I was over stalking A Peaceful Day when I saw this bit on her sidebar on reading through all the Newberry Award winners. I am revamping some of our independent lessons including read a loud time so naturally I was intrigued by this idea. After a click over to the website, I was really happy that I followed that little rabbit trail.
Turns out, there is a Newberry Reading Challenge! Who knew? Seriously, did you know? I didn’t have a clue. My favorite part is that it’s a low key challenge. Perfect for a procrastinator like me. Do you procrastinate a lot too? I must be a world class one. I kid myself into thinking it’s alright by convincing myself and others that I do my best work at the last minute. I really couldn’t tell you if that’s true or not as I have never done anything in advance to know the difference. Anyway, I digress.
Newberry Medal Winners are the best in children’s fiction each year. The award was first given in 1922 which means there are a ton of books to devour. This completely takes the stress out of me trying to come up with a new read a loud when we finish our current one. We like read a loud time as it’s always fun to share a story together. It makes for some interesting conversations as we all recall a certain part of a favorite book. I am hoping that these are the memories that my children will cherish when they are older. I know I cherish them in my heart now.
Of course, I will get some of these on audiobook format for us to keep in the car while we are car schooling. I’m sure Audible has several of them that I could download to my phone then plug into the car jack. I must be careful with this though. I can clearly get so caught up in the story that I forget to keep my eye on the spedometer. That’s the same reason I can’t listen to the Nascar race on the radio either. For some reason the police aren’t keen to me driving Nascar speeds on the highway. Go figure.
I love this idea for our homeschool because it takes all the pressure off me to come up with an appropriate list. All I ended up doing is printing the list then checking our bookshelves for the ones we already owned. A quick visit over to Audible to see which ones were available on there. Poof, I have it all planned out for the year. Simple for me and high quality literature for them. I love it when a good plan comes together.
