Just about our every subject has read alouds. We start with the day alternately reading a chapter of the Bible (today it is Matthew 12:1-20). Our devotion would sometimes include a short play of 5-6 persons and for the fun of it, we would have a mock radio drama instead. Each one would take 2-3 roles and try to change our voices to suit the characters we are supposed to portray (with our voices at least). After that we talk about the topic. Next time, we will try to work on "home made" sound effects, record it in a basic player and listen for the outcome. Hmm, sounds like a good project.

We are also reading Hind's Feet in High Places as part of our devotion. I never thought at my children's ages that they would find it easy to understand. We stop after a few paragraphs or pages and try to "chew" on the words and relate it to our daily lives. After they have got acquianted with the literary style of the author, it is amazing to hear their insights on the story and it's parallels in real life.

Before lunch break, we finish a chapter of a book. We are reading Torches of Joy: A Stone Age Tribes Encounter with the Gospel by John Dekker. It is a part of our history/geography lesson. Our spine is Mystery of History 1. We are also reading Australia now and all the books we have with the same topic. It is like a treasure hunt for us as we find anything on Australia using all available sources ---history books, National Geographic mags, World Book cd or print, whatever we lay our hands on must have something about Downunder! But these are for independent study.

Our read aloud for Science this week is The Diary of an American Boy. Some neat sketches and ideas fill up the pages with an amazing story of a boy's ingenuity. My ds was encouraged to sketch more of his airplane and card designs =) They have been trying to do some plane designs on cardboard and how paper folding and materials can affect the aerodynamics of their paper planes. We are also doing Apologia Science Young Explorer's Series (Botany). This blends well with our nature study.

Who says we can't have read-alouds for Math? We have two big faves from a bunch of living math books we got from Rainbow Resource. These are G is for Googol, Sir Cumference series and Mathematicians are People, Too. It is for us exhilarating to realize that math isn't just crunching numbers. We have a shelf just for Living Math books and they can read it as a treat for finishing the math practice early!

Well, you may already know that we are tackling Noli Me Tangere for our Philippine History and Literature.  We are moving at a turtle pace since it has many Spanish and Filipino old terms we need to get familiar with. The children (and I,admittingly) love the "re-discovery" of things we thought were familiar as home, like how the old Manila was and what Philippines was like during the Spanish colonization. I once was faced with a challenge on finding a good history book. "Good" to me is not the boring, bombarded with dates and facts yet lacking in life and adventure as most history textbooks used in the schools. For now, I have settled with "A Question of Heroes" by Nick Joaquin, "Bonifacio's Bolo" Ambeth Ocampo and Pre-Spanish Philippines by JJ Pelmoka (which to me is too scholarly for my kid's ages, yet still a good read for the topic as suggested by the title).

And part of our read alouds are audiobooks we have downloaded including Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan which we got from Project Gutenberg.

I started a blog called bi.bli.O.te.ka about our reads sometime back but it never took off, perhaps, this might be the next entry for it. It's time to revive the link then..