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During my hardest year of homeschooling, I had a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, a one-year-old, and twin newborns. It was kind of crazy. That sounds crazy, right? Life was a little chaotic. Well, I remember one particular week, I was at church and a friend of mine, Sheila, who had homeschooled her three kids all the way through, asked, “So how’s homeschooling going?” Naturally, I burst into tears. I’m not sure she saw that coming. Of course, maybe she did. Anyway, she asked me how I was keeping the kids on track for their schoolwork and how much they could do when I wasn’t able to lead them through it. I think I looked at her with something of a blank stare. And so she said, “Okay, I am coming over tomorrow. I will bring some spiral notebooks.” She meant one of these bad boys, these 25 cent spiral notebooks. So I cleared a path to the door and she came and she showed me how a 25 cent spiral notebook could completely change our homeschool for the better. So today I’m showing that same method to you.
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I’m Sarah Mackenzie. This is the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. Today we’re going to talk about those spiral notebooks, which turned out to be the simple tool that has had the biggest impact on my homeschooling life.
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Now, I’ve talked about spiral notebooks before, but it’s been a while, and they are, I think, the simplest, most powerful tool for getting a handle on your homeschool day. I’ve used them for years and years. Every time I stop to do something else that’s more fancy or more beautiful or more complicated, I end up just coming back to the good old spiral notebook because it works so well. Now, I’ve homeschooled my own six kids from the beginning. My husband Andrew and I have actually graduated three of those kids. They’re now 21, 19 and 18. All three successfully graduated and off to college. Very exciting. But we’re still homeschooling because we also have an 11-year-old and twin 10-year-olds, and I want to tell you about what my friend Sheila taught me on that faithful day when she brought over some simple spiral notebooks and how that impacted our school. It was probably the biggest game changer in my homeschool.
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And since I first shared this idea maybe eight years ago, I’ve heard the same from so many of you. Just a few comments that you shared. Megan said, “I still cannot get over how this literally changed our lives. How could a simple spiral notebook completely change our homeschool? But it did.” Gaze said, “This spiral notebook technique completely revolutionized my homeschool.” Lauren wrote, “I love this method. I tried to move away from it to save time, but I came right back to it.” Yep, same, Lauren. Jessica wrote, “These notebooks save my sanity.”
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So today I’m going to show you what those spiral notebooks are, how to manage them in the easiest way possible, and some tips for keeping them very simple and really effective. Now, this episode of the podcast is actually also a video because I thought it would be easiest to show you the notebooks rather than just to tell you about them. So if you are listening to this on the podcast and you’d like the visuals, head to readaloudrevival.com/229 to watch it. I’ll try to describe everything I’m showing on the video for those of you who are just listening. But if you’d like to see the notebooks for yourself, go to readaloudrevival.com/229.
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Now, let’s go back to the time when my kids were 12, 10, eight, one and newborns and my friend Sheila came over to show me this method. At that time, my kids’ school day was really dependent on me. That was the problem. That gets very overwhelming. If your kids are always waiting on you for their next school thing and you have a lot of babies or a lot of responsibilities and you feel like everyone is always waiting because they are actually always waiting and they’re probably also complaining that they’re always waiting, you feel pulled in a million directions, right? You’ve got to take out the trash, change the diaper, nurse the baby, rock the baby to sleep, and the kids are waiting for their next school thing. So you feel like they’re waiting and waiting on you. You feel stretched too thin. Nobody’s getting what they need.
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So this is where spiral notebooks can help. This spiral notebook system can really help here. You’re going to get each of your kids a spiral notebook like this 25 cent kind you get from the grocery store. Does not need to be beautiful. In fact, I would recommend it just be not beautiful because each evening, what you’re going to do is write down your kids’ assignments for the next day, all of their chores, all of their housework, that’s it. Every night, you’re going to write down what their chores and all their housework is for the next day. I know, I know, I was skeptical at first too. Really, this is what I thought, “Sheila, really? Just write down what they need to do? That’s your solution?” But I, like so many of you, have been floored at the change that very simple task had on our homeschool because after I started using spiral notebooks in this way, we began to consistently get to pretty much everything in our school day before the day was over. That had not happened before.
