Read-at-Home Kids Report: Winter 2020

Third trimester sleep deprivation, giving birth to twins, and adjusting to life with two newborns during a pandemic has delayed my Read-at-Home Kids reports for several months. Instead of trying to look back and post a round-up for each month that I missed, I've decided that, at least for this year, I will post one report here on the blog each season, which will correspond to the seasonal reading logs I've been keeping for my three older girls. Today's post will focus on books we enjoyed from January 1 to March 2, 2020.

Welcome, Jack and Jill! 

It has been my tradition to give my children nursery rhyme inspired nicknames here on the blog. My six-year-old is known as Little Miss Muffet, my four-year-old as Little Bo Peep, and my two-year-old as Little Jumping Joan. Our boy/girl twins were born in the middle of March, and I've decided they will be known as Jack and Jill. They weren't born during the time period we're covering in this reading report, and they haven't heard any books yet, so I won't be mentioning them much in this post, but watch for them in the spring and summer RAHK Reports.

Family Read-Alouds

Our first read-aloud of the new year was The Happy Hollisters at Snowflake Camp. Though the story wound up being set during Thanksgiving, the weather was more suited to what I thought we might have sometime this winter. As it turned out, we didn't have any snow at all, but the story involved twins, which was a fun discovery for three little girls anxiously awaiting their twin siblings' arrival. The story also involved dog sled racing, which became the focus of Miss Muffet's and Bo Peep's pretend play for weeks after we finished the book.

In February, we dove into Far Out the Long Canal by Meindert de Jong, which was a huge hit with everyone, even Jumping Joan who doesn't always even listen to our chapter books. Miss Muffet and Bo Peep really empathized with the main character, Moonta, and they still make references to things that happened in the story. Again, it didn't end up feeling that wintry here, but they got a taste of fictional winter through this book all about ice skating.

Little Miss Muffet (6 years, 3 months)

Miss Muffet read or listened to 400 books between the beginning of December and the beginning of March. She devoured my review copies of the first two books in the new Jasmine Green Rescues series: A Piglet Called Truffle and A Duckling Called Button. These are really well-written stories of a girl who loves animals; they remind me a lot of James Herriot's books. She also zipped through the Magical Animal Adoption Agency series by Kallie George and the Orphelines series by Natalie Savage Carlson, and got off to a running start with the Freddie books by Walter R. Brooks and the Oz series, of which she read the first six books in just about as many weeks. She also made a point of reading dozens and dozens of picture books from our shelves that she had never read before. It's becoming clear that we're going to have a hard time keeping up with her appetite for books!

Little Bo Peep (4 years, 5 months)

Winter was the season in which Little Bo Peep became a full-fledged independent reader. By the beginning of March, she was nearly finished with the lessons in The Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading. During the winter months, she read shelves full of I Can Read books, including titles by Crosby Bonsall, Dr. Seuss, P.D. Eastman, Else Holmelund Minarik, Arnold Lobel, and many more. At the start of the winter, I was having to read the Mercy Watson series aloud to her; by March, she was reading them on her own. Being a reader is such a great point of pride with her right now. It makes her feel like a big kid, and she has been able to have "reading club" with her big sister, in which they take turns reading aloud from our collection of easy readers. She is also a huge fan of the Oliver and Amanda pig books by Jean van Leeuwen, which makes me so happy as they were my favorites as a kid too!

Little Jumping Joan (2 years, 4 months)

Unlike her older sisters, Jumping Joan prefers to read not a wide variety of books, but a small select stack of books on repeat for weeks at a time. During the winter months, these included Stanley's Colors and Stanley's Shapes by William Bee, Sleepy Little Alphabet by Judy Sierra, Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, If You See a Kitten by John Butler, Fabulous Fishes by Susan Stockdale, and What Shall We Do With the Boo Hoo Baby? by Cressida Cowell. Of all of these, the Stanley books have definitely been the biggest favorites. Jumping Joan is also a good audience for older sisters who wish to read aloud to someone.