dip into whenever we have time. Other books work much better with the other method of reading on our own, but reading aloud select passages and discussing 2 or 3 times a week.

 

We also read poetry aloud. Again, not everyday, but when we can. Ideally 2 or 3 times a week, at least.

 

Reading aloud continues to be one of my favorite parts of homeschooling.

 

 

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I love great literature and the boys are voracious readers. Do you still do read aloud a for middle and high schoolers? Someone posted about training the ear and vocab development with reading out loud. I'm sure that's still true for high schoolers but practically does it happen.

 

Any good suggestions for 7/ 10th graders. We could even do audio books

 

I try to read aloud through high school but there are seasons that it's just impracticable with sports schedules, evening meeting and such.  We've done novels like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Silas Marner and even non-fiction books like What He Must Be. I actually LOVE reading through books with my olders and my younger ones usually play with legos,curl up in a fort with pillows and blankets or get out paper and markers while we're reading. 

 

There is definitely value in reading all the way up.  First, you're getting more books into them. That's always good. Also, you get to enjoy the shared experience of reading a book together. And then, also, you might choose a book that they wouldn't choose on their own. So, yes, keep reading as long as your family schedule allows. 

 

We also read in the car or listen to audiobooks on long car trips. Even listening to audiobooks while running errands or back and forth from church, ball practice, lessons allows us to squeeze in more book reading.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I still do read alouds with my middle school age children, usually the newspaper in the morning (does that count?) and a book or magazine at lunch time.  Mainly because I get up earlier than them, so I eat lunch before they do.  

 

Plus we don't have a lot of catching up to do at lunchtime.  "How was your morning?  Oh, yeah, you spent it with me."  

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We do all the way through high school. My dd and I have read tons of epic poetry together: Marmion, siege of Valencia, Lady of the Lake, parts of Idylls of the King, Beowulf, etc. she and I have done a Tolkien focus and we read the Simarillion, the Fall of Arthur,plus things like On Fairy Stories and the Tolkien Reader.

 

For high school books we often sit together with our own copies and listen to an audio version. A lot of times, bc our lives are so crazy, it may be a mix of their reading on their own some days and getting together to read together on others. That is a nice way of keeping pace but still interacting. We read War and Peace that way this past semester.

 

Other titles done together over the yrs are Iliad, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, lots of Shakespeare, and even books like Dracula. There are lots more, but I can't think of the titles right now.

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