Seven Favorite Read-Alouds

Here are seven of our favorite read-aloud bedtime (and naptime) stories in this house. These are all books we own and have read and enjoyed many, many times.

These are listed in no particular order of preference. They are all wonderful.

1. Barn Dance! by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom fame. I love this story. The rhythm of the verse is infectious, the illustrations are beautiful, and the story speaks to curiosity and adventure. Anyone with a bit of bluegrass or country in their background will particularly enjoy the animal square dance at the heart of the story.

2. The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst. I love reading this as a sequel to The Gingerbread Man (Read the Gingerbread Man first!). This story picks up some time after the poor end of the Gingerbread Man with the old couple's second attempt at making a gingerbread cookie. This time things turn out differently. The story is such fun to read. My children are delighted every time I pull it out. One small warning - it has an unfortunate use of words ("dumb", "airhead") when the fox first meets the gingerbread girl and I choose to switch those words for "silly" when I read it to my children. I would definitely NOT let that stop you from picking up this book.

3. The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth and Barbara McClintock. This, by far, is my favorite telling of the gingerbread man tale. The rhythm and rhyme are perfectly written so that this is incredibly fun to read and to listen to. The verse repeats many times during the telling of the story and my children love to chime in and tell the story along with me.

4. The Clock Struck One: A Time-Telling Tale by Trudy Harris. This is a creative extension of the nursery rhyme/song Hickory Dickory Dock. The book is fun to read (sing) and enjoyed by both parent and child. As a bonus, if you take only a few seconds to show the kids, they will learn how to tell time to the hour.

5. The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. This book is a tale of a clever mouse taking a walk through the woods avoiding predators using his wits and telling a tall tale about an imaginary creature called a gruffalo. Imagine his surprise when he runs into the gruffalo and needs to quickly use his wits again to avoid becoming the gruffalo's meal. The rhythm and rhyme make this book fun to read and the story is interesting enough to hold up to repeated readings. There is just enough scary to make the children enjoy pretending to be afraid without actually scaring them. I also enjoy watching the children come to understand just why the mouse's tricks worked.

6. Stuck in the Mud by Jane Clarke. This book tells, in rhyme, the story of a mother hen trying to get her chick out of the mud. She becomes stuck and then her would be rescuer becomes stuck. And then the next and the next until the entire barnyard is stuck in the mud. The book is fun to read and the twist at the end always gets a giggle. It also happens to be a great book for working on final consonant deletion.

7. Egg-napped! by Marisa Montes. This is a tale of what happens when Gabbler the goose and his wife find their beloved egg missing and all the forest animals try to help them get it back. Again, it is the rhyme that makes this book so much fun to read. The story is full of fun, adventure, a bit of suspense and danger, and a satisfying ending.


Does anyone have some favorites of their own to share? I'm always looking for great new books to read with the kids.

The Weekly Review: Week 57

SLP Idea of the Week

Land of Nod sells a wooden tic-tac-toe board (which I do not own). I think the board looks beautiful and appears to be sturdy. I also think you could cut my printable speech cards to size and put them in the holes and then have the children play speech tic-tac-toe. You could also draw a tic-tac-toe grid and just deal a card into each of the nine spots and play speech tic-tac-toe without purchasing the beautiful wooden playing board. I wonder if my three and four year old children could play the game?

Favorite Blog Post This Week

One of my absolute favorite blogs to read is Swistle. She consistently writes well thought out posts about topics I find interesting and just seems to be a genuinely good person. This week she wrote about children and swearing (the little swear words like "hate", "stupid", and "sucks") which fortunately aren't much of an issue yet for me. I liked her idea that using them is a privilege based upon the user's ability and wisdom to use them in moderation, appropriately, in certain settings, with specific audiences (not in front of small children, or in front of grandparents for example). That gets around the do as I say, but not as I do contradiction most people get into when they simply forbid the use of such words. Anyway, it was a well thought out post and you should check it out if it interests you.

Ava this Week

Ava's really perfected crocodile tears this week and oh-my-gosh is it driving me crazy. At first, she only used them when she got a minor scrape or bump, or during small altercations with her brother and so it wasn't immediately obvious that the crying was completely fake. So I reinforced it with lots of snuggles and hugs and by immediately fixing her problem. From her point of view, this was great. So then she moved on to bursting into sobs every time I tell her no.

For example, yesterday morning I put her hair in a ponytail. Once we were done she asked if I had done a braid and when I said no she started sobbing. The performance included real tears. She hadn't even actually asked for a braid and I hadn't actually told her no. I told her I wasn't even going to listen until she stopped crying and asked nicely. And then I left the room. It took her a minute to turn the tears back off. She asked nicely and then got her braid. I feel a bit mean and heartless walking away from my sobbing 3 year old, but I will not reinforce that behavior any more. She's also taken to responding to simple requests (please put on your shoes) with a simple, one word, reply: "no". I'm nipping that one in the bud too. Fun times in Avaland lately.

