Reading Holes Aloud with my Third Grader
One of my favorite books as a middle schooler was Holes by Louis Sacher. When I became a fifth grade teacher, Holes was a read aloud that captivated my class. I mean, who can resist rooting for Stanley as he tries to break the curse of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. The meaningful connections between Stanley and Zero, the mystery surrounding Camp Green Lake and why the boys are digging holes. Oh, it’s such an engaging tale.
Even though we read this as a free read outside of our school schedule. We still found a way to make connections. There was a lot of freedom in how this book progressed for us, it wasn’t a unit study, more of making connections across different things we also happened to be reading.
One book we read with our 3 year old was Southwest Sunrise. Its a beautiful picture book about a little boy who moves to the desert and learns to find beauty there. Since we live on the front range of the Rocky Mountains, having a book to help show a desert ecosystem was nice.
One difficult part of the book depicts a lyncing. In the story, Sam, the onion man, kisses Kate, the schoolteacher. Since Sam is a Black man and Kate is a white woman, a town mob attacks Sam and kills him. While this part of the story is hard, it’s important to cover with children. My daughter and I talked about interracial relationships and read the book A Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage by Selina Alko. She also wrote down the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia in her history timeline.
N pulled an onion from our backyard and nature journaled it. We had a good time thinking about what the air on the mountain smelled like with thousands of onions growing. Just our single onion was potent enough to fill our entire homeschool room with a strong smell.
Finally, we made old fashioned spiced peaches! Canned peaches aren’t my favorite thing but we absolutely loved them! They were tangy and delicious, N especially loved eating them mixed with yogurt. In the book Zero lives off of 100 year old jars of spiced peaches he found in the desert. The stomach virus he contracts after led us to conversations about safe canning practices, bacteria, and food expiration dates. Since we’ve been canning our garden surplus this year, it was a practical conversation.
After we finished the story, N added Holes to her reading log in her Reading Journal. Sometimes we read a book just for the beauty of reading a book. Sometimes we read a book for the purpose of school and narration. Sometimes we read a book and we find ourselves making spiced peaches and uprooting onions in our backyard. The beauty of homeschool is the ability to do all of it.
(The notebooks featured in this post come from School Nest . We aren’t affiliated with this shop but I will absolutely buy every notebook they make. They’re exceptionally wonderful)
