Reading – A Habit and a Delight by Dr. Donna Johnson
It’s finally spring in Minnesota. The end of the school year is fast approaching, and the news in my classroom is both good and bad. The good news is that books and reading have become a source of – in Charlotte Mason’s words – “interest and delight” for me and my students. Living books capture our minds and spirits; reading them together is the best part of each day. In the past weeks and months, my students and I have read The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now we are reading two books more recently published and perhaps less proven, but that I feel can be categorized as living books: they are Holes by Louis Sachar and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Holes was first enjoyed by many of my students as a movie; they thought they “knew” the story but are finding that you “should never judge a book by its movie.”* The book is so much richer and …