Weekly Michael

Ahh how the behavioral tides rise and fall in this house (read - currently rising). Michael is experimenting to find out what level of snarkiness (mild backtalk) will be tolerated. Fortunately he isn't pushing too hard. A relatively mild redirection usually works. He'll say something slightly rude. I'll tell him that wasn't an acceptable way of talking in our house and model a more appropriate alternative and he'll correct himself. Gotta love experimentation.

Ava's and Michael's Weekly Home Therapy Notes

Other than our nightly readings of the articulation practice booklets there has been little structured speech practice this week. I've been solo parenting in the evenings all week due to a huge work thing going on for my husband and so I've been taking it easy in the evenings with the kids.

Weekly Homeschooling

We're working with math, handwriting, and reading. We get in about two 20 minute lessons during an at-home morning (M, W, F). So Monday we did math and reading. Wednesday we did handwriting and math. Today we'll do reading and handwriting. I call the lessons "special activities". We do one activity. Then the children go off and play a while. Then I call them back for the second activity. We fit in breakfast, lunch, outside time, and other random projects in too so the morning flies by.

Handwriting Without Tears: Review and Printable Progress Chart

Michael is starting to write. However his grip is awkward and he draws his letters rather than writing them using a consistent sequence of lines and curves. I've been wanting to do some homeschooling, so I chose a handwriting program as one of the first curriculum programs to try with the children.

I chose Handwriting Without Tears (HWT) for our handwriting curriculum. It isn't the prettiest printing style out of the many options for handwriting styles. I chose it because I like how it is taught. The program was developed by occupational therapists. It teaches uppercase letters first because they are develpmentally easier for young children to write. All of the uppercase letters can be written by writing big lines, little lines, big curves, and little curves.

The program is well structured. Rather than teaching the letters in alphabetical order, the letters are grouped by the way they are written. The first 8 letters taught are F, E, D, P, B, R, N, and M. They are called "frog jump" letters because your pencil has to hop back to the starting corner after making the first big line. After learning those letters children learn the other uppercase letters that start in the upper left corner. Finally they are taught the letters that start in the upper center spot. After learning all the uppercase letters, the first lowercase letters learned are the ones that are exactly the same as their capitals, just smaller.

I also liked the way that they begin teaching letters without using a writing implement at all. They start with blocks (big line, little line, big curve, little curve) and play dough (roll the shapes and combine to form letters). The wet-dry-try method on a small chalkboard is brilliant because the child must develop a tripod grip in order to do it and they think it is so much fun. In the wet-dry-try method you write the letter in chalk on the chalkboard first. They take a tiny sponge and trace over your letter mimicing the strokes necessary to write the letter. Then they take a tiny ball of paper towel and trace the (now wet) letter a second time drying it in the process. Once dry, you can still see where the letter used to be on the slate. For the last step they try writing the letter themselves on the slate with a small piece of chalk. By the time they are done, they've observed once, and "written" the letter three times. My children often continue the cycle wetting again with the sponge, drying again with the paper towel, and writing again with the chalk at least 2-3 more times before becoming bored.

The teacher's manual for the Kindergarten level is wonderful. It educates you about the handwriting process. It talks about readiness and gives examples of many fun activities you can do with pre-writers to develop readiness skills. It describes multi-sensory ways to teach handwriting (music, movement, blocks, wet-dry-try, door tracing, imaginary writing, magnet board, roll-a-dough/sensory tray). It covers posture, paper, and pencil skills. All of that is covered before it starts on the actual lessons covered in the kindergarten curriculum. In the back of the manual there are tips for addressing issues with handedness, pencil grip, and pencil pressure.

I ordered the teacher's manual, student workbook, roll-a-dough tray, magnet board, slate, chalk, and sponges. I haven't touched the student workbook yet. . My children are little (3 and 4 years). They still need to develop some fine motor readiness skills before working with writing. I read through the entire teacher's manual. I intend to go through all of the "frog jump" capital letters just using the manipulatives first before having them use pencil/crayon/paper. So far we've done E, F, and D. The children love the wet-dry-try on the slate, the roll-a-dough tray (which I use by finger tracing with salt), and the magnet board. I use the slate for every lesson and switch between the magnet board and tray. One child uses the slate while the other uses the tray/magnet board and then they switch. I wish I had bought two slates.

Once the tripod grip is more natural and they're completely comfortable with the frog jump letters I'm going to try having them write the letters using tiny pieces of crayon on construction paper rectangles I cut to fit the sensory tray. Then I'll switch to a piece of regular paper with 6 rectangles on it. Then I may pull out the student workbook and start having them do the workbook pages.

I made a progress / reinforcement chart for the kids because they love putting stickers on a chart, and they like seeing how much progress they've made over time. Feel free to download it and use it with your own children/students if you happen to be using the Handwriting With Tears Kindergarten program yourself.

Each "lesson" only takes us 10 minutes although I allow the children to continue to play with the manipulatives as long as they like. The more they "play", the more they develop those fine motor pre-writing skills. I couldn't be happier with the program and with our first foray into homeschooling.