::: beautiful books :::

I spent a good portion of my time yesterday preparing for the upcoming school year for Sweetheart (10) and The Baby (6). Since I now have one adult child in college, one adult child leaving for voluntary service next month, and one teenage son attending a brick-and-mortar high school for the first time, I have only two daughters to do homelearning with. We'll be using Ambleside Online again, a free online curriculum that uses the philosophies of Charlotte Mason, an early 20th century educator who taught that education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life, not just a means to getting a job or getting into college, but the formation of character. She produced a series of lectures to help parents understand how children best learn. Ambleside Online uses Mason's philosophies to guide the selection of materials.

Here's what I like about using Ambleside:

• The use of living history books as opposed to textbooks;
• The use of quality pieces of literature;
• The large amount of support and resources available;
• The focus on short lessons;
• The focus on nature study;
• The focus on art and music;
• The fact that the curriculum is free-of-charge, created by mothers who believe in the philosophies of Charlotte Mason;
• The gentle, flexible nature of Mason's approach;
  
• The belief that children are capable of understanding quality literature and beautiful language, that books don't have to be dumbed-down for children to be able to enjoy and learn from them;
• The focus on formation of character;
• The physical beauty of the books themselves.

Over the last few years since we started using Ambleside, I've been on a treasure hunt to find the books suggested in their curriculum, and I've been blessed to find so many of the books we needed for our learning journey. Fortunately for me, a book addict and lover of things vintage, many of the books in the Ambleside curriculum are physically beautiful. I've acquired them by scouring thrift stores, used-book stores, PaperBackSwap, and online booksellers. Many of them I've found for very reasonable prices, while others still elude me because of their limited availability or prohibitive prices.

This year will be the first year that we will have all of the physical books we need for the whole year. In the past, I used what I had found, borrowed some from the library, or used some of the many online books available. Because I've been collecting these books since Sweetheart was in Year One (she's in Year Five this year), and because my friend Kathy, who first introduced me to Ambleside and has always been a source of inspiration to me regarding both parenting specifically and life in general, sent me some essentials a few years ago (hers was the first package I received when we moved from the city to the thicket), and because my friend Marcella gave me the entire Charlotte Mason set, I'm fortunate to own the majority of what I need. Yesterday, I bit the bullet and used my Amazon card to purchase the last few books I didn't have, as well as Teaching Textbooks for Sweetheart. Considering that the registration fee for Monet's school year was more than the cost of all of the books PLUS the math curriculum, I feel pretty good about this year's preparations.

Because we have the majority of the books already, I made our twelve-week schedule (a customized version of one that can be found on one of the many Ambleside Yahoo groups) and we began our readings last night. The girls were attentive and excited. They both love to read, love good literature, and I know they'll be as excited as I'll be to see those books come pouring in through the mail. I'm especially excited for the arrival of Holy Experience blogger Ann Voskamp's A Child's Geography.

And I'll be excited to snuggle up on the bed, reading my old leather-bound copy of Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare and leafing through my olive-green hardbound Botsford's Handbook of Nature Studies, or seeing the girls curled up with the cat and copy of Aesop's Fables or A Child's Garden of Verses.

Here and here are the rest of the books we'll be using.