Book Club Jr.

Sweetheart is part of a book club. It's made up of homeschooled students from about 8-12 years old (or thereabouts). It was started by some friends and let me tell you.....we have read many, many books that I would never have chosen otherwise because of this book club.

I think I might be becoming literate.

See, I went to public school my whole life. Can I blame that for the reason I have never read The Three Musketeers or The Secret Garden or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Actually, I was discussing 20,000 Leagues with my sister and we were talking about the author Jules Verne. I told her he wrote about futuristic things in his time. She wondered how I knew that and I showed her.

So....yes. MTV obviously trumps literature courses. Oh wait, actually I would have learned that from VH1's Pop Up Video. See? I read.

We enjoyed The Tale of Despereaux before the movie came out. We also read The Trumpet of the Swan, which I owned my whole life but never read. It's been really neat.

Last year I had to read most of the books to Sweetheart but this year she is flying through them on her own. That is very cool! We have sort of gotten hooked on the Great Illustrated Classics. They seem to be a really good fit for most of our kids.

Well, last year the little sisters sort of just played during book club. Sometimes they sat in on the activities but they didn't get a whole lot out of it. This year, since they are all now officially school-aged (Little Bit is the youngest), I decided I wanted them to get to do something too. I was talking with one of the other moms about how the littlest one is always along for the ride, but the activities are so rarely about them.

(OK good grief. She's not THAT much younger. She's so short in this picture but she's only 6 months younger than the girl on the far left!)

So Book Club Jr. was born. I have three sweet little girls who are three different ages, but are a nice fit with each other. We've only met once but we had fun. For the first meeting I tried to keep it light. (I wanted them to have a good impression of Book Club Jr.!) We read Ira Sleeps Over and I had everyone bring their bear. They got to introduce their bear to everyone and then we did some crafts. We had a few minutes extra at the end so I brought some bears for them to play with. It was fun, but I'm looking forward to doing more challenging stuff with them.

Today we are going to read The Napping House, which may not have been the best choice because there is no food involved. We made soup for Despereaux (obviously), and ate spaghetti and meatballs before we read and went to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. I'm all about the food books.

Oh. But I'm supposed to be teaching the children about reading. Right.