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For the first time, I wasn’t having to rack my brain to remember what we were supposed to be doing. I wasn’t having to keep all my kids on track, keep track of who might have gotten off track. My kids weren’t perpetually waiting on me in my days, our school days weren’t taking hours and hours and hours. Each morning, after breakfast, the big kids would do their morning chore. They would dress and brush their teeth and then they would set to work on their school notebooks. So instead of feeling pulled between a teaching lesson and my toddler and setting on soup for dinner, I go about my business with the little ones and all the tasks that need to be done. My kids go about theirs. And when they have a question or they need help with an assignment, they just bring their materials to me and I help them on the spot. That’s the overall system. So if some other kid is getting help at the moment, this particular child can work on something else in their notebook until I’m free.
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Let me show you what this might look like. I’ve got a page here. This is from Allison’s notebook on a February 10th. You can see I wrote math lesson 64 and Flash Master 120 seconds. That’s a math drill program, and then there’s piano for 20 minutes, typing for 15 minutes. QRT in our house means quiet reading time for 30 minutes. And then I asked her to write down what she was reading. She was reading the Railway Children. Religion, read one chapter of St. Rosa Lima. That must have been what she was reading at the time, and a page of cursive. So this is it. This is her school list. This is everything she’s supposed to do for school this day.
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Now, you might be like, “That’s not that impressive,” and I’ve been trying to tell you for years, we don’t do school as everybody else does. We are very basic in our home and it serves us really well. We do lots and lots of reading and read alouds, and that just fills in all the edges and helps us enjoy our homeschool.
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So this is it. You would write down just the things that you’re doing. Here’s the next day. Here we go. Lesson math, lesson 65. On this day, she colored it in with faces. This is my art student who’s now studying illustration at art school, so that’s fun. She’s piano lesson at two 30, typing 15 minutes. Same thing. It’s same thing every day. This is so fast because I pretty much have a list of things that I’m just copying the day before, math, piano typing, quiet reading time, religion. And on this day, read aloud to mom for 10 minutes.
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And so if you notice back on the page before, I think there was some… Yes, there was something she didn’t get to, so she just didn’t mark it off. No problem. When I see that in the evening, I just know like, oh, okay, she didn’t get to typing today, and so tomorrow hopefully we’ll get to typing. Now, if she hadn’t gotten to math lesson 64, then that’s also fine. The next day, instead of math lesson 65, I would’ve written math lesson 64 again because now we need to do it. And that simple act kept me really in line with knowing where people were, where you were getting behind. Because if there was multiple days you weren’t getting to math lesson than 64, then I know that we’re having some trouble. How come we’re not getting to math? That’s so much better than going weeks and weeks before I realize how behind we are or much you’re struggling. So that’s something to keep in mind.
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Okay, so a couple of quick things about this. I have found it best to write out these spiral notebooks the night before, and here’s why, and your mileage may vary. As with everything I ever say about homeschooling or on the podcast, I hope you know are the expert on your own homeschool. So take what works from any of my ideas and leave the rest. I tend to be something of an incurable optimist in the morning, believing we can do all the things. But in the evening, after I’ve had a good dose of reality and I’m tired, I’m a little more tempered. So what I found is if I wrote the list in the evening, I wouldn’t write down as much for the next day because I’m just very well aware at that time of day of our limited time and my limited energy, which brings me too to this idea of writing it all by hand rather than just typing it up in a checklist because as you see, most days are pretty much the same. I’m writing the same things more or less. We don’t have a ton of different things. When she finishes the Railway Children or St. Rose of Lima, that will change, but there’s not like a whole lot of things that are different here.
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So why handwriting over just printing a checklist? You can do this however works for you. But handwriting has for me, helped me to remember my limitations, my kids’ limitations because you can only fit so much on a page. And once I’ve written out a bunch of things on a page, that feels like a lot of work, which helps me do less, which is a very important thing in my homeschool. I think that’s why homeschooling has worked so well for us for the long term and we’re still enjoying it, is because we don’t do that much. We do less and we try and enjoy it more. Keeps our expectations in check.
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And also, keep writing it out by hand really keeps me up to speed on where everybody is in their lessons because, like I said, if I write down math lesson 64 and then that doesn’t get done, the next day I write down math lesson 64, and if it doesn’t get done again, I can problem solve that so much better, like I mentioned, than going weeks before realizing we’re not making any progress in an important area or a kid’s been practicing something wrong because I haven’t had a chance to check work and help them fix it. Which leads me to another thing I wanted to mention, the importance of checking their work.
