THE READING ROOM
Useful, honest writing about homeschooling one actual child.
195 articles. Page 5 of 13.
experiential learning
Your child thinks a wildfire begins when something catches fire. It begins about ten years earlier, in a wet spring, and that is the one idea this book is well placed to fix.
read-alouds
Every person in this book is wrong about what is killing them. Not foolish. Wrong in a specific, careful, understandable way, and that is the most interesting thing in it.
experiential learning
The bears in this story did not walk out of the woods as monsters. They walked out of a dump that people had been filling for years. That is the science, and a chapter book has the
experiential learning
Read it, then go outside and see whether it was telling the truth. Very few books hand a five year old the means to check them, and this one does.
secular homeschool
Most wolf books are about teeth. This one is about walking, which is what a wolf actually spends its life doing, and that is the unusual thing about it.
read-alouds
Ask a five year old to draw a shark and you will get the same animal every time. This book exists to prove that drawing is one species out of hundreds.
secular homeschool
She is the size of a bottle cap when she goes into the water, and the next time anybody sees her she is decades older and crawling up the same beach she was born on. What happened
experiential learning
Ask any adult why a chameleon changes color and you will almost certainly get the wrong answer. It is one of the most widely believed false facts about any animal. Here is the real
read-alouds
Big numbers do nothing for a small child. This is the picture book that turns the biggest animal on earth into an actual size instead of a figure on a page.
experiential learning
The best thing in this book is not the light bulb. It is the phonograph, because every link in the chain from a voice to a groove in foil and back out again is visible, and a child
experiential learning
Your child will meet two Teslas in their life. One of them built the electrical system your house runs on. The other one is mostly made up, and this book sits closer to the first t
gifted or struggling
Everybody knows what he said on the moon. Almost nobody can tell you what he did in the four minutes before he said it, and that part is the engineering.
read-alouds
Two Nobel Prizes is the part every child gets told. The part worth telling is the shed, the iron rod, the tons of black rock, and the notebooks that are still too radioactive to pi
experiential learning
She was twenty-six, she had no science degree, and she sat in a forest until the animals stopped caring she was there. Then one of them stripped a twig and went fishing for termite
experiential learning
The apple is the part your child will remember. The prism is the part that will teach them what proof looks like, and it is sitting right there in the middle of the book.
read-alouds
The five years at sea are the famous part. The twenty years afterwards are the part that made it science, and they are the reason this particular life is worth a child's afternoon.
