Again, for posterity, I am listing some of the more notable stories we read aloud as a family in 2009. Since January is nearly over, it's probably time to re-start our "We've Just Finished Reading" list in the right hand side bar. Asterisks mark the stories we liked best.
For the 2008 list, click here.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (slightly abridged)
**Heidi (1880) by Johanna Spyri.
Anna wrote in her journal, "I like you being kind and I like your daughter. I know that your daughter is sick. I know that I had to go back to the mountain with grampr."
Two questions for Heidi afficionados: Who was Anna pretending to be when she wrote this letter? Who was she writing the letter to?
**Tom's Clockwork Dragon by Jonathan Emmett.
Blinky Bill the Mischievous Koala (the book of the Yoram Gross film of Dorothy Wall's Australian classic)
*Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Babar's Little Girl by Laurent de Brunhoff
*Matilda by Roald Dahl.
Anna says, "This book is about a trouble-maker." Matilda is Dahl's heroine in this story, but despite being a "reader of books" who enjoys the humour of Dickens's Pickwick Papers and a "mathematical prodigy" who can multiply 19 by 14 instantly in her head, by chapter 8, she has not yet realised there are alternatives to responding to meanness with spite. With the help of her teacher Miss Honey, Matilda finds a better way of dealing with her enemies, thankfully.
*Horton Hears a Who! by Dr Seuss
*Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss
*Doctor Dolittle's Zoo (1925) by Hugh Lofting
**The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922) by Hugh Lofting
**The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) by EB White
*Stuart Little (1945) by EB White
**Frog and Toad Together (1972) by Arnold Lobel
The Musical Life of Gustav Mole by Michael Twinn, illus Kathryn Meyrick, tape narrated by Patrick Macnee
Dumbo from Disney
*Ten Boys who Made a Difference and Ten Girls Who Made a Difference by Irene Howat, from the Light Keepers series
*Nothing by Mick Inkpen
**The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins (1938) by Dr Seuss
We have also listened to The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on audiobook CD.
Tuesday 26 January 2010
Our Read Alouds from 2009
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3 comments:
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Is this something other than Sherlock Holmes? I don't remember that title. Sounds intriguing.
Thanks for this post. I often mine your sidebars for reading ideas!
Amy
We've just read "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and worked out (pretty easily) which boy we would like to be! I think we will need to put Matilda on our list for this year.
Amy,
Basically, The Lost World is an adventure story with dinosaurs on a volcanic up-thrust plateau in South America. It stars a journalist determined to prove himself daring enough to win the hand of his beloved, who thinks him rather bland. He gets a wee bit more than he bargains for when he volunteers to accompany Professor Challenger on a journey to record the professor's discovery of the existence of living dinosaurs. No Holmes.
Doyle's book is the story that Michael Crichton's novel of the same name, the sequel to Jurassic Park, was (very) loosely based upon. The movie "King Kong" also owes much to this classic novel. Four years after it was published, Edgar Rice Burrough's The Land that Time Forgot was published, also exploring the idea of dinosaurs still roaming the earth in a far-flung locale. The idea predates Doyle though, going back a few decades to Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth which is on our read aloud book shelf for 2010, along with Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, which we read in a *very* abridged form in 2009.
Meredith,
I like that book, but somehow I never got into Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It just confused me. Boy and Going Solo (both autobiographical) are also great reads for older boys. I think I have read most of Dahl's children's books either as a child or to my children. So far my favourites are still The BFG and The Giraffe, the Pelly and Me.
~ Sharon
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