What happens when we slow down and really listen to the language of a story?

In this special Brave Writer podcast episode for kids and parents, we cozy up with Cynthia Rylant’s Lighthouse Family series and unpack a delicious opening passage from The Storm. We notice how sound, mood, adjectives, and even compound words work together to paint Pandora the lighthouse cat’s lonely world—and we share simple ways to turn those discoveries into:

• copywork,
• scavenger hunts,
• and rich family discussion.

Join us as we read, notice, and play with language—then keep the magic going in your own read-aloud time.

Show Notes

One of our favorite things to do as home educators is to read aloud with our kids. But there’s a subtle shift that can turn a simple storytime into a rich apprenticeship in writing: reading like writers.

• Why this word and not that one?
• Why start the story here?
• Why does a single sentence feel so sad or so thrilling?

Those questions aren’t just academic; they’re invitations into craft.

The Power of a Single Sentence

Take a sentence like “She found herself sighing long, deep, lonely sighs.” We meet a character who is isolated, but instead of being told “She was very lonely,” we feel it in our bodies. The repetition, the commas, the triple stack of adjectives—it all creates a slow, weighted rhythm.

When we read like this with our kids, we can pause and ask: What makes this sentence so powerful? How would it feel if we changed one of those adjectives? What if we took the commas out? We’re not administering a quiz; we’re inviting curiosity. Our children learn, almost by osmosis, that word choice and punctuation carry emotion.

Playing with Sound

Sound devices like alliteration, assonance, and consonance can seem like abstract literary terms until you hear them working in a story. “In a lonely lighthouse, far from city and town, far from the comfort of friends…” rolls off the tongue like a gentle wave.

Instead of handing our kids a definition, we can point to the line and say, “Do you hear all those L sounds? How does that make it feel?” From there, we can play: try writing our own description of a place using repeated sounds, or go on a “sound scavenger hunt” in today’s read-aloud. Learning becomes a game instead of a worksheet.

Seeing the Story Beneath the Story

We also love to notice how authors handle time. A flashback, for example, doesn’t just fill in backstory; it reveals what matters most to a character. When a writer drops us into a memory of a storm at sea and a ship saved by a lighthouse, we see why tending a light later becomes a vocation of the heart.

These are beautiful conversations to have with our kids: What is this character afraid of? What do they love? How does the past explain who they are now? Suddenly, reading isn’t only about plot; it’s about empathy.

Turning Noticing into Practice

All this noticing naturally spills into our children’s own writing. Once they’ve hunted for compound words in a chapter book, they start inventing their own. Once they’ve collected homophones, they delight in spotting them in the wild. Once they’ve experienced how a powerful verb like “howled” or “crashed” changes a scene, “said” and “went” start to feel boring.

We don’t have to lecture about any of this. We simply:

• keep reading aloud, pausing now and then to marvel together,
• ask big, juicy questions,
• and treat literary devices like a spice cabinet we can open and smell.

Over time, our kids internalize what good writing feels like. And when they sit down to write—even if it’s just a sentence or two at first—they have a rich store of rhythms, images, and structures to draw from.

That’s the quiet magic of reading like writers: we aren’t just passing the time or checking off a language arts box. We’re building a shared language of craft and a lifelong love of stories, together.

Resources

• Order the Lighthouse Family issue of the Dart here (available Jan. 1, 2026)
• Find the Lighthouse Family books in the Brave Writer Book Shop
• Brave Writer class registration is open! 
• Visit Julie’s Substack to find her special podcast for kids (and a lot more!) 
• Purchase Julie’s new book, Help! My Kid Hates Writing
• Find community at Brave Learner Home
• Learn more about the Brave Writer Literature & Mechanics programs
• Start a free trial of CTCmath.com to try the math program that’s sure to grab and keep your child’s attention
• Subscribe to Julie’s Substack newsletters, Brave Learning with Julie Bogart and Julie Off Topic, and Melissa’s Catalog of Enthusiasms
• Sign up for our Text Message Pod Ring to get podcast updates and more!
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Connect with Melissa

• Website: melissawiley.com
• Substack: melissawiley.substack.com
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• Bluesky: @melissawiley.bsky.social

Produced by NOVA