Authors describe food. They almost never give you a recipe.
Dickens spends a whole paragraph on the Cratchit family’s Christmas pudding and not one measurement. Your child reads those scenes, pictures the food perfectly, and never notices that most of what they pictured, they made up.
Recipe to Read starts there. What does the book actually say? And what did your mind fill in?
Close reading you can taste
Separating what a text says from what you assumed is the foundational skill of close reading. It is also hard to teach, because it is invisible. A child who misreads a sentence does not know they misread it.
Cooking makes it visible. When your child copies out every sentence about the pudding and finds there is no recipe in any of them, they have learned something about reading that no comprehension worksheet can teach.
Six books, six meals
- Alice in Wonderland
- A Christmas Carol
- Little Women
- The Wind in the Willows
- The Secret Garden
- Robinson Crusoe
All six are out of copyright and free to read online or borrow from any library. The same six appear in every Recipe to Read volume, from third grade through high school, with harder questions each time. Returning to a book you love with better tools is what literary study is.
How each unit works
The four moves of the Fourfold Method (The Fourfold Method) appear under kitchen names.
- Gather. Your child copies the food sentences out by hand. The close reading is the copying.
- Measure. Two columns: what the book told you, and what you filled in yourself.
- Fold In. The world each book came from. What did people eat in Victorian London, and why?
- Serve. Your child writes the recipe the author never wrote.
At this age a recipe is provided for each meal, because the full reconstruction comes in later volumes. And every unit asks the literary question underneath it all: why is this food in this book?
Reading History pages
Each book has a Reading History page your child fills in every time they return to that book, at any age. A third grader’s notes on The Secret Garden, read again at fourteen, are a gift. Older volumes ask students to read their own earlier entries and account for the difference.
What’s inside
- Six units, one per book
- Gather, Measure, Fold In, and Serve pages
- A recipe for each meal
- The literary question in every unit
- Reading History pages
- Vocabulary pages, because old books use old words
- A page for you in every unit
Get Recipe to Read 3–4
88 printable pages, 8.5 by 11, black and white for a home printer. Your family license covers every child in your household, every year.
This is a first edition. Tell us how it goes at your table, and we will build the best suggestions into the next edition. Every purchase includes free updates to future editions.
Get Recipe to Read: Grades 3 & 4
Gina Glenn Steffy
Pair it with
Night Zookeeper: writing practice that feels like a game
Recipe to Read builds the reading. Night Zookeeper turns it into writing practice your child actually wants to do. Kids write stories, poems and reports inside an online world they help build, and a real tutor sends written feedback on their work, so you don’t have to be the bad guy. It covers reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation for Grades 1 to 6, and there’s a free trial so you can see if your child takes to it.
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Pair it with
School of Traditional Skills: hands-on learning for the whole family
If your family loves learning by doing, the School of Traditional Skills is a natural next step. It’s an online library of homesteading classes taught by people who live it: gardening, cooking from scratch, fermenting, preserving, raising animals and more. It fits right alongside the cooking in Recipe to Read and Recipe to Write, and gives older students real skills to log as electives.
Explore the School of Traditional Skills
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Lisa Nehring and her husband, Dr. David Nehring, a Clinical Psychologist, and Biblical Scholar speak together on a wide variety of topics, including education, classical education, vision, mission, parenting, marriage, and more.
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