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!