Summer Reading

I am blessed that I don’t have to bribe or coerce my kids to read at any time of year. All four of my kids love books and love to read and be read to. We are raising readers.

We’ve always had lots of books and we go to the library weekly and come home with bags full. We maxed out the prizes at our summer reading program and there’s nothing more to do but continue reading. The prizes were awful anyway.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to straddle a fence of popular fiction and classical literature with my teen daughter, Liz.

I remember the trash I read at her age and I don’t want to just give her free reign to read whatever she sets her eyes on.

When lessons slow down or we take a summer break, teens have more free time to read for fun…and I struggle to find appropriate reading material for my teen that doesn’t feel like school.

Luckily, my kids are kinda nerdy and love reading schoolish books for fun. They have lots of freedom during summer and school breaks to read what they like and I am so thankful that they choose educational reading. I have few worries.

I love the reading lists at Ambleside Online. I enjoy the reading assignments with Tapestry of Grace and Story of the World. I feel that Shakespeare, poetry, naturalist reading, and biographies are very important. Living books are so much better than textbooks or dry non-fictional accounts.

I love discussing the books Liz reads. I try to preview everything she reads, but sometimes I go on reviews and pray it’s ok since I can’t keep up with her! She keeps a reader notebook and we discuss topics and themes together. Reading helps with vocabulary building.

The library teen reading lists have nothing worthwhile and the covers of the books are disturbing. Men kissing girls with torn shirts. It’s no better than Harlequin and there is no place for that in our house. And we don’t subscribe to Oprah’s reading list or any other celebrity-sanctioned books.

I worry about Liz’s peers who are obsessed with vampires and the occult and how they devour all these dystopian books about teens in a post-Apocalytpic world.

I love it that Liz enjoys Dickens (especially since I do not). I’m encouraging her to read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women as part of our history studies. Her tastes are different than mine and I love to hear what she likes and dislikes, her favorite parts and characters, what makes her angry or sad. I pray to keep conversations going through the teen years and books offer great discussion jumping-off points for life topics.

Liz is a great example to her younger siblings. They see her reading and love to read too. They beg her to read to them and she’s really great at doing voices and sound effects.

My life is easier than most since I have a degree in English literature and taught middle school, high school, and college English for almost ten years.

We still do family read-alouds every morning and evening. School books are in the mornings and a fun family classic is before bed. Alex even reminds me if our evenings get crazy and I forget or try to skip it!

I look forward to our reading assignments this year as we move into year 4 of our history cycle. We’ve never worked through year 4 completely before. I couldn’t bear to teach World War II when Liz was so little. I couldn’t expose her to all that yet. But now that we’re living here in Germany, it’s so much more important.

Did you know that swastikas and raising a right hand in the “Heil” are illegal in Germany? They don’t tolerate hatred or intolerance here.

I look forward to having discussions with Liz about our brave new world. This is the era when science fiction became popular and I love that I can raise geeky kids.

See what our homeschool high school looks like.

Check out other Crew members writing about teen reading: