Summer Reading - An exciting family activity

Growing up, i watched my mom read. ALOT. It instilled such a love for reading in me!

When i lived in Lousiana, i was stunned that the children there had "required" summer reading lists. Books they MUST read before coming back to school. Pleasently stunned is a better way of saying that, i thought it was an awesome idea and looked forward to my children one day bringing home their lists.

Now though, where we live there are no lists for them.

So i created my own summer reading program.... that works perfectly with our libraries summer event!
First I look up the HAISLN (http://www.haisln.org/recommendedreadinglists.html) site and print out their lists for my girls. The lists include short descriptions of the books, i have the girls highlight some of the books they are interested in.

Then i log onto our local library website and either put one or two on hold, or request some transfers!

Then throughout the summer we have a personal reading time, and just before bed I read aloud to them from a novel. Even Zoey who is 4 can sit and listen to the novel!!! Right now we are reading a Harry Potter book.

I also have myself a reading list. I pull books from The Modern Library Top 100 Lists. Ive slowly made my way through the lists. I think its important for them to see mom ALSO sitting and enjoying reading!!

Another fun thing we do for the reading program is to go on reading adventures. We will pick places to go read at. The park, the lake, monument rock, coffee shop... anywhere we can think of. We tried McDonalds once, but that was tooooo distracting! LOL.

Its amazing! So i suggest, if your school does not have a reading list for summer.... get excited with your children and create your own!!!

If you do have your own, im curious, what do you do to encourage your kids to read over the summer???

Angela

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Working from Home - All is better!

Its been a bit since i posted. Such a hectic life i now lead!! Im so glad summer is here.

Where have i been you ask? Well besides the end of the year with MOPS, end of school year and a rather interesting vacation (from which im writing from)... I have also been glued to a new book.

Some of you, my friends, have heard me already sing the books praise since i started reading it a few weeks ago. I was only on chapter 3 when i knew it already changed my life as a "WORK AT HOME" mom. So now i want to share this book with all you my friends.

The book is called "Making work at home work" and its written by Mary M. Byers. For such a long time i struggled with fitting how to be the stay at home mom i am, with the fact that i do have a part time job. I have been trying to juggle in things like volunteering and being at the kids school, with deadlines. UGH! Its just too frustrating. One of the things i have learned from Mary is to no longer look at myself as a stay at home mom.

While some of her book was hard for me to relate too, I don't fully own my own business, there were many points that has helped me tremendously with my job at ScrapGirls.com - Like: How to be systematic, take a break, how to face a dinner dilemma (neat recipes included) and getting past the guilt of working from home.


If you work from home, either working for someone else or running your own business, please go get this book. I plan on going out to purchase a few copies to give as gifts to a few friends i know could use it!

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