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And the handy thing about these little spiral notebooks is that it puts the onus on your kids here instead of you. So as you can see here, I use check marks before the task, see if I can do this on the camera, for the work that needs to be done. So math lesson 64, and then I put a checklist after the task because those check marks are there for me to sign off. It is the child’s responsibility in that case to bring the notebook. So it would’ve been Allison’s responsibility to bring this notebook and get the second check. That means have mom check it. Their spiral notebook is not done until they’ve gotten their check marks and they’ve gotten me to check off any work if there’s a second checkbox. Like I mentioned, this takes the onus off of you as the mom and also helps your kids gain some independence and autonomy and take some ownership over their own work and their own schedule.
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Let’s talk about a couple of obstacles that might come up for you. If you don’t have time to write down assignments each night, and this feels pretty overwhelming, you might be sitting there going, “I do not have time for this.” And the truth is this would take me about two minutes per kid because we’re just doing the next thing. Now, I don’t do any fancy curriculum. We do have a do the next thing way of homeschooling over here. At the beginning of the year, I would spend a little time making a master list of assignments and how frequently I want each kid to tackle each assignment, and then I’d use that as a quick reference. So each day, I’m probably going to put math, the next math lesson or the same one, if today’s didn’t get finished, which happens more often than you’d think it will. I’ll probably say, read the next chapter of the book you’re reading or practice typing for 15 minutes. I don’t have a fancy lesson planner and I don’t do… I almost do no lesson planning. We do the next thing in this subject for this many minutes usually.
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Now, there were times, of course, when my kids were all young where I really couldn’t carve out 10 minutes to do this for each of my kids. And if you are finding that evening, after evening, after evening, you’re just not getting to writing out spiral notebooks, then what would help me is I would skip something else. I would skip swiping the floor or folding the laundry or scrolling social media because knowing it’d only take me five or 10 minutes to do this, this system gave me way more peace of mind than having a swept floor or having little laundry folded and it took about the same amount of time. So that was helpful.
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Another question I often hear is, do I really have to hand write it? And I mean, no, of course you don’t. You’re the boss. At different times, I’ve found handwriting to be helpful because it really helps me from getting too carried away. It makes sure I’m paying attention to where my kids are in each lesson. It helps me be really present to where my kids are and how they’re doing. But I actually am not handwriting these anymore. We’re using a different system, a modified version of spiral notebooks, which I’m going to show you next. So you’ll see how I do this now instead of a list, a handwritten list. So if that’s a major obstacle for you, I get it.
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Last words of wisdom, if you choose to use this method, keep it simple. Resist the temptation to complicate it, to color code it, to make it any more difficult than it is. In homeschooling, I have found simple is pretty much always better, always more sustainable over the long term. And that’s the key, sustainability over the long term. So it’s going to be much more effective.
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Another thing you’re going to want to keep in mind is you’re going to want to keep those notebooks handy. I sort of threatened my children on pain of death not to remove these from the kitchen counter. A spiral notebook will not make your life less stressful if you are spending time every day looking for them. Ask me how I know. So we had a rule, they could not be moved from the kitchen counter and they were just primetime spot on the kitchen counter during the day.
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This is what I use with my older kids almost all the time, but let me show you the post-it method of doing this, which is what I’m doing now. The idea is the same. You’re going to give your kids a full picture of what’s expected of them. The whole day isn’t going to depend on you to keep it going, to know what’s next, to keep everybody on track. But for some kids, a full list all in one glance, well, it works fine, perfectly fine for some kids. It can be really overwhelming to others. And also, I have found that some of my kids need a little extra motivation.
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So the post-it system, it’s a tweak on spiral notebooks. My husband actually came up with this idea when this system wasn’t working quite as well for my son. He was overwhelmed by the whole list. It felt like… We had a rule in our house that you had to have your spiral notebook done, your list done, and it had to be 2:30 before you got screens. And this just felt very overwhelming at the beginning of the day for him.
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So my husband came up with this and let me show you what it is. And this is what we do with our younger kids now. So instead of a notebook, I’ve got a clipboard. And on that clipboard is essentially a bingo card. I’m going to try and describe this for those of you who are listening, not watching. If you’re watching, you can see it on my camera here. On the bingo card, I’ve got nine squares and my kids’ name at the top. So this is Beckett’s. On each of those nine squares I have typed out… Of course, you could hand write these if you wanted, but I have typed out one thing per square. So for example, do two pages of explode the code could be on a square, right? Math with dad. This one it says school with dad. School with dad. That’s math, really. And I put a cute little clip art of my husband there. Practice piano is on here, I think. Yep, practice piano 15 minutes. School with mom.
