by Lisa Ripperton
January 3, 2019
Every child should have an opportunity to hear a story and a song, a poem and a rhyme every day of the year. With the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet now available at Gateway to the Classics, it is easy to make that happen for five year olds.
When you enter the Read Aloud Banquet, you are greeted by a brightly illustrated rhyme and a selection from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. Upon refreshing the screen, a new rhyme and a new poem appear to delight the reader.
Scroll down and you encounter a set of nursery songs for the current month with sound controls so you can start and stop them. These songs come from The Baby's Bouquet and The Baby's Opera, selected and illustrated by Walter Crane. Click on the song title and you will see illustrated sheet music for the song, often followed by a full page color illustration, like the one pictured below. According to Frances Epps, "The Baby's Opera and The Baby's Bouquet are perfect feasts of delight to little people of two years old and upwards; the picture and music alike fascinate them." ("Song for the Nursery," Parents' Review, Volume 1, pp. 144-164). Every month automatically brings a new set of songs fitting for the season.
Scroll down to the bottom and one of the 17 richly illustrated tales from Frederick Richardson's Book for Children and Old, Old Stories Retold will be on view. As with the rhyme and poem, a new folk tale appears when you refresh the screen. A few of these tales have accompanying audio, narrated by Daniel Ripperton.
In scrolling to the bottom we passed over a schedule of readings for every day in the week. The week displayed corresponds to the week of the year. In this plan there is a story and a rhyme to read each day. Click on the week number in the lefthand column to display all the readings for the week that you can then copy into a file for offline reading, if need be.
As you can see from the overview of the reading plan below, the stories and rhymes come from a variety of different books in a range of genres. Instead of reading one book straight through, with this plan you read from a different genre every day of the week, with each book read once a week over a number of weeks.
The yearly plan consists of four 12-week blocks, with a 4-week holiday block at the end of the year. Where possible, books are started at the beginning of a 12-week block. The stories in the books read on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday should be read in order, from the beginning. The stories in the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday books, which could be read in any order, have been arranged as much as possible to follow the seasons, at least for those living in the northern hemisphere.
Subsequent posts will offer more information about the different books in this plan and why they were included.
NOTE: The Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet is NOT meant as a replacement for the reading of picture books. Nor is it meant as a substitute for participating in whole family read aloud time. Young children gain more than you might imagine from listening to books well above their comprehension level.
The Power of Reading Every Day
The selections for a given day can typically be read in under 15 minutes, assuming no interruptions. With interruptions, of course, it will take longer. In the course of a year, if you read all the selections, you will complete the reading of THIRTY books in their entirety, and selected stories from a handful of others. Granted, EIGHT of them are one-time reads, but that still leaves TWENTY-TWO substantial books to finish in the course of a single year!
Spreading a Broad Feast
In offering the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet we are spreading a broad feast. Children who partake are likely to show a greater interest in the out of doors, wonder more about the lives of children in far away places and in bygone times, have a greater capacity for expressing their thoughts, and have more examples to guide their actions. Take a look at the Kindergarten Read Aloud Banquet now, try it out with your child, then share your thoughts with us by adding a comment below.