Tag Archives: school

Nature Anatomy: The Curious Parts & Pieces of the Natural World, and a Giveaway!


“How many ways do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”

The find of the year (so far) for me is this piece of glory from Julia Rothman called Nature Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of the Natural World.  The entire thing is the what makes me love to homeschool (and I needed a new boost in loving that lately).  The book is fabulous, and everything one could wish for in a “textbook.”

First, it’s chock full of interesting facts covering various areas of geology, botany, biology, meteorology and astronomy.  In being such a broad book, do we turn up our noses claiming it can’t offer depth in any one area? Sure. You may look down if you like. But what it DOES offer is so beautifully presented and academically enriching that you’d be missing something great by choosing a dry science book over this one.

And then there are the illustrations. Folksy, detailed, handwoven with love and care and interest.  My goodness, I’m in love!

This author is the same one who brought us Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life a few years ago. It had raving reviews but it was brand new to me this year.  I figured that I didn’t have a whole heckuva lot of interest in farm life on a technical scale so what would I get out of it?!  Little did I know that I’d lovingly turn each page in this too, admiring the art and the information each page provided.

Both books would be phenomenal springboards for deeper studies into any one area.  Nature Anatomy especially is such a breath of fresh air in this home.

I have the highly lauded (in Charlotte Mason circles anyway) Handbook of Nature Study and while the information in that is excellent, the photos are in greyscale and limited by their time period. And much to my ever-burning shame, it doesn’t get used nearly so much as I had planned. I’d like to think of this new Nature Anatomy filling in the gap in some way as being something fresh, useful, beautiful and worthy to include in our morning basket studies a few times a week. A must have in my opinion… you can virtually browse through it here.

I’m so in love with this book that I’m going to send it to one lucky person during this upcoming Easter season. I don’t know how I’ll choose a winner, but it’ll be non-scientifically random of course. If you have read through this post and are interested in receiving the book, just post a comment about something, anything, I don’t care— by Divine Mercy Sunday.  That day is my birthday and it would give me great delight to share the gift of this book with someone!

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Electric Ben!!!

Yes, we’ve transitioned into Springtime and yes, it’s Easter and I missed out on blabbing all about my favorite Easter books because I tried to really limit my computer time during Lent.  I’ve been itching to share some goodies discovered and biblio-thoughts that have marinated over those 40 days but first I want to tell you all about Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin before I forget.

Benjamin Franklin is absolutely the BEST character for Revolutionary Era picture books.  His unique background and personality and lifetime accomplishments make him ripe for the memorializing… and there have been many books written about him.  So when I noticed a brand new one out by Robert Byrd, I was mildly surprised that publishers would consider any more books on Franklin. I mean, he’s not exactly a novelty in the picture book world and I wasn’t convinced an author could offer us anything fresh about the man.


Byrd has proved me wrong.  His book is absolutely a new essential for Franklinophiles and for students studying the birth of our nation (or electricity, or fireplaces, or printmaking, etc…).  The book is best suited for maybe ages 9 and up. It’s wordy and fascinating and the pictures, though quite well done are fairly small for the most part. The book is the epitome of a living book. It could honestly be a starting spine for an entire Revolutionary era study and use all the fascinating bits of Franklin’s life as jumping off points for other things. He covers science, the economy, politics, nation building, farming, weather… truly Franklin’s was a universal mind.

To be fair, there a number of excellent Ben Franklin books out there. We absolutely LOVE our How Ben Franklin Stole the Lightning for example. And the never disappointing D’Aulaire’s Benjamin Franklin is also on our bookshelf. But there was just something really special about Byrd’s new book. It was so thorough! Just so well done all around! So, take that for what it’s worth. But Benjamin Franklin is the quintessential American and if it seems random to praise his books on Easter Monday, so be it.