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Now, the way we do our school day, I do morning time, which is like language arts and read alouds and stuff, poetry, memorization. I just call it school with mom because they’re going to sit down, they’re going to do it all with me. They’re going to do their math and some handwriting practice with their dad. So they’re going to do school with dad. That’s a whole separate thing.
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And then QRT, that’s quiet reading time for 30 minutes. On here, it says cursive one page and explore the code, two pages. So each square has either a chore or a school activity to do. Now, you could make this grid any size. If you wanted to put more lessons on it, you could make it another row. I found that nine squares seems to be a good fit. I actually put chores on here as well because, with my younger kids, I have found I’m not as good as I used to be at keeping up with making sure they do all the things, make their bed and brush their teeth in the morning.
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My older kids, when we were doing spiral notebooks, for the most part, I didn’t put chores on here. I think sometimes I would if there was a child who was not doing their chores, but I was just better at keeping up with that. These days, I find I’m not very good at keeping up with it. So I put it on here. Anything you want the onus on your child for, put it on the whatever list you’re using. So I put it on this grid. So they’ve got get dressed and make bed, brush teeth, feed Tommy, that’s one of our dogs, and cookie clean bathroom, which is wiping down a bathroom. So those are all on here too.
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Okay, so here’s what happens next. After I’ve got this grid, I use mini post-it notes and I cover each one. So I’m just going to take one of these little mini post-it notes and I’m just going to stick it on one. And I’m just going to switch over here to show you Emerson’s now. This is his summer checklist, his summer list grid. So as you can see, I have put a post-it on each square to cover up the thing that I wrote on it. And on those post-its, I write random numbers between one and five. So some on this particular grid, say two, five and three.
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Now, each child lifts a post-it to see one thing to do. And so I’m going to lift this one and see. It says brushed teeth. And then, when they have completed that task, they put this post-it on the cabinet, and then I add up those points at the end of the day onto a score sheet. And once they’ve each earned 150 points, we do something fun. We go to FroYo, we go bowling, we see a movie at the movie theater, we have a game night, something like that. I’ve worked this out so my kids get rewarded about every three weeks. That’s why I picked 150 points because I was just picturing how long it would take them to earn about that. That feels about right to me. You could do this less or more frequently, depending on how you want to do it.
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So here are a couple logistical tips for using the system. I use a different color post-it for each kid. So I’ve got blue for Beckett, green for Emerson, pink for Clara, and that way, when they put their points up on the cabinet and I’m adding up their points at the end of the day, it makes it very easy. I can add them up really quick. I know that all the pink post-its are Clara’s. I don’t have to write their names on them. I reuse the post-its. So they’ll put them on the cabinet and then, when I’m done adding up their points, I just slap them right back on this. I don’t change this out. I don’t change out the grid, except maybe once a month or once a quarter when I want to change some things that are on it. I use the same one day after day. So I just slap those post-its right back on there and then were added again the next day. Again, keep it simple, right?
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I don’t try to match up the harder tasks with more points for the most part. I make it random. So today I’m making your bed, that might be… Oh, here, get dressed and make bed, this is worth two points today. Tomorrow might be worth five. If there is something that tends to be a slog in our house that oftentimes is math or piano practice, I will try to make it higher points because that’s a little bit more incentive.
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A side benefit of this, and it ended up being more than a side benefit because it felt very… I didn’t realize how much it was draining me until the solution happened, which is some kids who either want to get done with their school fast because they just want to be done with their school fast or their question is, when can I have screens? Or if you’ve got a lot on your plate and you feel like your kids are waiting for you, what they’re saying is something more along the lines of, “I’ve been waiting for you forever. When are we going to get school done so I can have screens” or free time or whatever. So this helped, and same with this. Either system really helped because it’s in black and white.
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I basically had two rules. I have two rules. To get screens, your spiral notebook has to be done and it has to be at least 2:30 PM. And that 2:30 PM part, by the way, it’s just my way of keeping kids who would do sloppy work just to get it done from being rewarded for that sloppy work. Because if I would say your school has to be done, some of them would do it very sloppily and be done by 11:00 AM and I don’t want them on screens at 11:00 AM. So that works. It’s like these are all the things that are expected of you and it has to be 2:30 PM.
