I still wasn’t sure, but since the illustrated versions had just started being released, I went ahead and bought one.
The series is wonderful and she still enjoys reading them to herself, but she was ready for something more when we read together. What I knew was that our current read-aloud selection– The Magic Treehouse series–wasn’t holding her attention. I was one of the few people around who had not read the series, so I didn’t know just how dark it would get. The right age to start reading Harry Potter was a big question before we began. Since Harry Potter has become such a huge part of our lives, I thought I’d share some lessons we learned, as well as some reflections on what it meant for us to read Harry Potter aloud together. Get your own copy to share with your kids, and please let me know what you think! I designed this book journal with her input and she can’t wait to get started! She’ll have a place to reflect on what she reads, draw her favorite characters and scenes, and rate the books she reads. We’re now planning to start a mother-daughter book journal, where we can both share our thoughts on the books we read together. With the last couple of books, we were reading as fast as we could–not truly wanting the experience to end, but wanting to find out what happened.Īnd of course, the hours discussing the books (and movies) mean that we have been immersed in the world of Harry Potter for over two years now. My reading pace was slower, she asked more questions, we took more breaks.Īs she got older and became a true Potterhead, we picked up the pace. We read those first couple of books very slowly. Admittedly, this was maybe a little early. We started reading the books when she was five. Which means that we spent at least 164 hours reading–but I estimate that it was probably about twice that. Toward the end of our journey through the books, I figured I could read about 25 pages aloud in an hour. Google tells me that we read roughly 4,101 pages, though the actual page count varies by publisher and edition. Not long ago, my seven-year-old daughter and I completed a milestone: we finished reading the entire Harry Potter series aloud. That means if you click and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Like Harry, Cat Chant grows up and fulfils his destiny but nonetheless the titles in the sequence all remain suitable for younger listeners.This post may include affiliate links. As in Harry Potter, and Diana Wynne Jones has been acknowledged as an influence on JK Rowling, the stories move freely between everyday life – in this case an historical one – and several remarkable parallel worlds. However, when the two children are summoned to live with a distant relative who turns out to be wizard with the government role of Chrestomanci, a job that puts him in charge of controlling the misuse of magic in a parallel universe, Cat gradually discovers his magical powers which turn out to be exceptional. While Cat knows that his sister is a witch he believes that he has no magical powers. Like Harry Potter, the two children are orphans their parents have drowned in a boating accident. The sequence begins with Charmed Life which introduces Eric Chant, always known as Cat, and his elder sister Gwendolen who is a witch. While the setting and the specifics of the magic are different, the exploration of how a child can have so much power and what can be done with magic are familiar. Like the Harry Potter books it is sequence of seven novels with a boy magician at its heart. Diana Wynne-Jones’s The Chronicles of Chrestomanci would be a good place to begin. Luckily, there are a lot of other magical stories they can enjoy while they do so.