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The Read Aloud that Never Ended . . .


ByGrace3
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If you've never read Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, you may well get a laugh out of it:

 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/indians/offense.html

 

 

My secret to read alouds is doing it right before turning out the light. It helps both of us go to sleep, and it encourages him to get his little bod into bed. Plus, once you read aloud all 13 volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events, everything else seems so ...short. We just finished Freddy Goes to Florida, and it was rather like Three Men In A Boat meets Beatrix Potter. Great fun!!

 

Thanks! I have bookmarked this! Good stuff. :001_smile:

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Dude, you're SO not the worst. I still haven't finished Missie Lee (part of the Swallows and Amazons series) and I started it when my middle dd wasabout....7? She's 13.5. It was good, too!

 

Sometimes I think I had another baby just so I could read certain books aloud again. I can't wait for Swallows and A's. And the Borrowers. And Betsy-Tacy. And The Wolves Chronicles. There are worse reasons to have babies, right?:tongue_smilie:

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I have been avoiding this thread because the title made me feel guilty. Books we have not finished (don't get me wrong we were enjoying them too!):eek: :

Cricket in Time Square (I think we had 2 chaptera left)

Mr. Popper's Penguins (again I think I had 2 chapters left)

Tirzah

Little House in the Big Woods And Farmer Boy

 

Yes, I am the worst read aloud mom. :w00t: I guess after reading aloud history, science, grammar etc, my voice is just too tired to do story time (and if I wait until bedtime I am too tired))...after enough time passes we lose our place and start another one. This year I decided that Story Time is going to be whatever audio classic I can find at the library at the time (beside Hank the Cowdog - although we love him too). :D

Edited by kayinpa
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I think what might make it worse is that we started in in April, finished it in June and didn't read any read alouds in between. :blush: Other things for school we did in May, but then we went away, came back, left again, etc. We have read some picture books, but not much.

 

On a positive note, we are 2 days and 2 chapters into Henry Huggins! :lol:

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It's been over a year since we started "The House on Pooh Corner". Many books have gotten done since, but we're still in chapter 4 on that one. I really don't understand why it is so famous. It is sooo boring!

 

Oh, yes, I'm struggling through this right now. I don't think my daughter understands a single word.

 

The Phantom Tollbooth is another one. I think we're going on 5 months now. I think my neurotic, ueber-Type-A personality is incompatible with Phantom Tollbooth.

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Oh rats! I just bought Secret of the Andes. I'll have to let them read it to themselves. :001_smile:

 

That was actually the read-aloud that broke the camel's back a couple of years ago. We stopped reading thru Sonlight book selections mid-year after that read-aloud (it used to be part of Core 3, I think) and have not gone back. My son actually cried about halfway through that book, because he just couldn't deal with it anymore. :lol: On the flipside, my daughter actually liked it, so I had to keep reading it!

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I started reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making to the kids months ago, and I hated reading it aloud. It was one of those books that I struggled to get through each night. Finally, after we got half-way through, I couldn't take it anymore. I "lost" the book, and we haven't been able to find it since. :lol:

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We read Secret of the Andes this year but it was one of those that I just couldn't get into so it probably took longer than is should have.

 

This was the one that held us up too. None of us were eager to dive back in each chapter so it was not particularily missed when life got in the way. We did eventually finish it and have moved on with other books happily, but while over all the book was good it was not one that grabbed our attention.

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Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. We really enjoyed the first half or so, then she got to be a teenager and it started getting a bit slow. We stopped not too far from the end - I read the rest and decided there was nothing there that they'd be interested enough in to keep reading.

 

Lots of others that we started before we got a good bedtime read-aloud routine established. When DS was 4-6 we started many more books than we finished.

 

Oh rats! I just bought Secret of the Andes. I'll have to let them read it to themselves. :001_smile:

 

My DS enjoyed it (he was 7 at the time), and has talked about it occasionally since. It was rather on the slow side, though.

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Little house on the Prairie. After we finished it, I told DD she was on her own for the rest of the series. I can't believe how many pages, and pages, and pages were describing wheat!

 

DD wanted to read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". It's still sitting on the end table, bookmark a few chapters in. We didn't exactly give up...it's simply that the Lord of the Rings Lego sets came out, and we decided to dash to "The Hobbit" instead, and haven't looked back to poor Victor Hugo.

