Our kids go to bed early for children their age (and for homeschooled kids who can sleep in everyday!) But the reason we’ve always had early bedtimes is because we encourage their reading/drawing/writing/alone time after dark. Do you ever remember reading a wonderful book, deep into the night, under your covers maybe with a flashlight? You couldn’t put the adventure down, surely the next chapter will reveal the character’s fate! One of our main goals is to foster a love of reading in each of our kids. This doesn’t mean we have pushed them to read, or compared when they started reading with their peers, or have even put them in any type of reading curriculum. The way we foster a love of reading is to just be patient, to read to them, have them read to us, and give them lots and lots of time to look at, pour over, and read books.
This is the year reading clicked with our 8 year old, and I could not be more happy with how she did it, or at what age she did it. Time doesn’t matter to me, just her heart for books. Thankfully, she now can enjoy her early bedtime and not just look at the pictures, but actually soak in the words and understand them. I’m so proud of her.
So this is our littlest, every single night. Her brother is just a couple feet away, adding more pages to the adventure novel he’s writing, and her sister is in the other room drawing to her hearts content.