Accents

Our current "read aloud" book is The Island of Mad Scientists, by Howard Whitehouse. It's subtitled, "Being an Excursion to the Wilds of Scotland, Involving Many Marvels of Experimental Invention, Pirates, a Heroic Cat, a Mechanical Man and a Monkey," which tells you a bit about the humor of the author. This is the third in a series - we finished the second one last week and jumped straight into this.

The reason I bring up this book is that whenever I read books, I try my best to do different voices for the characters, particularly if it's obvious that they should have different accents. I mean, can you really read Lord of the Rings and not do Gollum?  

I committed to this during the first book of the series which wasn't difficult because although it was set in Britain, all the characters were British aside from a southern American. I can do decent British and Southern accents. 

By the middle of the third book, we've added a lot of variety and it's been challenging to keep up. At last count we have standard British, cockney British, Scottish, Indian, German, imaginary "Chiligriti" accent, southern, Canadian, robot, parrot, and most recently, a Russian pretending to Scottish. On top of that, there's male and female voices. Sometimes I get mixed up and it comes out as some kind of accent no one ever uses. But it's fun to try!

Another day in the life of a homeschool mom.