First-Grade Read-Aloud: James and the Giant Peach

I read aloud to The Boy from a chapter book every day that we have school. It's my favorite part of the school day. (His is math. He takes after Isaac.)

We read James and the Giant Peach last month, and The Boy was positively wide-eyed through the entire thing. Giant insects, people in the clouds, and the Empire State Building...fascinating stuff for a seven-year-old. Roald Dahl is quickly rising to the top of our favorite-author list.

I asked The Boy just now what his favorite part was, and he said he liked the earthworm. Personally, I thought the centipede was better. Mostly because of its boots.

We watched the movie after we finished reading the book, and...it was all right. The movie is different--I don't mind if movies leave things out, but when they add new things in, I get grouchy.

The edition pictured here is the one we own; some more recent versions have more fun, cartoonish illustrations. Although I guess it doesn't matter all that much--a giant grasshopper is a wondrous thing, no matter how it's drawn.

I love book lists!

I don't know a lot about Kumon. I do know that The Boy loooooved Kumon's My First Book of Cutting when we were doing preschool.

And I learned today that Kumon has free downloadable reading lists. I love a good book list, people! There are some great books on these lists. For example, Level 2A includes Penguin, which is one of my favorite children's books ever.

I can't wait to check out the ones I haven't read yet.

Do you guys have any good sources for book lists? I have a billion of them bookmarked, and I know that we probably couldn't even read all of them in our lifetime--but I just love them so.

Kindergarten Read-Alouds: Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner

I've had The Complete Tales & Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh on my shelf for years and years and years. I pulled it out to use as a read-aloud for The Boy toward the end of this year, and we had a...different...experience with it than I would have expected.

Your kids have probably seen the old Winnie the Pooh movies. (The Boy hadn't. We watched them afterward.) If they have, let them know right off that some of the stories are different from the movies. Some parts of the movies were lifted right out of the books, though, so that's fun.

Here's where our experience wasn't what I expected--some parts of the stories were hard for The Boy to follow. I thought (based on the movies) that they'd be easier, but they're written as though A.A. Milne were sitting right there telling them to you, so sentences go on and on forever (like this one), and he sometimes uses words that I had to stop and explain because of their British-ness, and sometimes he uses silly words that he probably got from Christopher Robin (the real one), and I'm done with this sentence now, but that's how large parts of the stories read.

Which is fine. And I expected The Boy to lose interest--but he didn't. There's something about Winnie-the-Pooh that kids love, even when they're not sure what the heck Rabbit is talking about. And I enjoyed reading them, because the characters are just so stinkin' sweet.

So we read all the way through both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. I'm not saying that you would have to, of course. We read some of the poems, too, but we were pretty tired of the book by then--it has about a bajillion pages.

So, overall, I'd recommend it as a read-aloud. And, whether your kids like the stories or not, have them watch the old Winnie-the-Pooh movies. I've never met a little kid that didn't like them.