48 Reading Comprehension/Discussion Questions Instead of 'Did you like it?'

Things you can ask a child about something they've read/heard read aloud...

1) Which character was the most like you?
2) Which character was the least like you?
3) If you were going to make a movie out of this book, tell me who you'd want to play (insert role).
4) What part of this story gave you the strongest emotions?
5) How would you describe this book to a friend?
6) Can you think of 3 words to describe the (bad guy/hero/etc.)
7) Would you be friends with any of the characters if they were real?
8) What was your favourite scene?
9) Did the author use any literary devices that you disliked? (Too much rhyming, cliffhangers, etc.)

10) Why did this book appeal/not appeal to the critics?

11) Are there cover blurbs from other authors?  Who are they?  What did THEY write?  Why do you think they liked THIS book?

12) Is this similar to anything else you've read?  How?  

13) Why do you think you picked this book up, anyway?

14) How do you feel about the cover art?  Do you think it 'fit' the story?  Why?
15) Did you find any spelling or grammar mistakes in the text?

16) Did the story ever drag?  When?  Why?  Why did you keep reading?
17) Did the author use any interesting fonts or designs?

18) Were there footnotes or endnotes?  Did you read them?  Did they answer any questions?
19) Who did the author dedicate the book to?  Why?  Who are they?

20) Is this a good story to read before bed?

21) Was there an introduction?  Did you read it?  Did it help?  Would you suggest people skip it?
22) Was there an appendix?  A table of contents?  Did any of that improve your understanding?

23) Is this the author's first book?  Tenth book?

24) Have you read anything else by them?

25) Were there illustrations?  Who was the illustrator?

26) Who was the cover designer?  

27) Did the title page give you any interesting information?

28) Was there foreign language in the text?  Did you look it up?

29) Did this book make you hungry, thirsty, tired, energetic, etc.?

30) Is there a sequel?

31) How many pages did you read in a sitting? Why so low/high?

32) How would you change the characters, if you could?

33) Did you think that was a good ending?  Would you change it?  How?

34) Did you ever cry while reading it?  Why?

35) Do you think the chapters were split up at good points in the story?

36) Why do you think (character) did (action)?

37) Is there any foreshadowing?

38) At what point did you think you knew how it would end?  Or was it a complete surprise?

39) Could this have been a shorter book?  Or did it need to be this long to tell the whole story properly?

40) Could this be a longer book?  Or would it drag?

41) Who do you know who would like this book?

42) If you met the author, what questions would you ask them?

43) If you could choose a soundtrack for this book, what music would you choose?

44) What other books could you compare this one to?

45) What did this author do really well?

46) What did this author do poorly?

47) Imagine you have a bookstore of your own.  What would you put in a window display to showcase this book?

48) If the author came to a party at your house, who else would you invite and why?

Stages of Packing Books

 

Stage One (The Green Optimist)

Oh I'm going to pack books today!  Wonderful, yes, let's go to the grocery store and get a dozen boxes and I'll finish the livingroom bookcases this afternoon.  I wonder if the children would also like to help?  Well, anyway, even if they don't it's nice to feel productive, ya know?  Gosh I'm such a forward thinker - so organized and planned.  Oooooo!  I wonder if I could do squats while I get the bottom shelves empty!?

Stage Two (The Excellent Preparation)

Well, now I've got 12 boxes and a roll of tape and I'm ready to get started.  Better make some tea, first.  I mean, I'll be much more productive with caffeine.  Okay, no more delaying here, Amy!  Where should I start...mmm...let's just do homeschool fiction first.  No, no, I might want to read some of that and it would suck if it was packed.  Okay, what about...no, no, I have an essay due next week so I'd better not.  Um...well I could...OKAY HERE'S WHAT I'M GOING TO DO.  I'm going to do history, in the livingroom, and if I come across something I think I might need, then I just put it aside.  Wonderful plan.  I'm so smart.

Stage Three (Acknowledging there is a ProBleM)

Crap.  I need all of these books. I didn't even remember I HAD this book.  Am I going to read it in the next two months, though?  I need to start a pile.

