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The following question was posted in comments in my posts titled
"My Father's World - A Brief Curriculum Review and How We Used It - Part 3"
As I was replying to this post I decided it would be better for others if I posted the reply as a blog post. I hope that you find some helpful information here.
Question :
Thank you for your reviews. I am considering purchasing this curriculum. My only hesitation is that I am limited in "book basket" selection. I noticed that you had a list of books that you have added to this year's curriculum. Do you have a list for Creation to the Greeks? I would be very interested in seeing that. Also, we have never used lapbooks before, but I am interested. Do you have any that you reccomend for this study?
Thank you so much for your help,
Lori Clark
Reply:
Hi Lori,
Thanks so much for your comments. I'm happy to know that my review has been of help to you, and am glad to answer your questions. I'm always happy to share how we have used a curriculum or book. We don't always follow the curriculum to the letter, but rather we make it our own by making adjustments that will better suit our family.
First let me say that the Book Basket list of books is not at all set in stone. The TM does provide a good list of supplemental books for almost every week of the study, and these books are for the kids to read or look at on their own. They are intended to enhance what you are teaching through the curriculum, but they are not required. The intent of the list (and the Book Basket) is to give you some extra resources (that you can find in your local library) to put in the hands of your children for further study or enjoyment. You could very easily teach the curriculum and never have a book basket.
I didn't stock my book basket every week. Sometimes the kids had other things they were interested in spending their time doing or reading about, so I didn't force the book basket every week. There were some weeks that I felt it was necessary to stock the book basket and encourage them to look through the books. If I couldn't find the titles that were listed in the TM I would substitute with books that our library had pertaining to the same topic (which is what MFW suggests you do). It only took a little time in the library to quickly review the books they had in the Juvenile section for me to choose books that I thought were appropriate. Our library's catalog is available for search online, so I would do my searches for book titles suggested in the TM from my home computer. That enabled me to be prepared when I got the library. For that school year I only purchased the books that were listed in MFW's catalog for the curriculum. I didn't purchase any additional books for CTG. I did however purchase additional books for the upcoming school year with the RTR study. I had a little extra money, and had actually done more research into what we would be studying for that year so that I would know what types of books would be good additions. For your concerns about the book basket I would make two suggestions:
1. Go to MFW's website ( My Father's World ) and click on "View PDF Sample Lesson". In that document you will find an overview of what will be studied for each of the 34 weeks of study. This would give you a starting point for searching your library for books that could be used for the book basket. By doing this you will get a better idea of what books your library has that would be appropriate substitutions should the books MFW recommends not be available. And / Or.....
2. Once you purchase the TM make a list of books for each week that you think are *must have books* for your book basket and ask your library to buy them. MFW has marked the books they most highly recommend with an asterisk ( * ). If you chose only those books to ask your library to purchase that would be a great start. I have been fortunate to have my library purchase several books that we wanted to go along with our study, and many libraries are glad to do that for homeschoolers since many of the books homeschoolers use could be used by school teachers for their classrooms as well.
As for the lapbooks, there are several great companies out there that have great lapbooks. Here are some links to some of my favorite companies that sell lapbooks: Hands & Hearts , Knowledge Box Central, In the Hands of a Child, Live & Learn Press, and you can find lots of lapbooks at Homeschool E-Store. When I use a lapbook I don't always use every activity, nor do I lay out the completed activities in a file folder as most lapbooks are done. I often choose the ones that I think are most important to our study to pull out for the kids to work on for their notebooks. They paste their lapbook activities to card stock, slip them into sheet protectors, and place them in their notebooks. You can always offer the remainder of the lapbook activities for them to work on outside of school time if they are interested, or you can do the entire lapbook for school. It's a very flexible type of activity.
We used several activities from the "Ancient Greece Games" lapbook by Knowledge Box Central when we were studying Greece at the end of the year. We also did some activities from the "Human Heart (Basic) Lapbook" by Knowledge Box Central when we briefly talked about the human body in science (you will do a thorough human body study in RTR the following year). We did more study on this than the curriculum had planned because the kids were really interested in learning more about it. I thought at first that with such a thorough study of the human body coming up next year that we shouldn't have done more study than the CTG curriculum had planned, but now that we have done it I'm glad we did. I think it will give them a greater understanding of what we will study next year and since they were interested and wanted to do more I think they have learned from it, and that's always a plus! We did the same thing with astronomy when we briefly studied that topic in science...we did more than the curriculum had planned. I had on hand the Apologia book "Exploring Creation with Astronomy" by Jeannie K. Fulbright, so we did a little reading from that book and used a few lapbook activities from "The Moon" by In the Hands of a Child. I also used some of the notebooking pages from Jeannie Fulbright.
So, as you can see we made this study our own by branching off here and there, and adding addtional things of interest. I hope that I've answered all of your questions thoroughly. If I can help in any other way please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.
Blessings!
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