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And this is especially true if you are too busy with littles to check sloppy work or check to make sure things are done. It’s just a good, nice, hard, fast rule. It will remind you to at about 2:30, if kids are like, “Okay, I’m done. I get my free time or whatever,” to be like, “Bring me your checklist,” or “Let me see your post-its and I can see where you’re at.”
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So what I like about this post-it method, and like I mentioned, I use this method actually with all three of my kids now, is that, number one, I don’t have to write out the assignments each night. So if you’re having a hard time keeping up with writing the assignments out, doing the post-it method might be easier for you. I’ll change out what’s in the squares, I think I mentioned this, about every month or every quarter, but for the most part, you’re just using the same sheet.
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I always pick the reward and the kids don’t pick the reward. I pick it. So if I really want an M&M Blizzard, going to Dairy Queen is going to be the reward for the next 150 points. I pick the reward and I put it on the top of the score sheet, and that score sheet is just written on a piece of paper taped up next to where they put their post-its when they put them on the cabinet. So it’s written on the top of the score sheet as something to look forward to. For us, it’s always an experience, a way to connect. I don’t reward my kids with prizes or things for school. It’s always connection. It’s always time with me, which is what our kids really want anyway. It’s a movie together or bowling together or ice cream at the ice cream shop together. It’s time. That’s what I’m using to motivate my kids, time.
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Actually, at the end of last school year, I told the kids, if you want to go for 300 points, this was in the last six weeks or so, I told them, “Once we get to 300 points, we’ll be done for the school year and we’ll go to an indoor waterpark.” So that was really fun and it was a bigger reward. And that’s it. Like I said, it’s not fancy.
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I know all this feels way too simple to be effective, just write down what the kids need to do, but this tip is probably the tip I hear about most from homeschool moms who say they cannot believe how much better their homeschool day feels using it. Sometimes the simplest things that don’t cost a penny are the best ones.
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Now, I should’ve said this at the top, but I’ll say it here because I’m just now thinking of it. If you have a system for lesson planning and keeping your kids on track and keeping your school day hemming along, that’s working for you, don’t switch to this method. Don’t break something or don’t fix something that’s not broken, right? But if you are struggling with the feeling of everybody’s waiting on me, I feel like I can’t keep up with everyone, I feel like kids aren’t able to just move forward in their work, try it, see if this helps. For me, keeping the spiral notebooks really was a game changer. And then moving to this post-it method has continued to be a game changer. I actually prefer this method just slightly. It’s got that whole reward thing built in. It’s a little less time-consuming.
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The whole point of homeschooling is that we get a bespoke education for our kids, one that fits our kids temperaments, our temperaments as their teachers, and also the circumstances. And your current circumstances might be that you have a new baby or you have some illness in the family, or you’re working extra hours, or you just have some kind of thing that’s making it harder for you than it was before. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not a problem to be solved. It’s just homeschooling. And God wants to meet each of us and each of our homeschool exactly where we are. Your school day, your kids, the limitations on your time and attention, they’re all exactly what God wants to use to meet your kids where they are in your homeschool. So use a tool like post-it notes or a spiral notebook to simplify it if that will help your homeschooling day.
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Show notes for this episode along with the full video are at readaloudrevival.com/229. In those show notes, we’ve got a blank nine square grid that you can use for that post-it method if you’d lik., you can just grab that free blank nine square grid and then get yourself some little tiny post-its and away you go. So you can grab that in the show notes. Readaloudrevival.com/229 since this is episode 229.
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Now, let’s go hear what’s in my voice mailbox from Read-Aloud Revival Kids.
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Hi, my name is Gray and I am six years old. I’m from Denver, Colorado, and my favorite book is Ember and the Island of Lost Creatures. It’s by Jason Hammond. And I like it because it has lots of action and mysterious stuff in it.
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Ah, thank you, Gray. I have not read Ember and the Island of Lost Creatures yet, so I’m going to have to go look for that at my library. I have, however, been to Denver, Colorado and I love it there. So I need some more messages from you kids. Gray is the only one who left one this time. So if you’d like to leave a message sharing your favorite books, what you’re reading and loving lately, leave me a voicemail. I especially love those voicemails from teens. So if I’ve got any teens listening, go leave me a message. I need to know what you’re reading so I know what to put on my TBR so I know what to know to read next. Go to readaloudrevival.com/message to leave a voicemail. I’ll be back in two weeks with another episode of the Read-Aloud Revival for you. In the meantime, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
