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.

Do you have one of these in your home? I’ve seen many versions. For some it’s the coffee table or a hutch. A place under the window or maybe a piece of furniture in the dining room. I searched for years for the perfect spot. I tried baskets and trays. Finally, a place called out to me. There is an old oak child’s dresser from my husband’s childhood home (and his mother’s as well) that stands behind our dining room table and it has a table runner on top. It is a relatively undisturbed flat surface in our house. We don’t have too many of those and the fact it that is largely undisturbed by our four children makes it the best place in the house to set up the learning display for the week.

The learning display is where I will set up books that go with our unit study. I can put out artifacts or other clues to what our adventures will be for the week. I put up related work there and showcase our current study in a variety of ways.

The kids know they are always welcome to visit the books there and enjoy them. I generally don’t specifically assign them a book from there though sometimes I do encourage them to find a book they like and to look through it. Sometimes I assign a Daily Quest that requires a child to find information there – either in a book or in some other medium as part of the display.

Perhaps some of you already do this, but do not see the fruit that comes from it. Maybe you’ve tried it before and find it difficult to maintain. Or maybe you don’t see your kids using it at all. If this is you, I encourage you to keep trying! I learned long ago that my very “hands on” daughter would see a book on the coffee table that would catch her eye and before long she’d be engrossed. Not only did I see her reading a lot, but she would share what she was reading with great enthusiasm.

That’s when I decided to really use this and work on providing a variety of books and artifacts at the learning display. Is it worth it? As soon my daughter, who is 9, requested to learn more about the Underground Railroad and I provided the books and other items, she started plowing through them and so did my oldest son who is 11. Literally, the two of them have read at least a half a dozen books each on the topic of slavery and the Underground Railroad and the Civil War as well as the biographies of significant people of the time. Does it make a difference? Let’s see. My daughter has been part of a puppetry class at our homeschool co-op this past semester and she made many puppets and wrote just as many puppet play scripts. One of them was about Harriet Tubman- a beautifully written short play about a slave boy who is helped by Moses- the mysterious person who helps slaves to freedom. Her puppet, which she constructed from paper mache, bears the likeness of its name sake. The play was written to portray the character trait of courage.

As my kids read more and more about the topic, I felt myself worrying about them getting ahead of our studies. If they read all about it at the pace they choose, then what will be left to discover during our studies. As I began to get more into our unit, I realized that the prior knowledge my students now held about the Civil War and the events leading up to it, only enhanced our activities as we went along. There was genuine discourse about what they had read as we worked together on an assignment- for example recently an article for a collaborative “newspaper” we are putting together.

Yesterday, as we were working on the articles for the Camp Kettle newspaper we are doing as part of the unit, my daughter was telling me all sorts of facts. For instance, slaves were starved so they wouldn’t run away. To which my 11 year old commented he thought the slave owners were wrong because it made them want to runaway more. I replied that the idea didn’t work out for the owners and my daughter agreed saying it was one of the things that backfired on the slave owners because it made the slaves try harder to get away. She has a very astute observation about the times back then and was able to do the ad on the page about a reward for runaway slaves. She said one reason that they wanted to do a sign with written names instead of pictures is because the slaves couldn’t read and wouldn’t know when they had been noticed. She was putting descriptions on the sign and said she listed fat because that was a very unusual marking for a slave because they were all very thin.

All the insight she has gained has come from books I’ve left around as available to read! When I think I let them read too much and there will be little left to learn, I remind myself (as a former public school teacher) that this notion of knowing too much about a subject is really a school teacher fear! To the contrary it is fun to talk about these things as we do the activities and learn more about the war. Yesterday we had quite a little discussion on how Harriet Tubman felt about President Lincoln and how she thought he wasn’t doing enough to end slavery. Meanwhile, Lincoln was working on unity and not having the south form a new nation where he would have no control over the issue of slavery. Had the south done that, slavery would not have ended. It was an interesting little debate and I think what made it so in my mind is that I was not having this discussion with my high schoolers but rather my 4th and 6th grade kids who had done little more than read books about a topic they wanted to know more about.

I’m often curious when I see the one to three paragraphs that tell the bare minimum of facts about a person or topic and that are followed by a handful of questions to make sure the student read it right. They are readily available to classroom and home educators alike and my guess is they are used more often than not. This would be a dreadful task for my daughter, but the stack full of real books about a person’s life and times that she could choose and read at her leisure based on a topic she told me she wanted to know more about was a delight! Which begs the question, why do we sometimes settle for less?

Providing a learning environment that is print rich- in all its forms be it fiction, non-fiction, picture book, chapter book, a set of flash cards, an internet site whatever it might be – just might delight your children. Take the opportunity to listen to their interests and just make it available. At first they might need active encouragement that leads them there (like a Daily Quest or a Scavenger Hunt), but once they get there, they will go back again and again.

And then you will see the difference it can make! Perhaps it will be your kids debating the merits of Lincoln’s Presidency at the dinner table one night. All because of an inspiring book.

Heather Woodie is a homeschooling mom of four kids ages 10, 8, 6, 3 and wife to a handsome chemical engineer for 13 years. Before raising a family, she taught middle school science and has a masters degree in curriculum and instruction secondary education. Now teaching at home means the chance to provide the extraordinary for her children. Between family and homeschooling time, she is working as volunteer staff for MOPS International as an Area Coordinator for NY State. She’s been homeschooling four years and you can read about those adventures on her blog, Blog She Wrote.

Related posts:

1. Teaching the Books of the Bible When I was a child, I learned the books of the Bible in the Christian...
2. How to Painlessly Add More Books to Your Reading Schedule “So many books… so little time” is a common refrain among bibliophile homeschoolers. Laundry has...
3. Finding Great Books Literature is a major aspect of our homeschool. We easily spend 2 or more hours...
4. The Forgotten Daughter Book Action, adventure, hardship, romance, forgiveness, triumph, politics, scandal..you would think those words were describing the...