For the Love of Reading

Danny and I feel so blessed in that our children are readers. They devour books. They typically will take a book with them wherever we happen to go in case they have a few spare moments. We have always preferred to buy our books as the children will read them over and over again. Multiple times. We have also included reading aloud as part of our family time on a regular basis. Our criteria: must be excellent and enjoyable for the whole family. Our love for reading has always reflected itself in our curriculum choices. We prefer the literature-rich selctions we find in Beautiful Feet Publishers, our favorite history curriculum, as well as the collection of books offered by Sonlight Publishing, another great curriculum choice.

Recently, we've begun to frequent our local library. Bethany is taking a literature class that requires her to write a report each month, and so off to the library we've gone to see what we could find. Not only have we found what we needed, but we've found some things that we wanted. We recently discovered the Freddy book series, by Walter Brooks. These great books are just fun and funny to read. The Freddy book series consists of 26 books that are centered around talking animals with the main star being Freddy, the pig. Freddy is the consumate pig-he does it all: he oversleeps, overeats, and overreacts. Mr. Brooks wrote his series over the course of about thirty years, from 1927-1958, at which point they were then published. Daniel may be the greatest Freddy fan the library has seen in years!

Bethany is interested in the American Girl series, although tonight she checked out Book One of the Elsie Dinsmore series. We love the Elsie stories, and have two volumes of the Elsie books on Audio CD. She and Daniel both have read the entire Narnia series a number of times. She also loves biographies and books about other countries. Danny and I often wonder what the Lord is going to do with the love that she has for His wide-world.

Tonight, I checked out "Carry On, Mr. Bowditch." This book was a winner of the 1956 Newberry Medal. It's included in many History curriculums I've looked at since we've been homeschooling, so I can't wait to dig in.

There's something satisfying about going to the library. I don't begrudge those who neglect the gift of a good book; I admit, a nice heavy dose of HGTV would do my soul some good every now and then. Somehow, though, I grieve almost when I think about the missed opportunity that can be found only in books; imagining characters, their accents, imagining where they may have lived, what life was like in their era. And then there's the vocabulary of those early times. Oh, there's so much to discover!

As I write, the house is almost completely silent. Other than the sound of the kitty's crunch crunch at her food bowl, you'll hear the swoosh of the turning of another page as two of the cutest faces in the world are stuck behind their book of choice. And so goes the end of another day for our homeschooling family.