Once again, my sons’ school requirements have been driving our reading. My fourth grader’s language arts teacher designed a unit to go along with Watsons Go To Birmingham. He and his classmates read three to four chapters a week. I started reading aloud with chapter 2. My fifth grader started staying close for these readings. (He hadn’t read the book.) Even the seventh grader started lurking and stole away with the book to finish it on his own. (He said he much preferred it to Bud, Not Buddy.) I think the bus anxieties and antics and the dynamic between Kenny and his bully big brother Byron hit pretty close to home around here.
My fifth grader’s language arts teacher is doing a similar thing with the folk tale collection The People Could Fly. He’s been doing his own reading — at night when he goes off to bed. What he doesn’t remember is that I read many of those tales to all three boys when they were pre-schoolers. Virginia Hamilton was a favorite author of mine.
For non-school reading, the reading that happens at night when my nine-year-old is cuddled in his bed, we just finished reading The Godolphin Arabian. Douglas identified with the stable boy Agba, but he couldn’t understand why the boy couldn’t talk. Now, we’re on to Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander.
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