Stage Four (Cracks are Showing)

I've used 12 boxes and I'm not done this bookshelf.  Um, okay, um...Okay no panicking!  Amy, you are an organizational maven.  You are lovely and intelligent and if you and your family have a TEENSY TINY problem well, it's fine.  EVERYTHING IS FINE.

Stage Five (Reality Sets In)

"Hello?  David?  Yeah, listen, I know you're driving to the dentist but is there any chance on the way home you could stop and get...yeah.  Yeah I'm out again.  OKAY MOST OF THIS IS YOU, IF WE WANT TO POINT FINGERS, SWEETHEART.  No, no little muffin, Mama is not yelling at Daddy."

Stage Six (The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves)

Alright, kids listen.  I need y'all to stop playing with that tape because Mama is trying very hard to not cry about these books.  Why is this book over here?  This isn't part of that series!  I need to calm down.  NOTHING IS WHERE IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE.  Alright, so do I pack these all just helter skelter and deal with it while I'm unpacking or...STOP. TOUCHING. THE. TAPE.

Stage Seven (Weight Of The World)

Amy.  Amy.  You need to get these books packed.  You aren't giving them away.  You aren't burning them.  They're just in boxes.  That's all.  Calm down.  It doesn't matter at this point if the series are together...

Stage Eight (Distractions)

I have to take 10 minutes and see how many more titles I need to finish the Dear Canada set.  

Stage Nine (Help Is On The Way)

No one will be able to lift anything, none of the boxes fit on the shelves, who knows what's in any of it, I've already needed four things I've packed away.

Stage Ten (The End)

The moving van is here just put stuff in banana boxes and pray.

Sabbath, City Thoughts,

I love Sunday, and do you know why?  No, it's not because of church or brunch...it's because Sunday is the one day of the week when my children are allowed to play video games, and they are silent.  It's so silent in my house right now, while we wait for David to finish recording and uploading his sermon.  Then we drive to a nearby church that offers a parking lot service, and we sit in our car and listen.  And afterwards we let the dog run wild in the field.  

Sunday isn't my sabbath day of rest, I'm afraid.  Never has been.  If you work 40+ hours a week and DON'T have a wife at home to do all the home stuff, then you come home and collapse in exhaustion and then the days you do things are Saturday and Sunday.  That's just reality.  It was a bit easier when I was a student, because there were often long gaps in between classes when one could run to the grocery store, or do a load of laundry.  But, of course, now I'm at home with three children and I'm homeschooling them, and going to school myself, and all the other things.  So, no, Sunday isn't restful.  It's a workday - a day when my husband is off to church to work, and a day when I am herding people through reality.  

But that's okay!  While I think the concept of Sabbath is critically important, I also think the idea of everyone sitting silently in a front parlour as a family is incredibly outdated.  The video games give ME a sabbath from listening to people clamour for my attention and services.  Here I am, in silence.  I will take my sabbaths as a dozen little moments of peace throughout the week.

The harder side

In the midst of all this busying back and forth, I am covering a hole.  I'm hurt.  I'm hurt by the way this ministry is ending, by how relationships are ending, by how so much of this is wrapping up in totally unpleasant and unforseen ways.  I'm hurt by the church.  I'm hurt by people.  I'm hurt by other ministers.  I'm hurt.

Maybe that doesn't shock you, or maybe it does - that someone can love God and not feel happy about all his little children.  Expectations are...a real drag, guys.  They really, truly are.  They make you feel like you're entitled to all sorts of things that you really are not entitled to.  Especially in ministry.  Especially there.  

Here's the thing - LOVE IS TRICKY.  It's hard to love people on your own.  It's HARD to do that.  Sometimes you really UNLOVE those people.  No love, 0%, do NOT recommend!  And that's why the love cannot ultimately come from you; it must come from somewhere else.  If it came from me, there would be about 3cm of love and then you'd hit cement.  I am not a loving individual; my default is "Kids!  Listen, we're crossing the street because there's some Jehovah's Witnesses coming towards us and they're holding pamphlets.  Everyone GO!"  The loving you see in me, that's not me, that's God.  

