THE READING ROOM
Useful, honest writing about homeschooling one actual child.
195 articles. Page 6 of 13.
gifted or struggling
Everybody can do the hair. Almost nobody can tell you what the man actually worked out. This book gets closer to that than its cover suggests, and it is honest work in the places w
experiential learning
A dead whale is a sealed container full of bacteria that have not stopped working. Everything else about the opening of this book follows from that one sentence.
experiential learning
Every single fact about a T. rex is an inference. Nobody watched one. That is the idea hiding inside a stolen skull mystery, and it is bigger than the dinosaur.
experiential learning
Nobody steals a koala because koalas are lovely. Somebody steals one because almost nobody on earth can keep one alive, and difficulty is a price.
experiential learning
The truck backs in, the doors come open, and the crate is empty. Everything that happens after that is driven by what a panda is worth, which turns out to be a stranger number than
experiential learning
A big cat gets blamed for a killing it did not do, and the machinery that decides what happens to it next has almost nothing to do with biology.
experiential learning
The horn a poacher will kill a rhinoceros for is keratin. The same material as your fingernails, growing out of a patch of skin. That is most of the tragedy in one sentence.
gifted or struggling
Your nine year old wants funny. You want the reading to be doing something. On most shelves those two want different books, and this is one of the places they stop fighting.
read-alouds
This one is a comedy with a mystery inside it, and the animal content is thinner than the cover promises. Saying that first saves you the disappointment later.
experiential learning
Nobody takes a baby gorilla quietly. An infant lives inside a family that will defend it, and that is the arithmetic sitting underneath this entire book.
experiential learning
A herd of elephants walks onto a lit football field on a Friday night, in front of a full stand. Nobody in the bleachers hears the part that matters.
experiential learning
A man dragging a sledge across Antarctica burns more food in a day than he can carry for a day. Everything else about polar travel comes out of that one sentence.
gifted or struggling
Ash is not smoke and it is not soot. It is rock, milled to powder, and once it lands on the grass the animals that eat the grass are the ones in trouble.
read-alouds
You remember August 2005. Your child does not, and this is a hundred pages with a golden retriever on the cover. Both of those facts matter before you buy it.
experiential learning
Most of San Francisco did not fall down in 1906. It burned, over three days, because the same shove that cracked the buildings cracked the water mains under the street.
experiential learning
Four books in this series put their second world somewhere you cannot get to. This one puts it four inches down in your own yard, and that changes what you can do with it.
