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362 reviews for:
The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids
Sarah MacKenzie
4.31 AVERAGE
362 reviews for:
The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids
Sarah MacKenzie
4.31 AVERAGE
Excellent argument for the power of reading aloud with those you love both big and small. Not only does in nurture an early development for empathy but allows your children to experience so many life challenges within the walls of their imaginations. This the author argues gives them experience to face the world. She also brings up many studies of the power of reading together on education levels. It is the secret formula every educator is looking for and every parent would stand in lines for miles to get their hands on if in was created in pill form. What I love is that almost everyone can read to children. No time? 10 minutes every other day works out to 30 hours a year. Don’t have money? If you have access to a library card, you can read books together.
While I agree with many of the author's arguments in favor of reading aloud to kids, I agree with the reviews that the Religious undertones made this hard for me to digest. The idea that the Bible is a literal text that teaches us literally is not one that sits well with me. I am moving on to other texts on this topic.
Really appreciated the read aloud book lists at the end, mostly for ideas of books to keep in the cache of books to read next. The overall book itself was really informative about the long term benefits of developing a read aloud culture in your home, and confirmed my desire to keep doing what we’ve been doing.
Excellent book and I highly recommend to anyone who wants to raise a reader. There are definitely some religious themes woven throughout the book, but I didn’t find that it impacted Mackenzie’s main points or had any bearing on her advice, which was excellent for any audience. I’ll be buying a copy for my personal library to reference as needed.
I really enjoyed this book and think it’s so important! It was fun and easy to read with great ideas, book lists for different age groups, and discussion questions that would be easy to adapt to any kid or book. I love that the author stresses the importance of reading aloud to all kids, especially those who can already read, and how she urges us to build a book club atmosphere in our homes and focus purely on the joy of reading and the joy of creating memories and meaningful relationships with our kids.
My one (kind of big) problem with the book is how she talks about her Christian beliefs. As a follower of Jesus myself, I feel bad criticizing this part of the book, but for me it never meshed. It reads like Zondervan agreed to publish the book if she added enough God to it, so she went back and added some God like sprinkles on a cake, and my major issue with that is that it narrows the audience of a book that should be accessible to all parents down to only those of her same faith. Makes it really hard to recommend on a wide basis. As a teacher, I’d love to be able to recommend this to all parents, but I wouldn’t be able to because of the religion factor.
My one (kind of big) problem with the book is how she talks about her Christian beliefs. As a follower of Jesus myself, I feel bad criticizing this part of the book, but for me it never meshed. It reads like Zondervan agreed to publish the book if she added enough God to it, so she went back and added some God like sprinkles on a cake, and my major issue with that is that it narrows the audience of a book that should be accessible to all parents down to only those of her same faith. Makes it really hard to recommend on a wide basis. As a teacher, I’d love to be able to recommend this to all parents, but I wouldn’t be able to because of the religion factor.
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
slow-paced
This is my second read through of this book. I love Sarah’s emphasis of using fiction to point children towards God’s Truth.
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
I don’t like the formatting the way she features quotes of her own as little page breaks like she doesn’t trust us to know what is important. However the content is spot on and so helpful especially if you haven’t already listened to the early days of the podcast.
A nice companion to the read aloud handbook by Jim Trelease. We even got new book recommendations!
This book is so passionate in encouraging the reading of books to children and teens to enrich relationships and spark thought-provoking, meaningful discussions and connections. The author is Christian and that is clear in her writing of her experience and motivation, but as an atheist reader, it isn't terribly off-putting. There are some useful and surprisingly diverse booklists in the last few chapters with books sorted by which ages would most enjoy them and subjective appropriateness. Great starting point and reference.