And I'm holding on to the hope that he can keep loving through me for the next several weeks because I am OUT of those 3cm, folks.  I'm out.  I'm tired of...all of the things.  I want to open my mouth and have God give me words that will encourage and uplift, and instead I'm holding my teeth tightly together so that I don't say what I'm thinking.  I worry the words will start to drip out the edges, start to divert themselves to my eyes, my ears - just run out of my body in fits and starts, dripping on the carpet as I walk.  That would not be good.  That would not be a nice ending.  The words are not nice words.

God is the well of stillness, the lack of chaos.  If I am to make it through this move, it will be by His strength alone.

April 8 - Moving Update

 We're up to...hold on, let me count again just to make sure...

44 packed boxes!  

So the packing thing is always okay for me, honestly.  I mean, you gets the boxes, you puts the things in the boxes.  It's not difficult.  We're doing fairly well on that front.

The decluttering is a bit less comfortable, but I'm trying.  I've found a home for a few things - it's just a question of actually having the things OUT of the house, because people say they want stuff, but do they really??  This is a returning issue for me.  Also I have no memory left so no, I'm probably actually NOT going to remember to bring it to you.  Sigh.  Prolly not.

I've been calling various health providers today.  Make sure everyone has a dental checkup before we move and our insurance kicks off.  Found out that we can't have eye exams until July, and we move in June, so that's dumb but okay, our eyes were fine whenever we last had them checked so I assume they'll be fine until we can get a new optometrist.  Have scheduled a time to go in and get the last pair of insurance-covered frames for my glasses that have been glued back together one too many times.  

Also called the junk removal guy who brings things to the dump for a fee.  Because do I ever have things to bring to the dump, friends.  Oh, do I ever.  Someone would like my raised garden beds AND the dirt in them, which...fantastic.  Come and get those suckers.  Called the vet to make sure animals will have rabies shots and such before we go.  Northern and Southern Ontario have different animal health concerns, apparently - protection against ticks and heartworm, specificially.

This week is all about finishing school for the grown ups.  I'm on the home stretch of this trade publishing in Canada course, and as soon as I'm done I'm taking a break until September, so we can get settled.  David has a final volunteering session at the food bank, and then a final reflection paper to write, and then all of his requirements for this degree on his end have been fulfilled.

The children's schooling is not really critical to finish at any particular time, but I am trying to wrap up all the odds and ends of books that we've started, just so we can finish our series and pack them away.  

We'd hoped to do a run down to Ottawa with a few dozen boxes in the van, but then the provincial lock down happened, so now we're not going anywhere for four weeks.  This means we've got boxes slowly engulfing our house and no where to put them, which is...fun. 

And there we go, plodding ever onward.

The Door Within Trilogy (Spoilers Included)

 I give you...The Door Within Trilogy by Wayne Thomas Batson!

While not marketed as a 'Christian' story, the Door Within by Batson is so heavily saturated with Christian symbolism that it falls into the same fiction category as Narnia or the Wilderking books.  I do think that someone could read it without noticing the faith aspects, of course.  There's no mention of Christ, no specifically Christian language used or anything like that, but the story has such a strong Christian flow to it that if you are at all familiar with Christianity, you will probably see it.

In this first book we are introduced to Aiden, who finds a set of scrolls in his Grandfather's basement and makes a decision to believe the story written in them.  It's a story about a king, Eliam (El-I-Am, yes.  Brush up on your Hebrew, friends!) who rules over the kingdom of Alleble with his twelve trusted knights.  He writes all of history into a magical book locked in a tower where he stores all knowledge.  Then he's betrayed by one of his knights, the evil Paragor who is overcome by his lust for power.  Paragor kills the king, and also kills a whole bunch of innocents, but King Eliam rises from the dead and Paragor is thrust into the wilds of the world, where he attempts to take over other kingdoms by pandering to the greed of their citizens.

