Homeschooling Charlotte Mason Style

Homeschooling Charlotte Mason Style

Read Alouds

We love read alouds in our house.  If you’re not familiar with the term read alouds, this refers to reading a book out loud to an audience.  In our case, I am the reader and my children are the audience.  I love homeschooling Charlotte Mason style which places a large influence on literature and using good literature in your homeschool.

So I thought I’d share with you this weeks read alouds.  And yes that’s plural.  We read more than one book a day.  In fact, we normally have 3-4 different daily read alouds.

While we’re reading our books I often have a calming(Peace and calming or lavender) or focusing(vetiver and brain power are amazing) essential oil blend diffusing to make sure we are all focusing and not letting our brains wander.  The main reason I started this is that I was letting my brain wander while reading!  Yes it is possible to have a wandering brain while reading and still read well!  Also, some of my kiddos are doers.  They have to be doing something to really understand what they’re reading so they’re going to be playing with essential oil infused playdough or mega blocks.

So our breakfast read aloud is normally a more focused Christian living and guiding type book.  Lately we’ve been reading through some YWAM biography books.  Their heroes and heroines of history series is amazing.  This week we’re reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder.

That brings us to our second read aloud time of the day.  This is normally at lunch time.  At lunch this week we are reading The Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Makes sense that we’d be starting her most famous book series while reading about her life.  This is how homeschooling Charlotte Mason style is so great!  You can read about an author and also read some of their books at the same time.  For me that’s amazing.

For our lunch read aloud we’ll go through the whole Little House series before we decide on a new series. Sometimes we just go back to book one because it’s amazing how children can pick out new things each time they listen.  I even find myself picking out things that I’d not paid attention to before when I read them as a child.

Another read aloud!  Yeap they just keep coming!  The next read aloud is for supper.  For our supper read aloud we like to read The Chronicles of Narnia.  This is our constant.  We just go from one book to the next and then back again.  So far we have skipped reading aloud The Last Battle though as it’s a bit much for our younger kiddos.  The older kids have read it on their own though and we’ve had some good discussions.

Our last read aloud comes with bedtime.  For bedtime I will read another series.  Right now we’re doing Anne of Green Gables.  We’ll go through the entire series.  Once this one is over I think Emily of New Moon will be up next.  I’ve always been a big fan of these books and love sharing them with my children.  Anne with an E is still one of my favorite characters!

What are some books that you like to read out loud to your children?  I want them to be books that will teach my children something.  Character training is so important and most of our books are going to focus on teaching while telling a vivid story.