I love to read! I always have. I can remember spending my entire summer vacations reading either in the grass, down by the banks of the creek, up in the shady tree in the yard, or while lying in bed in my hot room with the windows open waiting for a breeze to blow through the window to cool things off.
I would read just about anything. And I still do, whether it be the news, the weather, an on line gossip blog, message board communities, recent medical studies, magazines, children's books, the back of the cereal box, it doesn't matter! If it has words, I'll read it.
Several months ago, I decided to start rereading the Harry Potter books. Hope has read them many times over again, as she first began reading the series in 1st grade. We started out with me reading the first book to her, and she eventually took over reading them on her own. Like me, she will read almost anything she can get her hands on, and enjoys writing her own stories as well.
T.J. on the other hand, much prefers being read to. He's not as quick at reading and gets impatient when he is slowed down by a difficult word and will quit. But he absolutely loves to be read to. So I decided that that this time around with the Potter books, I would read them out loud to him. Thursday night, we finished book number 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and last night we began Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
I have discovered that I missed a lot of details the first time around in my apparent rush to get to the end and find out what happened as soon as possible! As you can imagine, all of us here are quite anxious for the newest book to be released this July. But with that, is also the sadness that the series will end as well. For those of you who don't read the books, J.K. Rowling will only write 7 of them, one for each of the 7 years that Harry Potter attends the wizarding school of Hogwarts.
While the intended audience was supposed to be for children, numerous adults have fallen in love with the books as well. I am still amazed, each time I read one, the imagination, creativity, and writing skill that Rowling possesses! It is my hope that even though she intends to end this series, that in the near future, she will see fit to begin writing a new one.
As for me and my kids, well, we'll just have to find a new series to begin reading at night when we're done with these. I'm enjoying this time with them at night way too much to let it end! Oh, and as a side note...T.J. gets credit for school for the Accelerated Reader program for these books, and due to the grade level and complexity of them, he earns quite a few points when he takes the AR tests. He got 100% on the test for book number 5 which earned him a trip to the book store in Rockford this month. So far, he's the only student in his class that has qualified.
1 comment:
That is exactly how we started the series years ago. None of my boys like to read, at that time, but they loved being read to. So we read the first one as a family. It was awesome! I loved them too! However, after that the boys would read them faster than I could make time for. So these are truly the books that got my boys reading, and really enjoying the process. I hope that even though she is finishing this series, that she will come up with another series that is just as interesting!
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