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An Education in Pictures

As it’s not in the scope of this blog to discuss homeschooling philosophies, I wanted to give just a glimpse at our upcoming year in a picture.  Our education is based on good, living books, and that’s largely what you see here.  I’m showing you a picture of our spine, not the myriad of supplemental picture and chapter books, copybooks or online resources that reinforce all that we are learning (especially with art, science, music, history, religion and poetry). Plus there’s a lot of overlap between these years as we’ll be doing much of this reading together.  I also haven’t put in the math for my 4th grader yet; can’t seem to win any auctions on e-bay for Teaching Textbooks 5!  As it is, while I love designing curriculum, I am becoming more and more of a Charlotte Mason purist. This is mostly for two reasons: when the rubber meets the road, you have to abandon your glorious ideals on a pedestal and do what works for your own family; also, the methods of a true Charlotte Mason education are incompatible with having a diverse plan of attack (e.g. There’s no sense in insisting on copywork if you are also forcing the child to do spelling sheets, handwriting workbooks and grammar lessons too.)  So while homeschoolers can certainly have a “Charlotte Mason flavor” to their curriculum… I sort of feel like the “atmosphere, discipline and life” is an all or nothing approach, at least for our purposes. So, just for novelty’s sake I present parts of the 2012/2013 year (beginning in August!) for my boys:

Kindergarten:

3rd Grade:

4th Grade:

“Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.” 
-Charlotte Mason 


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Owls and more

This is the latest thrift store cache, a smallish but respectable lot.  First is a nice, sturdy hardback of the winter classic, Owl Moon, which I bought to replace my raggedy paperback copy.  Next to that you see a mint condition copy of Sector 7 from that wordless master, David Wiesner.  I am so happy to add that to my bookshelf!  Then we add to our Tomie de Paola collection with Strega Nona Meets Her Match.  Underneath you see a really novel book that is excellent to leave lying about near the breakfast table for the children to “discover.”  It’s called: Nature Got There First: Inventions Inspired by Nature.  But the real treasure Goodwill had to offer me was this book on bottom left called Owls by Tony Angell.  It is fascinating.  This is truly what a living book is all about.

Tony Angell is a naturalist and an artist and he writes and draws about eighteen different owl species with superb realism and from his own first hand experiences. (Read this lovely article on him here.) I never really thought much about owls, but they are a fascinating part of the bird family and this book is just the hook to draw someone in.  I also discovered that Angell is actually from this area and he has several public sculptures around the Puget Sound that I hope to see at some point.  The book is published through the University of Washington so it’s not a big mainstream seller, but it’s absolutely worth keeping an eye out for!

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Thrifting Swoon/On Challenging Your Children

I went to the Goodwill yesterday saying a little prayer as I went in that there would be some decent pants in the sizes of my two middle sons… they are in desperate need of some fresh knees to rip through.

No such luck. God, in His infinite goodness, did not allow such a mercy. But He did allow me to find a book that has been on my want list for a very, very long time:

Pagooby Holling C. Holling is the very first living science book that I read aloud to my children when my oldest was six years old. It was a very surprising hit. Kind of like how I was shocked when my six year old requested that we read Pinocchio (the original version) where the language is archaic and challenging, but they loved it! Children really ought to get their ears trained to hearing excellent vocabulary though. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they always need to be talked (read) down to. They will rise to the challenge. And when I taught myself to read at age four, whenever I came across words I didn’t know, I just sort of ignored them until they slowly came to meaning based on context. That’s how readers and writers are born. They get challenged with the words in their natural setting which they are exposed to often. If you yourself are uncomfortable with reading challenging books with your children, get the audio version! Play it in the car where they can’t escape the words which might ordinarily make them disinterested only because they are unfamiliar…

But I digress, I think if I were to read Pagoo again with their ages now (9, 7, 5), it would be even more popular. As it is, Holling C. Holling books are one of the more superior options you have in teachable stories. I mean, a lot, lot, lot of picture books really double as educational too… but these are something special. Each one is a perfect science or geography lesson in and of itself with a story wrapped up in it. And the art, which is usually a color spread on every other page, and more nature-journal black and white sketches with captions in between… is super. Do not expect a typical 15 minute story however, they are fairly dense. We spread our reading of it out over a week.

Pagoo is about the life of a hermit crab. We learned all about tidal creatures, life cycles of hermit crabs and fun little facts here and there. It was really easy to make it come alive for them when we went to the aquarium and could see real hermit crabs up close… and then I reinforced it with buying this excellent little companionfor our toy animal bin too.

