Read aloud

Upon returning from my business trip I shared my desire with my daughter to read to her regularly. She was very excited to hear this. We had periodically read together, but nothing regular... in fact, I could probably count on both hands the numbers of times I had read out loud to her.

I started with my 4 year old. I asked her to pick out a book and she excitedly came to me with The Big Book of Baby Animals. It was a bit of a struggle. I let her choose which animals she wanted me to read about, but she had a very hard time paying attention for more than just a few seconds before she wanted to move on to the next animal. I reminded myself that one of the key benefits of Read Aloud is that it trains children to pay attention and it increases their attention span. I will keep an eye on this over the next several months and see if that happens.

We read for about 15 minutes and we both decided we had enough. We took a short break and I decided to give it a try with my 7 year old. She was also very excited and said she wanted to read to me first. OK... who is this and what did they do with my kid? She has NEVER volunteered to read to me and my first thought was the I was supposed to be the one doing the reading. I quickly realized that having HER read was one of the main goals of this project and decided it would be best to let her go first. She read Bravo, Amelia Bedelia! to me and her sister for just a few minutes. We laughed together. When she asked to stop I said "SURE!" and she said she wanted to read about the weather from one of her Childcraft books. We read about where the wind comes from (which honestly had always been a mystery to me) and discussed it a bit. After 10-15 minutes, we both agreed to stop and continue tomorrow. It was a very enjoyable session and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I think we will take a trip to the library and pick out some books to read aloud.