do kids actually follow this stuff??

[EthiopianFood]

http://www.angelicum.net/html/the_good_books_in_print_list.html

 

Has anyone here read these books to their kids at the recommended ages, especially the Nursery and Preschool ages? I just can't imagine young kids sitting through, nevermind comprehending and enjoying, books such as these.

[Jean in Wisc]

What a nice book list! We did not read the fairy books out loud--my dd read some of them to herself, though.

 

I doubt we read most of these to the kids when they were as young as they recommend. I don't see why you could not pick and choose, though, and make them appropriate to your dc's abilities.

 

There are a lot of titles here that I read as a child; I went in search for those titles when my children were small to be sure they read them, too! :001_smile:

 

Jean

[chiguirre]

We did okay with Beatrix Potter in Sonlight PK 4/5 and Winnie the Pooh in K, but my kids certainly didn't get everything in the stories. I tried the Blue Fairy Book with ds this year when I gave Ambleside 1 a try. I thought it was a bit too much, it even lost my interest. I substituted for a Geraldine McCaughrean Fairy Tale Book and we were both much happier. For younger kids, we really liked the books in SL PK 3/4. In fact my dd still likes them and they're handy for taking to the doctor's or other waiting rooms because they're relatively short.

[4kiddies]

I haven't used it myself personally, BUT it has been HIGHLY recommended to me by someone who has been a classic homeschooler for years with her 7 children. She especially recommends the online classes ( I can't remember what they call them:glare:!)

[Annabel Lee]

It looks like a wonderful list to me! I don't know how well a 2 or 3 year old would understand some of the content, but I read The Complete Works of Beatrix Potter to my sons, who were 7 & just-turned-5, last summer. I've read them some Aesop, Charles Dickens, and now we're stuck on Oz books b/c they like them so much and we have to stop and discuss some parts. Whenever I read aloud a word I know they don't know yet, I simply tell them what it means.

[LadyAberlin]

I read Beatrix potter and winnie the pooh and dr dolittle to a newly turned 4 yr old. I haven't tried the fairy books. He is 5 now and we have read a lot of Thornton Burgess, Peter Pan, and Wizard of oz among others.

[Testimony]

Some of those books are recommended at Amblesideonline. I have not read all of the stories from the Andrew Lang, but a good number of them. They are very interesting so, they do hold the children's attention.

 

I must admit that I have cheated with some of the books, like Swiss Family Robinson. The book is over 1,000 pages long. So, my library had the entire unabridged version on cassettes. It was 13 cassettes in all. We listen to that book over and over for months. We learned a lot from that book.

 

I read the full version of Jungle book. AAA! That was a nightmare. My children loved the story. I thought that I was going to die! It was 450 pages of thees and thous. It was the same with those fairy tales too. Reading all those thees and thous, I thought that I would faint.:tongue_smilie:

 

Blessings in you homeschooling journey!

 

Sincerely,

Karen

http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/testimony

[dragons in the flower bed]

My eight-year-old read early and well, so I couldn't read an easier, modern book like, say, Charlotte's Web, outloud. It has been devoured at age four independently. I turned to old-fashioned sounding books. We read a bunch of Oz titles. My middle child sat in because he wanted to do so, and he was three and four at the time. Now he's six, and he just read Through the Looking-Glass, the original, unabridged version, by himself, in a day.

 

Kids are language learning machines. Their little heads are entirely capable of determining your meaning by what seems like nearly psychic means to us. They use body language, context, the tone of your voice, and other cues, and they get the meaning of what you're reading, and they learn new vocabulary and complicated sentence structure at the same time. Read when they are tired and clingy, or give them things to do with their hands, and they will pick up more of the story than you would think. Their squirminess is not caused by an inability to comprehend.

 

However, alarms go off in my head when I see Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm on a reading list for small children. Those stories, in that original form, are gruesome, in many places terrifyingly cruel, and completely inappropriate for a five-year-old. I'd wait to age eleven or twelve for that title. Seeing it there makes me wonder if the person responsible for that list has indeed read all of the books on it.

Edited March 26, 2009 by dragons in the flower bed
forgot to underline one title

[choirfarm]

I guess it depends on the child, but a lot could. When I did Sonlight Core 5 with my boys, my daughter was 4 and I was completely amazed by what she understood. She was just in the room when I was reading the readalouds and many days she would tell my dh what happened in the book. That was the same year she asked me one day, " Mom, if John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater, what movie was he watching??" It was completely out of the blue. I finally figured out she must have been listening to an Adventures in Odyssey in her room, so we talked about the difference between a play and a movie. She is VERY auditory... If only she could read... I figured she was so smart it would be easy, but here she is 7 1/2 and she can't and doesn't want to..

 

Christine

[jellogirl]

It looks fairly decent. I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 when I read The Jungle Book, Black Beauty, Tom Sawyer, and the like. And I was not an early reader! I remember a lot of the books on the early elementary list, and while I couldn't have read them myself, I remember them as read-alouds.

 

You could compare this list to Sonlight. They list ages for reading and listening to many good books.

[coralloyd]

I read Beatrix, Winnie the Pooh, Treasury of Mother Goose, A Child's Garden of Verses, and Dr. Dolittle to my girls when they were 6 and 4 years old.