It must be true that the older you get, the more vivid the childhood memories. At this time of year, I can easily recapture all my young feelings and experiences of summer. Can anything equal that delirious thrill of exploding out of the school building doors on that last day of school? Behind me were the confines of the… Read More The Summer Stretch
There is nothing like a library book sale. Half our library consists of books we have gathered from such sales. Emily is a pro, having tactics for unearthing the best books, and our car is inevitably riding lower on the way home. Where we live in the mountains, libraries are small, attendance at sales is sparse, and selection is… Read More What Some People Do for Books
Emily and I bristle when, on a fairly frequent basis, a child in our library informs us that “fiction is fake,” or “I want to read a true book,” though we know that these ideas are not their own, but have been adopted from adults in their lives. All of us speak and believe according to the ideas we… Read More Charlotte Mason On the Reading of Novels
If you can imagine this, when I was a child, a little Golden book cost $0.25. My grandmother used to slip a quarter into her letters to our family for me, and it was a treat to go to the local “dime store”(also a phenomenon of past days) to buy a new book. Along with Christmas and… Read More A Library of Their Own
With the celebration of Mother’s Day, my thoughts naturally turn to my own mother who died a year and a half ago. The gifts a mother gives are impossible to sum up, or gratitude for them properly to e express, and, whatever the shortcomings, inadequacies, or failures our mothers have, it is indisputable that we owe them our life… Read More A Mother’s Gift
When my second daughter was learning to read, she had trouble. She knew her letters and their sounds and could put them together into words but became discouraged and tearful before she finished a line. Her glasses were fine. She wanted to read. I was puzzled. I found out by accident, one day, what the difficulty was: she… Read More Learning to Read
Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping a friend choose books for a comprehensive science curriculum she is writing, a science curriculum depending almost entirely on living books for elementary through middle school. She had been checking out books to preview during her Living Books Library visits and then scouring the internet and public… Read More What’s in a “Living Book,” or, Why We Collect the Books that We Do
Years ago, a friend told me a story that I’ve never forgotten. Her mother was bedridden, in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease, and had a woman who came in to care for her. On several occasions, my friend would arrive to find this woman reading to her mother. She was a horrible reader – stumbling over and mispronouncing… Read More Hey, Will You Read to Me?
A friend of mine just returned from visiting the awe-inspiring New York Public Library last week. Her narration of their exhibits and collection is enough to give me strong pangs of envy. Alas, I must content myself in enjoying that august institution’s treasures vicariously through her exuberant descriptions. Still, though we are tucked away in the basement of a… Read More Library Visitors
Frequently, I am asked by a parent in my library for a book on “character.” They want help in teaching their children about right and wrong, about virtue, about how to know how to make wise choices. Sometimes, they want a book specific to building a certain character trait or overcoming a bad one, such as lying, or selfishness,… Read More Do You Have a Book on Character?