One of my favorite times as a mother is getting to sit with my kids on the couch and read books. We have been doing this every day since my kids were all little and make it a routine to do this each night. Nothing like snuggling up with a good book. I especially love good picture books when they are little. As we started homeschooling we realized the importance of having a good chapter book going all the time! We have so many favorites and will share some in another post. As seasons and holidays come and go we change out our basket of books to the new seasonal ones. This is a favorite thing for my kids! They pretty much beg to do this sooner than I want to bring them in! I'm always adding to them as new ones come to mind or I find a great deal on them! I will often get used books from THRIFTBOOKS.
We have a small home so we have to store our big library in our laundry room and we rotate books from there to our bookshelf in the living room. Once we exhaust those books we will rotate again. We normally have one family chapter book at a time we listen to. Brian or myself will read aloud from that book. Sometimes we will listen together to an audio book if we love the narrator ! In our family room we keep a wall book shelf where we keep the books that we need for our school unit. For example when we did "Farming and Food" unit we would put all books related to that topic on the shelf. Super helpful to have them all at hands reach and where kids could easily find them!
One book that really helped me what Read Aloud Revival in establishing good reading out loud habits with my kids! Since they weren't accustomed to listening to long chapters, she gives some practical things to help with this. One thing that has helped us is allowing the kids to have a little hands on thing (blocks, coloring, drawing, playdough, sand or some sort of hands on) while they listen. Rule is, they can fiddle with it but can't talk. I find that my kids listen very well when they are doing something with their hands quietly. Always have your chapter book setting out on the counter or somewhere where you can see it so you can easily grab your book and gather your kids to read to