Other books we’ve purchased (albeit full price) from this author are Minn of the Mississippiand Paddle-to-the-Seawhich we began reading when we studied the beginnings of European explorers in Canada last year. Excellent, excellent books. And who really needs pants when you have books?

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(Theoretical) Library Pick of the Week


This is theoretical because we’ve not actually checked this book out. It was on our holds queue and I was devastated when I couldn’t pick it up. Truth be told, we are currently blocked from the county library system. Apparently they don’t tolerate a $40 bill. See, when your library charges 25 cents/day/book for overdue items, this really, really adds up when you are checking out 30-40 books at a time. Now, there is no excuse really, we live within walking distance to our local library. But the trouble is when we “lose” a book (it’s under a mattress or behind the piano) and another user has holds on it, it is unable to be renewed… and accrues late fees. Couple that with an unfortunate incident involving a wiggly boy, a large glass of water and a $20 book, and your account quickly goes into the delinquent status. (As I type we are racking up fees for one errant book: Babar Visits Another Planet— because it is unable to be renewed since our account is delinquent and it is nowhere to be found) Meanwhile, the library keeps sending me notices that I have holds to be picked up which agonize me that I can’t pick up until our account is paid off–maybe next payday. But I digress.

I am certain that A Butterfly Is Patientis a fantastic book in the same vein as this author’s other two mentioned books here: An Egg Is Quietand A Seed Is Sleepy. I loved how the other two books wove readers into a spell of story and science and found the illustrations and prose delightfully engaging… these would certainly be worthwhile books to invest in full price for both the sake of its beauty and its academic merit. A Butterfly is Patient was released this May and after a 30 second perusal at a small bookstore on the Oregon Coast, I was convinced it merited mention even if I’ve not read it in its entirety yet. So look for it and its predecessors as soon as you’re in the mood for delight!

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World History in 284 Pages

This was going to be called “Library Pick of the Week” since it really is my pick of the week but it deserves more gravitas than that and I plan on buying it before next fall. E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the Worldis superb. This book will be our spine for history studies for the next few years. Some compare it to Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the Worldin that both tell history from the narrative style for what it is: a story. I have considered using SOTW for our history with the kids many times, but for some reason it never “felt” perfect (Yes I confess; she who praises logic and reason so often resorts to plain old gut feelings.) for our particular family, though it may be a great fit for others. Perhaps it’s the rumors that after the first or second volume there are inaccuracies and blatant biases against Catholic history. Perhaps it’s the daunting activity books or other curricula-like materials that accompany the text. I don’t know. I just know that I never appreciated history as a child and I want to avoid that for my kids. History is so fascinating! And when it’s told in an interesting, NON-textbook way, I think even the most school-weary child can’t help but be drawn in.

That’s what A Little History of the World offers. It’s a story (not a curriculum), told in a brilliant, engaging, child-friendly way. Gombrich was an Austrian man and history (from Ancient Egypt up through World War II) is written from that perspective. (He also has The Story of Art which I’m eager to explore too.) Yet, even if it’s never read to children (I’d say age 7 is a great start), adults will be able to appreciate it. I think it’s an ideal approach for our purposes as I plan on teaching history next year using many, many living books. There is so much history to be told that every single “plan” and textbook in the world will have gaps. As a homeschooling mother, this gives me great peace knowing that ALL education models–public, private, or home– contain gaps; there is simply no way to learn all there is to know about human history. So using Connecting with History (about which I’m very excited!) as our guide to books and activities, we’ll also bring in Gombrich’s book as the central overview of any period we may be studying prior to exploring all the tangents and trails that interest us during that time. I also learned that there is a Little History of the World on CD!!!which I think could be a great alternative for some people who want to listen to it in the car or who want to let their children listen to the chapter while Mama is doing dishes or helping Billy-Bob with Calculus.

*Disclaimer: the very first chapter in this book talks with primitive man and Neanderthal-types. I’m quite comfortable with my own theories of evolution but if this topic offends you, it is a chapter easily skipped and certainly should not act as a deterrent to the rest of the book!

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. “-Ursula K. LeGuin
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