Day 3- Passing things on to my kids

I am a very sentimental person. I love the little things. I also love things handed down from family members or that belonged to someone special. Or traditions or things that they loved and now pass down or share with you. I enjoy doing this with my own kids. I can't wait until Avery and Emma and I get to restore my old three story wood dollhouse that my grandpa had made for me. To rewallpaper, paint and fill it with furniture. Recently I was able to share something with Hunter. Even though he is only in first grade he is reading far beyond his grade level and very ready for chapter books. When I was in fifth grade I loved a book called "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle." I own a copy of it and for years have read it once a year just for fun because I like the story. I pulled it out of my nightstand a month ago and was ready to read it again and thought of Hunter. I read a summary of the book to him and asked him if he wanted to read it together. He definitely wanted to and so we started reading a chapter every couple of nights. After we had tucked the girls into bed he would come in my room and climb up on the bed with me and snuggle in. I would read aloud to him doing different voices for the characters and stopping to explain new vocabulary words as they came across. He loved it. We would finish a chapter or I would stop at a cliffhanger point and he would beg me to read on. "Captain Jaggery isn't really bad is he mom?" "Was it really a person down in the hold with Charlotte?" he would press me to tell him. "You'll have to wait and see" I would tell him. One night while walking back to his room in the dark he said, "Mom when we were walking back to my room I was just imagining that we were on the Seahawk walking to Charlotte's cabin and it is all dark and we don't have a candle." As we were reading I would stop and have him tell me what things looked like in his imagination and we would make predictions and talk about the different ship terms. We would look at the diagrams in the back of the book at all the different parts of the ship so he would be able to vizualize them as we read. Now I must say that there were parts of the story that I left out or slightly modified to adapt to a first grader instead of a fifth grader. I was so amazed at his ability to sit and just listen without pictures and be able to tell me a few days later what had last happened. Sitting there with him snuggling and reading together, I was in heaven. It was such a neat thing to get to share with him. A boy I love and a book I love what could be better. The night we read the final chapter we laid on his bed in the dark with a flashlight and finished the book. "I love this book!" he said and quickly asked me what we would be reading next. Needless to say Dad wanted to join in the fun and I believe that they are now on Chapter 3 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.