Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 4: The Dos and Don'ts of Read-Aloud

I do so love a good bullet-pointed list, and this chapter of Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook is bullets as far as the eye can see. Whee! Here are some of my favorite read-aloud "do" guidelines from Trelease, along with my helpful commentary.

With infants and toddlers, it is critically important to include in your readings those books that include repetitions; as they mature, add predictable and rhyming books.


My husband thinks repetitive and predictable books are dullsville, but Jackson loves them, of course. There was a period when we were plodding around a variety of literary barnyards for weeks and weeks and weeks, just because the animals said their noises on each page in a predictable and repetitious way, every single time. (The Animals of Farmer Jones and The Very Busy Spider, I'm looking at you.) I've also found that the littles like books that make their parents sing. Sometimes these books are simply illustrated versions of actual songs, like Old MacDonald Had a Farm (we enjoyed this oversize edition from Child's Play), other times they might be something like a particularly sing-songy Sandra Boynton (e.g., Snuggle Puppy), but especially since I'm not much a natural performer, "singing" books are great. P.S. A fellow mom referred me to an audiobook version of Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, read by Carl Reiner, and even though it's theoretically for much older children, I seems ideal for toddlers because of the constant mellifluous repetition. Last but not least, I love these little finger-puppet books. They make the kids spaz out, and again, they're a great crutch for moms like me who aren't natural performers.

Read as often as you and the child (or students) have time for) and Set aside at least one traditional time a day for a story.


We're good at reading all day long, but I must admit that a traditional bedtime story sometimes gets away from us because I just want to get the dang kid in bed! We read most often at mealtimes (especially lunch), second-most at potty-time, and third-most often at bedtime, thanks in part to the bookcase being right next to the dining table and the four small book baskets in Jackson's room. The book baskets generally contain favorite board books, while the bookcases have most of our larger storybooks and a funkier variety of board books. I've heard tell moms who do bathtime reading, but I've just never figured out what to read in there that would be more fun than "Splashing! Splashing!"

Encourage relatives living far away to record stories on audio cassettes that can be mailed to the child.


Awww, audio cassettes. Isn't he precious? Hee. My in-laws have a weekly Skype call with Jackson's cousin, and grandma L. almost always reads a picture book aloud to cousin K. The practice is, by all accounts, a big hit.

Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: "Don't forget your flood book." Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, these books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from "flood" books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor's office.


You know who always had a flood book? Rory Gilmore. A quick Google reveals this YouTube compilation that explains it all perfectly. (Hermoine Granger and Lisa Simpson would also be able to demonstrate this for you if you asked.)



As for myself, I've really be meaning to put together a "car library," but I like having all the current favorites in the house! I'm thinking maybe some kind of 500-page anthology would do the trick, but we'll see.

But wait there's more! Come back soon for the rest of the interesting "dos" in this chapter, along with some notable don'ts. To be continued...


What are your favorite read-aloud tips, tricks and "rules"? 

Budget Bug Cage for Backyard Nature Study

Are you on a budget but still want to house captured insects for further examination by the kiddos?

Grab a berry box out of the recycling bin and upcycle it into a bug box! Berry boxes already have built-in airholes, and since they're clear on all sides, your little scientists can even view the underside of the bugs in question, which is sometimes a hard view to get otherwise.

We found not one, not two, but three grasshoppers in the raspberry-mint bed today, and Jackson got to see up-close view of a little green guy as well a mature gray bird grasshopper (which I believe is the largest insect native to Southern California). He was very gentle with the bug cage, which is to say that he stopped shaking it as soon as I explained that it was a living creature that we should be gentle with. He also decided when the grasshopper should be let "out." He came away from the experience knowing the word "hopper," and having heard about antennae and the six legs common to insects. (FWIW, the other major new word he gained today was "taco.")

This little green fellow is a gray bird grasshopper in the nymph stage

This is a full-grown gray bird grasshopper; we found a second one a while later but let him be.

The two grasshoppers back in the "wild"; the mature specimen is in the dried-grass mulch on the left and the little greenie is clinging to one of the trellis wires on the right side.

On a personal note, I was thrilled to find these guys in my yard, since it means I'm not completely failing in my pursuit of an ecologically dense backyard! (We currently have much more lawn and concrete than would be my personal preference.) If these fairly demanding insects are here, it means they must be finding something fairly substantial in the way of food and shelter in our garden beds, which means that we haven't eradicated too many other microorganisms from the garden. Yay!

Theme Week Idea Cheat Sheet

Delightful Learning's
ridiculously cute balloon bouquet
 for Goodnight Moon

Aha! I just trawled through Delightful Learning's archives and stumbled across her rundown of all the many ways she approached her Before Five in a Row unit studies.

Her post Fun Things to Do with Five in a Row covers the gamut of approaches to theme weeks/unit studies, with her photos illustrating what you can do with food, field trips and hands-on projects.

She always makes me want to do such ambitious things, but if I just read the book five days in a row I'm usually ahead of the curve!

