Summer Reading – Books to Read Just for Fun!

Summer Reading – Books to Read Just for Fun!

Summer is a great time to read – and just for fun! With all of the options for customizing your homeschool year with Heart of Dakota (HOD), there are lots of amazing books you’ll never read based on the choices you made for your homeschool year. These unused packages can provide great summer reading books!

New Visual History Sets for Summer Reading

Did you homeschool your young children with Little Hearts for His Glory or Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory before the Visual History Sets were available? If you did and you feel like you missed out on those awesome books, why not use them for summer reading? They provide excellent read-alouds, include beautiful illustrations, and make history come to life. Or maybe you missed out on the Little Hearts… new Storytime set of books. Why not enjoy reading those over the summer? What fun!

Unused Storytime Sets for Summer Reading

I used the Boy Interest read-alouds in Beyond and Bigger. We thoroughly enjoyed them! However, I really did long to read the Classics (and even the Girl Interest) books too! Well, I am happy to say my sons didn’t miss out on these great books. I got them, and it worked wonderfully well to read them aloud before bedtime in the summer! Sometimes we read a chapter, and sometimes we got carried away and read three or more chapters! It was summer. We had the time! These books provided excellent summer reading for us, and we still remember them fondly!

Unused Storytime Sets or Extension Sets for Independent Summer Reading

Creation to Christ’s History-Interest read aloud set positively made the ancients time period come to life! We loved them! However, I thought the Boy Interest (and even the Girl Interest) books looked phenomenal too. As I searched at Barnes and Noble for books for my sons to read independently for the summer, I went home empty-handed. Pretty sad. Where were all the good books? Well, we’d never read the other HOD Storytime sets, nor many of the Extension Package sets. I’d always looked at those sets of books so longingly, knowing we’d never get to them… at least that was until I had the idea to get them for my kiddos to read in the summer! They made excellent summer reading books, and I loved the balance of genres too. My sons found new genres and series of books to love. My history-loving sons delved into the Extension Package books and loved those as well. Voila! Check “find summer reading books” off my to-do list!

Second Half of DITHOR Book Packs for Independent Summer Reading

Summer is just a great time to relax with a good book! Reading in a hammock, an outdoor fort, a pool chair, or even in a car on a road trip is a pretty fun way to spend your summer time! When Carrie chose Drawn into the Heart of Reading (DITHOR) books, she picked simply the best! Since DITHOR is scheduled just 3 of the 4 days a week in HOD’s Preparing Hearts for His Glory through Missions to Modern Marvels, kiddos get through only half their book packs each year. Carrie put together 9 different complete DITHOR packages of books. While some are Boy Interest and some are Girl Interest, they are all excellent books! At the pace of half a set a year, kiddos will never read them all. I often loved letting my sons read the second half of their book packs just for fun summer reading. Then, I’d move them up a set, making sure they read the books that matched their remaining genres the next school year. This worked great, as the books were always the right reading level and maturity for them!

Set Out What You Already Own

If you can’t invest in some summer reading books, why not set out what you already own? I did this many summers when my sons were younger. I’d even set out history books I’d read aloud, like American Pioneers and Patriots and Stories of Great Americans. Even though I’d read them aloud already to our sons, they enjoyed rereading them on their own when they could do so. I found the same thing to be true with science books! John Audubon was a favorite to read again and again. It fostered a love for birds our sons still have today! Good books beg to be read more than once anyway. Why not enjoy them for summer reading?

In Christ,

Julie