Homeschool Read Alouds

When it comes to the title of “best read-aloud book,” I think there are several hundred contenders! Ever since I was little, I have loved children’s books. I love the sophistication of the hardcover copies especially, the shiny creakiness of the library dust jacket, and of course, the smell of the paper inside! I love the way their colorful spines look lined up on the bookshelf. I even love the way they look, in all their variegated chaos, spread out all over our sunroom after a reading marathon!

When I was in elementary school, my class would visit the school library once a week and have a lesson from our librarian, Mrs. Milland. She would have a display of gorgeous new stories, and would do a “Book Talk” for us before letting us loose to make our own selections. Her expressions would come alive with excitement and mystery as she gave us teaser summaries about the new titles.

Book talk, homeschool style

I loved these book talks, and I love hyping up new picture books to my own kids, thirty years later! Henry The Castaway, by Mark Taylor, was no exception. I started this delightful read-aloud with my preschooler this week, that ended up being fun for all four of my kids! Right now they are aged 10, 8, 5 and almost 2. Eight years is a pretty big gap, so often I have to differentiate quite a bit in our full-family activities. Thankfully, curriculums like Five In A Row allow for such expansive creativity and differentiation, I can usually finagle a lot of useful content out of a single book!

The beauty of Five In A Row

One of my favorite things about the Five In A Row curriculum is the way the author pulls out incredible multidisciplinary learning out of each children’s book. With Henry The Castaway this week, we did activities related to art, math, geography, history, vocabulary, and social studies.

I also love when we can repeat lessons from previous FIAR studies, and this one did not disappoint! We talked about how to draw simple lines in water, to show which way the ripples are flowing (Also a lesson in The Story of Ping. My preschooler still can recall that the “Yangtze River” is in China!). We also talked about survival techniques (a theme covered when we did The Very Last First Time).

Try an Explorer Scavenger Hunt!

I also created my own Explorer Scavenger Hunt to go along with this story! My preschooler is very into maps, so I grabbed a couple of extra titles from the library. I absolutely love the book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney, and have used it many times in my homeschool to help my kids differentiate between neighborhood, city, state, country, and continent. It also gets them excited to know things (like their address) directions (like, we head south to get to the library!) and in which city they live.

There are two separate freebies for the Explorer Scavenger Hunt:

• Print-and-go cards (use cardstock!) to set up around your house and yard
• Teacher’s Key + Ideas: this way, you have a copy of the clues if kiddos get mixed up! I also included ideas of what to talk about for each clue.

I used these cards to compliment the book study, but I also may use them again for my preschooler’s birthday party this year! My kids love scavenger hunts, and having them at birthday parties has been a big hit.

I would love to hear if you found these ideas useful! Shoot me an email, or fill out my contact form here.

Cait