| Our family are book lovers who have learned | | | | Rather than forming your own personalized plan, |
| together for over 10 years. The foundation of our | | | | another idea is to just pick one of the many |
| education curriculum is the reading of good books | | | | published plans and ignore the others. Some of the |
| coupled with thorough mathematics. We focus on | | | | plans we recommend are from Sonlight, Veritas |
| reading good, classic, "living books" rather than a | | | | Press, and Robinson Curriculum. Another solution is to |
| textbook or workbook approach. Over the years, | | | | use one of several book guides that help categorize |
| we've found many recommendation lists. All suggest | | | | books. These include Honey for a Child's Heart, The |
| many quality books for each age level, all focusing on | | | | Book Tree, All Through The Ages, and Invitation to |
| various historical periods or other broad themes. | | | | the Classics. These are flexible and helpful but still |
| A wonderful problem exists for teachers - there's | | | | require a lot of page turning, indexing, and offer no |
| too much good material to teach! As we were | | | | direct online access to book vendors or libraries that |
| confronted with a dozen or more solid reading-based | | | | can help quickly determine what is available at a |
| plans, each recommending hundreds of books, | | | | reasonable cost. |
| choosing what few books to read each year became | | | | The best solution is an online book list that can be |
| a fun, but difficult, problem. We would see what | | | | easily searched and sorted by different criteria of |
| books the various lists had in common for a given | | | | reading level, historical era, type, price, etc. There are |
| reading level, what we could find affordably online, | | | | many online lists, though most are static lists you |
| and what we could find at the library. We'd narrow | | | | cannot easily search or sort. Many bloggers maintain |
| down further based on the type of work - classic | | | | lists of favorite books. Several sites provide more |
| literature vs. biographies vs. general narratives, etc. | | | | powerful search and sort capabilities. One popular |
| and then the historical period the book covered - | | | | example is Library Thing, tagging books for various |
| ancient vs. middle ages vs. modern, etc. In this way, | | | | categories. Another powerful site is Every Good |
| we planned very personalized, interesting reading. | | | | Book providing searching and sorting of classic books, |
| This is a difficult yet rewarding process. It works but | | | | based on the book's time period, type, reading level, |
| there are other helpful methods. | | | | popularity, and even cost. |