Inspiring Summer Reading - Nonfiction Reading For Facts

I had a second grade student in school this past year, who despised reading, but loved science.  Instead of spending my time with her, sounding out words in the recommended reader, we did simple science experiments (usually from the back of a Magic School Bus book).  She read the instructions out loud, and we worked through the steps together, and she loved it - reading and all.

It's a technique I've used often at home.  Science experiments, and recipes for that matter, whether they come boxed in a kit, or out of a book, call for very careful reading, and good comprehension skills.  It's not reading for entertainment, but for information - a type of reading we engage in every day.

Which is why, when the younger girls showed some interest in turning the extra cream we had left-over from our tapioca tasting into homemade butter, I gave them written instructions, printed from Scientific American, to follow.

I could just as easily have told them what to do.  Butter churning know how is one of the prerequisites to being a homeschool mom, after all, right up there with baking homemade bread.  How else could we make it through all those Little House on the Prairie unit studies?  But if I had told them what to do, I would have missed out on a golden opportunity to trick them into to inspire summer reading.

 
Normally my 8 and 9 year old girls would never consider perusing the pages of a layman's scientific journal, much less carefully reading through a three page article with no pictures to speak of.  But, with butter making in the balance...

...it was all fun and games.

E read aloud...

...while C carried out the instructions.

When their results were questionable, they consulted the pages instead of the mom...

...and were encouraged to continue on to success by themselves, thereby...

...honing their reading skills, engaging in a mini-science lesson, using up our extra cream, and providing me with yet another excuse to pull out the Lego minifigure mold.

Lego stud silver dollar short stack, anyone?

It's great to be a homeschooler.