Hello, I'm back. The girls and I went to visit my family last week and I am just getting back to our regularly scheduled life. As I have been catching up on emails, blogs and bookmarks, I noticed that there is a CM blog carnival this Tuesday at Dewey's Treehouse . The topic is open and at first I could think of nothing to blog about. Maybe I am not that Charlotte Masony after all... Then I was reading Thrifty Homeschoolers' posts about CM and it dawned on me - living books - I could post about living books.
Living books are such and obvious concept to me that I almost forget that it is a Charlotte Mason idea. We have been immersed in living books since officially starting our school year on September 10th. Since then we have been devouring picture books about different areas of the world. We have covered Australia, South and Central America and will finish Africa this week. After that we will take a break from our geography studies (sometimes ya need to mix things up, ya know) and spend some time with the chemistry set that has been gather dust for the last year and a half since I bought it at a consignment store. In conjunction with the experiments we will also read, you guessed it... living books. My list of chemistry related books is sitting on my desk right now waiting for me to check our library's online catalog.
It seems like no matter what the subject, living books are available to make the topic come alive. Even if we use a curriculum for a certain subject, I like to find books from the library to add to our learning. Here are a few examples of books we love in the different subject areas.
Math - Math Start readers, Books by Greg Tang
Grammar - books by Ruth Heller, Brain Cleary and Lynn Truss
History - too many to mention taken from Sonlight, The Well Trained Mind and many online lists
Science - We don't even use a curriculum for science. We pick our topics from What your __ Grader Needs to Know and then get books from the library on each topic.
Geography - Geography Song Kit and pictures books. See my lists here.
Music - World's Greatest Composers by Mike Venezia
Art - World's Greatest Artists by Mike Venezia
I truly cannot get enough of living books. If we could just sit on the couch reading books for school, life would be great. So much for the pesky math and writing skills...
I will continue to post the books we are reading as we use living books to learn about different topics throughout the year, so come back and check out my lists. Someone besides me should take advantage of the hours I have spent sorting through books lists and checking the library catalog :)
3 comments:
Great Post! Thanks for sharing with all of us!
I'm so thankful for people like Dr. Moore and CM that made me realize early on how important our children's readings are.
I will have to look up these books.
Like you, sometimes I don't feel I have much to share concerning the CM method but I think it's still an encouragement to others when they're able to read about some of our normal daily homeschool. Thanks for sharing your love of living books!
Elisabeth
I enjoyed your post! :) Living books have always been somewhat intuitive for me, too. I didn't even know the idea was associated with Charlotte Mason until about 2 years after we had decided NO TEXTBOOKS :) When I found out that the CM approach was behind all of the living books hoopla, I knew I wanted to learn more. I'm just beginning to really follow Mason's methods, and I have a feeling I'll be learning for a looooong time :) Have a great day!
Jacci
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