Friday, December 4, 2009

Using Books to Inspire

My latest article is up today over at Heart of the Matter. Here's a snippet to get you interested. It's all about how to use books as inspiration in your school! Using Books to Inspire...


Right now in our school we’ve been studying the Underground Railroad and The Civil War. They started as little “bunny trails” we wanted to follow after having read the Five in a Row book, Follow the Drinking Gourd. My daughter has taken an intense interest in the topic and we decided at a “conference” (my name for getting the kids together for a meeting to help decide the direction we’ll go in our school- they don’t get ultimate decision making power, but I do empower them to help steer us in the direction we should take together) that we’d jump in with both feet discovering all we could about slavery, the events leading up to the war, and the Civil War itself.

As any good homeschooling mother does, I immediately scoured our library system and ordered up many books on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, and the Civil War as I could find or see that would be good reading for the kids. Once they arrived, I picked them up and dutifully began working on a learning display.





...so head on over to read the rest!

7 comments:

My Little Corner said...

Excellent article!
Makes me want to go out and read about the Underground Railroad.

Heather said...

Thanks Sue! We've certainly be enjoying it.

Gail in NY said...

Fantastic Heather! Amazing what we as Moms can be taught by our children if we just give them some tools and encouragement!!

Shonda said...

O.k. my dear, you know I always want more info! I would love to hear more about your Daily Quests. Just to get my creative juices flowing. :)

Shonda said...

Ok, duh! My face is red! I see that you have a whole article on Daily Quests! I think it was when I had the flu, so I missed it! Ugh!

Heather said...

Some folks have asked about what I use for Daily Quests so maybe I'll do a post on that. I'm not sure it would make a good HOTM article.

Also, I should have linked to the article on Daily Quests when I wrote the new article, but I've been sick this week and I had that deadline!

It's sort of an individual choice, but I will think of a bunch and post them.

Oh and if you search daily quest on my blog, you'll get a post about it too.

Fairly local said...

Heather, this is great! I enjoyed reading it.