Library Book of the Week: Knuffle Bunny

Mo Willems doesn't need any promotional help from the likes of me, but we just read Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale for the first time, and oh! We both like it so much. I find it more personable than the Pigeon books, although of course I love them too. There's so much to act out here, and Jackson loves it when I say "Aggle flaggle klabble" and "snerp" and doing the "Trixie bawled" and "Trixie went boneless" parts. By the time we read it a second time, he was mumbling "Knuffle...knuffle" as I turned the first page. And I'm pretty sure if I were to take him into a laundromat in the near future he would immediately know what it is.

Runner-Up: When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Diana Goode, was an impulse grab this week, based on the feeling I'd seen it recommended somewhere on the Well-Trained Mind forums, and it's lovely. We've been reading Tikki Tikki Tembo as part of an extension of China Week, wherein of course the two brothers fall down a well, and Jackson immediately recognized the word when it came up in this very different book! When I Was Young in the Mountains seems like it ought to be for older and/or more sophisticated kids, but somehow the images and the language really connected with the kiddo.

Dud of the Week: A Very Special House by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Gibberish, and not  even fun gibberish. I adore the Krauss-Sendak collaboration A Hole Is to Dig, but this (and the A Hole Is To Dig sequel Open House for Butterflies) are nonsensical and disappointing.

200 Kindergarten "Prerequisites," aka Everything You Need to Know to Preschool Your Own Child

I think of these two lists often, so I wanted to share them with my tens of readers out there, in case you haven't seen them yet.

There's 100 Things To Do Before Kindergarten as well as 100 Books to Read Before Kindergarten. If you're looking for the pre-K canon, the latter list will do you right, and if you're looking for a list of memory-making, character-building, stimulating, vocabulary-and-neuron-enhancing childhood experiences, the former list has you covered.

They say that children who have been read a thousand books before kindergarten are best prepared for school (it sounds like a lot, but it's just one book a day for three years). I feel strongly that reading these 100 books 10 times each would provide many of the same benefits, although of course you should treat yourself to much broader reading.

My favorite unusual suggestions from amongst the "to do" list suggestions are:

10. Try ice-skating
29. Hold a newborn baby (to see how much they've grown)
88. Learn to twirl spaghetti on a fork

Your faves? Do you have a baby bucket list? Please share your ideas in the comments!

This Week's Used Children's Book Finds

Real Seuss (Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose was first published in 1948!), and a cobbled-together inauthentic Seuss-themed lift-the-flap book, a Shel Silverstein (diabolical! genius!) book called Giraffe and a Half, the classic growing-up book Little Gorilla in baby board-book form, two new-to-us Where's Spot? books by Eric Hill, and well-loved copy of The Bear Detectives. (I like Berenstain Bears morals books, but I love Berenstain Bears easy readers.)

I also found four pristine Japanese-language children's books (three Pénélope and one Curious George) that I will donate to the local elementary school's Japanese-language immersion program, in hopes of developing a relationship with the office ladies and because books that don't get adopted from the Goodwill get pulped, so I try to bring home as many foster children as I can, LOL.

China Week Wrap-Up

Jackson knows where China is now. It's on the blue thing that spins, aka the globe. Heh.

And he knows what 42 looks like, because he was very interested in Ping's 42 cousins, so we counted out 42 links every day and hooked them together into a long, fun chain. He also learned about "swooping" and "diving" from Ping, and he heard the song "Row Row Row Your Boat" every day, in conjunction with "the jerk, jerk, jerk" of the oars. He learned that boats can have wise eyes. He knows that ducks dive for fish, and that it's uproariously funny when mama makes sounds like the boat boy or Ping's master, who says "La-la-la-lei."


The Story About Ping is the longest book he's ever let me read him, and it's fairly complicated--there's at least four separate "acts"--but he sat through it every time, so long as his tray was full of food. This was a great experience because it make me certain that Jackson's attention span is expanding and that we can continue stretching it further. He didn't take to either the fingerplay or the longer stories, but I might try to slip in Tikki Tikki Tembo (another quasi-Chinese childhood favorite of mine) and see what he thinks. Plus, we need a reason to stretch out "China week" a little longer: I still owe him a bowl of wonton soup, and we haven't even seen grandma and grandpa's China slide show yet.

In other news, Jackson starred blankly at the Montessori-style sized-cup nesting activity for the first three days we did it, and then on day four, he just reached out, nested them himself and then looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to increase the level of difficulty. I was overjoyed, because he was genuinely befuddled at first, and then, after three days of demonstration and (then a couple of days off when we were camping), it clicked and he got it. I've seen book-related learning take place, but this was my first spatial-relations lesson that had a real effect and it was so cool. Definitely continuing with these. I think next we'll do "sorting silverware" since Jackson loves playing in the dishwasher anyway and because I have about 25 McDonald's fork-and-knife packets that I don't have anything else to do with.

I don't know what theme week to do next, mostly because I'm paralyzed by the possibilities. Trains? The five senses? Art? I also want to do a billion craft projects, like making Play-Doh and fingerpainting and ironing autumn leaves between wax-paper sheets and so forth. There is so so much to learn and do at this age, not to mention that there are so many parks to visit, adventures to have, and grandparents to socialize with. I'm pretty sure just hanging out and doing stuff and reading sometimes is an overabundance of stimulation, but you wanna do as much as you can, right?