Aiden shows this story to his father, who says something along the lines of 'oh, yeah I saw those scrolls in a bookstore once.  They're just one of those joke fantasy type things.  No one really believes them'.  Aiden can't shake the feeling that his father is wrong, however, and so he also shows them to his Grandfather, and HE says he also believes in Alleble and King Eliam, and that Aiden should make up his own mind, but that that scrolls speak the truth.  Aiden decides he also believes in the scrolls, and is taken away from Earth to the kingdom of Alleble.

Up to this point, the story is a little dry, to be honest.  Aiden is a very mopey, timid sort of boy and everyone around him seems sort of meh.  Nothing to write home about.  However, when Aiden gets swept to Alleble, I started to get drawn into the novel a lot more.  Here's where it could have gone down a very heavy handed religous path, and I was worried that would be the case, but actually I think Batson wove a very original and compelling narrative!

When Aiden arrives in Alleble, we learn that it is a kind of mirror world to Earth, and that all of the human-like creatures there are called Glimpses, and each Glimpse has a human counterpart.  This actually comes into play later when Aiden meets someone in Alleble who he knows from Earth.  Aiden is drafted into the king's twelve knights, and sent off on a quest to help bring a neighbouring kingdom under the protection of King Eliam, rather than Paragor.

There's a little bit of romance, sort of.  One of the knights is a girl named Gwenne and she and Aiden hold hands and once she kisses him on the cheek.  There is quite a bit of violence, on par with Wingfeather.  Some beloved characters die.  There isn't any questionable language.

You could just end with this book, which I actually like in a trilogy.  Sometimes you've visited an author's mind and it was fine and everything but you don't know that you're invested enough in the story to go through multiple more books in order to figure out how everything ends.  But in this case I think we WILL read the next two books, because I'm curious to see how the story arc ultimately ends.  At the conclusion of The Door Within, Aiden returns to Earth with the thought that he would not be allowed to return to the land of the Glimpses until he died and met them in the Land Beyond...

Hmmm....

Here are the next two books!

Book Review - Ghosts of Greenglass House (spoilers included)

Ghosts of Greenglass House is the second book in the Greenglass House series by Kate Milford.  We really liked Greenglass House, although you can read here about how I was not a fan of the ending, which was weak and also very strange.  Will the sequel be as strong as the first....?

So, Milford has set this story a year after the first book.  We learn that Meddy disappeared after the Christmas mysteries of the previous year, and hasn't yet returned.  Milo, meanwhile, is struggling more with his biological lineage.  While I don't have any personal experience with adoption, I really appreciated how the author handled it here in the story and I think it was very balanced.  She did rely, as in the last book, on convenient situations, but not As Much, or at least As Noticeably, as before.

In this novel, we're back in Greenglass House, and it is Christmas, and yet again we've got a bunch of unwelcome strangers stuck in the house to Milo's chagrin.  I would have liked a little bit of a change up with that - but I'm not a fan of formulaic sequels.  Meddy appears and she and Milo repeat the same sort of role-playing magic game that they did last year.  Wait...things are hidden in the same places.  It's all about the same theivery and sneakery...

This is the same book, isn't it.  Sigh.

I mean, if you enjoyed Greenglass House, you'll probably enjoy Ghosts, because it's essentially the same story.  On the other hand, in a lot of ways it is a paler reflection of the first book.  We're expected to already know a lot of background - who Meddy is, what game they played last year, etc.  For that reason, I'd say that to get much out of this story you would need to read the previous novel.

Other oddities...

When we read Greenglass House I immediately felt like I HAD to know where this place was supposed to be.  I fell down several rabbit holes trying to figure it out, and had pretty much decided that it had to be a generic north-eastern seaboard in the Americas.  Then along comes Ghosts - and there's a scene in the story where one thief is defacing an American coin and is told that it's illegal to do so.  She responds by saying it isn't illegal if it's foreign currency.

Gah!  Where is this story SET THEN??  I decided it must be Cornwall then.  Somewhere with a heavy history of smuggling, but with the correct weather patterns for the story.  But then...there's another part that comes along where it seems to imply that this is not in Great Britain.  I'm annoyed.  I'm unreasonably annoyed that I can't do a tonne of research and read a whole bunch of things related to the geographical area in which this story is set.  Grrr.