Reading History

I love books!!! I love reading!!! I truly want to instill the love of reading in my children. Unfortunately, Lionel is not a big reader. He does enjoy it, but he's not a self motivated reader unless it's a magazine or is a book about things that interest him directly...trains, World War 2, etc. We have a house FULL of great books, but he doesn't read on his own 'just for fun' like I do. I believe Sweet-Pea will become a reader as time goes on. She likes books more than Lionel ever did, so I'm hopeful that she will fall in love with reading. Only time will tell.

We have always loved the Beautiful Feet curriculum for our History lessons in school. We have done the following:

• Early American History (x2)
  
• US & World History
• Medieval History (x2)
  
• History of Horses

This particular curriculum combines classic literature with history which enables you to learn while enjoying great books. It's the 'living book' approach to learning. This year, Lionel decided that reading a lot of books was not going to be fun, so we decided to change to Bob Jones for his 10th grade World History class. It's working out well and we love the curriculum, but it's so different...more like a public school textbook, but that's more like his learning style, so it's a good thing.

Sweet-Pea is using Beautiful Feet once again and we love it. The Study Guide I chose to do this year, "Teaching Character through Literature", is not necessarily filled with historical events and facts even though it's her 'history' class. . We did the History of Horses curriculum last year because she loves horses so much and wanted to learn all about them. It was a tough class for her but she learned quite a bit!! We are taking it 'easy' this year though and are enjoying every minute of it. We have read many books so far...mostly simple elementary level books, but they are so sweet and full of life lessons. A few books we've read are:

• The Time of Wonder - McCloskey
• The Runaway Bunny - Brown
• Boys and Girls of Colonial Days - Bailey
• The Clown of God - dePaola
• Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge - Fox
• Rachel and Obadiah - Turkle
• When I Was Young in the Mountains - Rylant
• Miss Rumphius - Cooney
• The Library - Stewart
• Brave Irene - Steig

The study guide that comes with the curriculum gives you Bible verses and life applications to apply to each lesson, and I love that. We are moving quickly through this book and I know I'll have to supplement with other books later on this year, but they do give a huge reading list of other books to read. I highly recommend this company and their study guides/literature packs. Beautiful Feet has been fun, and I look forward to reading all the books I read with Lionel once again as Sweet-Pea gets older.