Reading together

I'm going to start with the end of the day, because that was my favorite part. When we finished dinner this evening Calvin, who was done eating and who had been eyeing his newest library book all through dinner, a book that we had made a special trip to the library to get earlier in the afternoon, suggested that he read the first chapter to us while we finished our meals. Although I'd had no intention of his reading this book by himself, hadn't even considered it as a possibility, we took him up on his offer, figuring that if he had trouble he'd let us know and we could pick it up from there. And because nobody told him he couldn't read it, he sat down and promptly did so, reading to us the first chapter of his newest book, The Knight at Dawn, a Magic Treehouse Book.

It has long been a dream of mine to share stories read aloud together as a family after dinner, and for all of his life we've been doing this to some extent because we always read to him before bed and he is happy to forgo all other activities to fill the small space between dinner and bed with books. But I had figured it would be some time yet before he took his turn at the helm. It was my favorite part of the day because it's a moment I've been waiting a long time for, and it was as delicious a moment as I believed it could be.

The rest of the day was fine, too. Calvin spent much of it in the middle ages, and between reading books, looking at pictures, and writing on note cards he kept himself pretty busy. I spent my free time, when I wasn't also in the middle ages, reading my own book and researching cameras, because while we did go for a fantastic hike this morning, and did see a majestic Great Blue Heron in our pond not more than ten yards away from us, I have no pictures, just whole lot of frustration, to show for it.

And by the way, nobody said homeschooling was a venture for the neat minded. As you can see, our house is now littered with a bread crumb trail of books on the middle ages. From where I sit, it looks like those crumbs all lead back to the castle (or possibly the laundry we'd just folded), but I think where they really go is straight into the future.