combining storytime

[Mercy]

How does this work when your children are at different levels to combine storytime? I am going to have one in ctc and one in beyond in january. Is it possible to do just one storytime with everyone?

Thank you,
mercy

[water2wine]

Absolutely! We do that all the time. You just would want to be careful perhaps about the maturity level the little ones. You might want to not for instance pick the history CTC read alouds for your Beyond kids. But maybe the girl or boy pack or a mixture or stay with the lower level readers for all. We have kind of done all of the above and it has worked well. With the read alouds for the Beyond kids you are reading above what they can read so that works for older kids too. You can pick other books as well. You just want something not too baby for the olders and not too mature for the youngers. I used to do read alouds for each program but now I really like combining them all for that. We have from 7 year old to 14 and that part really does work to combine.

Hope that helps! Maybe others will have great suggestions on what read aloud pack to get for your particular family. I kind of have done this and that. This year I am mixing from CTC boy and girl pack for all my kids.

[alydar]

Mercy - you got my wheels turning!


W2W - may I ask you a question?

When you combine your kids for one storytime, do you do their respective program's storytime activity around whatever you are reading or no?

I'm just wondering if I could do this as well. DD5 is listening to Reddy Fox in LHFHG and DS7 is doing My Father's Dragon in Beyond. Can I do the LHFHG storytime activity using the stories selected for Beyond? She's in there listening to his story anyway... so maybe......???

[netpea]

Mercy - you got my wheels turning!


W2W - may I ask you a question?

When you combine your kids for one storytime, do you do their respective program's storytime activity around whatever you are reading or no?

I'm just wondering if I could do this as well. DD5 is listening to Reddy Fox in LHFHG and DS7 is doing My Father's Dragon in Beyond. Can I do the LHFHG storytime activity using the stories selected for Beyond? She's in there listening to his story anyway... so maybe......???

The thing about Reddy Fox is that you really get to know these characters over the year. My children grew to love those books and the stories are so short that I would continue to read them.

What we do in my house, since I only have two school age children, is to save both the storytime selections for bedtime. I read both of them to both kids, but ask the questions only to the one child it was meant for. If there was an activity to do related to the reading, we save that for the following day. They enjoy listening to each other's story and it serves as our bedtime reading too.

[alydar]

Thank you netpea! That's a good idea, too!

DD has had the opportunity to hear the Burgess books already as she listened in on DS doing Little Hearts last year. But she does seem to be enjoying hearing Reddy Fox again so I'll probably just keep doing those with her.

[Mercy]

Well, I was just caalculating this upcoming year...

I thought we would be done with LHFHG in Jan. I have no idea why I thought that, because it looks like it will be March! And if I do a 4 day week, it will probably last all year. So, I dont think we will combine storytime this year, I guess. Unless my 11yo joins with the Burgess books (cuz they are really good!) But, the activities that go with the LHFHG storytime, need to be done with Burgess books. Oh well! Just trying to streamline where I can.

Thanks again for your help!
Mercy