Saturday, November 20, 2010

Living books, not textbooks

Educating Shoshie and Yakov was easy really. Both loved to read and helping them find appropriate reading material for whatever topic they were working on was just fun for me. Spending hours on research at the library or on the internet, I loved it. For science and history, we eschewed textbooks. That's not entirely true. Yakov, the literature/history guy, preferred his science rather straight forward. Shoshie, the budding biologist, read widely for science but she also loved historical fiction. And Jane Austin. She enjoyed Spielvogel's World History: The Human Odyssey as a background text. When she was doing American History, she combined it with American Literature and created a good course for herself.

What prompted this train of thought was this post at I.N.K. blog. I read this blog regularly because some of our favorite authors blog there and I learn about new books as well as older books that are new to me. If you read the article, click through to Joy Hakim's article in the Washington Post. It will make you glad you homeschool, if you do. (And if you read the comments on the post, just know that the grammatical error in mine is driving me crazy but I don't know how to correct published comments.)

Oh, another blog I discovered this week, Book-A-Day Almanac. So many new books.

Noach is different. He has little interest in reading anything not specifically assigned. Neither fiction, nor nonfiction. This is hard for me but I am adjusting. Slowly. And I read a lot of books to myself. PRM

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