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Little house on the Prairie. After we finished it, I told DD she was on her own for the rest of the series. I can't believe how many pages, and pages, and pages were describing wheat!

 

DD wanted to read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". It's still sitting on the end table, bookmark a few chapters in. We didn't exactly give up...it's simply that the Lord of the Rings Lego sets came out, and we decided to dash to "The Hobbit" instead, and haven't looked back to poor Victor Hugo.

 

You can get audio recordings of them that include Pa playing his fiddle. I like listening to the fiddling part.

 

Right now we are listening to "On the Banks of Plum Creek".

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The last Narnia book dragged on and on, and was a bit much for a five year old (well, MY five year old). The first six he liked, though.

 

And I'm surprised that people don't love Winnie the Pooh! I had to pace myself because I loved reading it aloud.

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I tried to read The Jungle Book and could not get into it. I read the first story couldn't take it. It sat on DD's bedside table for 3-4 months before I shelved it. My mom is going to read it to her next year! Another that was a bear to read was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Ariel loved the story, but the way it was written did not make it particularly conducive to being read aloud. When she gets older, she can read the sequels to herself if she wants more about Phronsie and Polly and the rest. It took us nearly 3 months to get through the first book. Reading. every. day.

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I tried to read The Jungle Book and could not get into it. I read the first story couldn't take it. It sat on DD's bedside table for 3-4 months before I shelved it. My mom is going to read it to her next year! Another that was a bear to read was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Ariel loved the story, but the way it was written did not make it particularly conducive to being read aloud. When she gets older, she can read the sequels to herself if she wants more about Phronsie and Polly and the rest. It took us nearly 3 months to get through the first book. Reading. every. day.

 

The first two in the "5 little peppers" are available from LibriVox. I think the third one is also, but we didn't care for the voice.

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The Wind in the Willows.

We all enjoy it it, but we've paused to finish some other things and then spring was upon us and our calendar was packed. now it is summer and we have more time. :)

So we are just now on chapter 6, Toad just escaped and stole the motorcar...

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:lol: It's currently The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet for us.

 

My kidsliked it, but years later have no memory of it.

 

I'm almost done with the Yellow Fairy Book and Wind in the Willows. Toad just escaped from prison in his washerwoman getup.

 

Peter pan was abandoned, as the younger listener was too scared.

 

Farmer Boy

 

I read chapters randomly, like short stories.

Edited by stripe
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My dh has been reading The Hobbit for at least a month and a half. We love it- but it feels sllllooowww right now. To be fair we did move countries and taken a major family vacation in the same time frame. But it still feels like it is going to be painful to finally get it done.:lol:

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Swiss Family Robinson seemed to never end for our family! Each time we sat down to read, the boys would joke and say, "I wonder what animal will die today!"

 

that said, we did like the story fine, but it is not a favorite.

 

This was ours too. It just went on and on and on. One preachy story after another, as far as I was concerned.

 

Ds must have enjoyed it more than I did, though, as he has gone on to read it on his own several times.

 

And I suppose I enjoyed the story too. It was just way too long for a read aloud.

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The Swiss Family Robinson have become like members of our own family, they've been here so long.

 

:lol: This is how we feel about the Ingall's! After Little House on the Prairie last year and Little House in the Big Woods this year. . . my dc love them and so do I but they are a killer to read aloud. The details slay me! :tongue_smilie:

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My girls and I are reading Little House in the Big Woods right now...and we have been for the past month. It's not that we don't enjoy it -- cause we do! We just can't remember to pick it up but every other week or so...

 

(I think it's because the chapters are "stand alone"... no major suspense from one to the next and it's easy to just let it sit after finishing a chapter; unlike something like My Father's Dragon trilogy where one chapter tumbles into the next -- we read those 3 books very quickly because they had to know what happened.)

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Swiss Family Robinson seemed to never end for our family! Each time we sat down to read, the boys would joke and say, "I wonder what animal will die today!"

 

that said, we did like the story fine, but it is not a favorite.

 

What's funny is all the killing in that book didn't bother my boys. I thought it might since a year or two before we read, "Mr. Poppers Penguins" and about the only comment about it afterwards was about how shocking it was to just kill those fish. (In one chapter a penguin eats the goldfish).

 

After further questioning it was discovered that the boys thought that since the pets the penguins were treated as 'people' they thought the same would happen to the goldfish.

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