Why I love having a large home library

Why I love having a large home library: At 830 on a Saturday night, when kiddo looks up at the stars and wants to know about that killer in the sky, we can pull a variety of works from our shelves and do a mini-unit study on the constellation Orion. 

"The Hunter"

A night long

Across the sky

Orion the hunter

Goes striding by

What is the quarry

He pursues

Through stars as bright

And thick as dews

And who has heard

His great dog bark

Sirius baying

Through the dark?

Geocentrism? Preschool worldview

"This is the light side and this is the dark side, and this is the sun and that is the moon, and it says 'This is the world I want to change.' ". --Jackson, 4 years 10 months

Rise and Read

Reading is the pathway

From the dungeon

To the door.

Freedom

Reading is the highway from

The shadow to the sun

Freedom

Reading is the river

To your liberty

For all your life to come

Let the river run

Learn

Learn to read.

“Choose Your Freedom -- Learn to Read”

by Dr. Maya Angelou, 2002

As published in Rise and Read by Sandra L. Pinkney & Myles C. Pinkney, Scholastic, 2006.

Lucy Calkins' List of Short Read-Aloud Novels for K-2

pp 38-39, Raising Lifelong Learners, Calkins

• Stuart Little, by E.B. White
• The Dragonling, by Florence Koller
• Catwings and Catwings Return, by Ursula Le Guin
• Fantastic Mr. Fox and George's Marvelous Machine, by Roald Dahl
• The Hundred Dresses, by Eleanor Estes
• Harry's Mad (and others), by Dick King-Smith
• Matthew and the Sea Singer, by Jill Patton Walsh
• Chocolate Fever, by Robert K. Smith
• A Lion to Guard Us, by Clyde Robert Bulla
• Owls in the Family, by Farley Mowat
• Stone Fox, by John R. Gardiner

There Was a Child Went Forth by Walt Whitman

There Was a Child Went Forth

by Walt Whitman

There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain
   part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years:
The early lilacs became part of this child....
And the apple-trees covered with blossoms, and the fruit
   afterward, and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road;
And the schoolmistress that passed on her way to the school....

The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture
   --the yearning and swelling heart....

The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time--the
    curious whether and how.
Whether that which appears is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets--if they are
    not flashes and specks, what are they?

These became part of that child who went forth every day,
    and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Read-Aloud Record, 2014

List of novels, chapter books, novellas and dedicated story collections read through the year with J1, from age 3.75 to age 4.75.

Looking back: 2003 reading list is here.

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang	Mordecai Richler		Better for six-year-olds?
Catwings	Ursala K. LeGuin
The Hotel Cat (New York Review Children's Collection)	Esther Averill
The Kingfisher Treasury of Stories for Four Year Olds	Edward and Nancy Blishen		We prefer the Corrin-edited, Faber-published age-level story books to the Blishen-edited volumes, but it’s good to have alternatives.
The Boxcar Children	Gertrude Chandler Warner		Primer-style language. An exciting, age-appropriate story, but like Beginner Books, better suited for emerging readers than for reading aloud.
Many Moons	James Thurber
The Reluctant Dragon	Kenneth Grahame		Michael Hague illustrations.
Comet in Moominland	Tove Jansson
The Children of Noisy Village	Astrid Lindgren
The Great Quillow	James Thurber		Doris Lee illustrations. Usual Thurber weirdness and wonderful language.
Tell Me a Story: A Collection for Under-Fives (Young Puffin Books)	Eileen Colwell (compiler)		Solid. Looking forward to read the other three volumes in the box set in coming years.
Owls in the Family	Farley Mowat		Terrific. Will seek out more Mowat.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum		Mostly Librivox audiobook, some chapters read by me. So glad we had a facsimile edition in the house--pictures are terrific.
My Side of the Mountain	Jean Craighead George
A Toad for Tuesday	Russell Erickson		A child-appropriate thriller.
Kashtanka.	Anton Chekov		William Stobbs illustrations. Ultimately heart-breaking but the kid didn't track the details enough to mind.
The Complete Brambly Hedge	Jill Barklem		These deserve to be better known in the States--lovely!
The Teddy Robinson Storybook	Joan G. Robinson		Adorable and so warm. Get omnibus/treasury?
26 Fairmount Avenue	Tomie De Paola		Terrific. Perfect for age level. Will read the sequels.
Caroline and Her Kettle Named Maud	Miriam E. Mason		J loved this. Perfect age-level and interest level for a TK/Kinder boy, with bonus feminism and history for me. “Mom, I’m going outside to look for four-leaf clovers near gray rocks so I can find seven and put them under my pillow and wish for a gun.”