Reading Day

Ah, Mondays. Sometimes our weekends are so full, we need a rest from the weekends! But Monday comes, and we can't afford to get behind in school. So I did a little shuffling with our weekly schedule to make last Monday a little different to get us excited about starting a new week. We had just been to the library and it was time to start some new books, so reading day seemed like a fun idea.

So what do you need for a great Reading Day?

1. Books. We started with 6 books, and replaced our usual subjects with extra readings. We started two new chapter books (Royal Monastic and Island of the Blue Dolphins) from which we read several chapters in a sitting. The rest were easy reader books that we read all in one sitting (including Poppleton books, Arnold Lobel's Grasshopper on the Road, and Henry and Mudge books), and we ended up adding in a few extras of these.

2. Schedule. I organized our schedule the same way I usually do - with a checklist in a spiral book for each child, but today's usual subjects were all replaced with reading. So today's check list looked something like this:

• Read during breakfast. 
• Read.
• Morning walk, and read outside.
• Quiet reading time on your own.
• Read again.
• Snack and Read.
• Read.

3. Post-its. Before we started on our schedule, we decided to read each book in a different place. I put a post-it on each book, and let the girls choose where we'd read each one. We wrote the location on the post-it. We chose Grasshopper on the Road for our outside reading, L thought it would be fun to read Poppleton in the Pop-asan (papasan chair), and then the girls each picked their bed for their favorite book.

4. Cozy socks. A last minute idea, to help make today feel extra special, everyone put on warm socks so we could be cozy while reading.

After we got organized, we read through our schedule. I tried to put the next book in its place while the girls checked off their list. I was just trying to stay organized, but the girls thought it was like a treasure hunt. So when we took our quick morning walk, we picked some flowers and then we arrived on the porch; and there they found a vase ready for our flowers, and our next book waiting. Later their books were waiting in their beds with snacks. A successful treasure hunt indeed! We went through most of our stack of library readers, and got started on new novel and biography with lots of snuggles, so I'd say a pretty successful day.