Living Books
Living Books
I never really understood the value of living books until I started homeschooling. I had two bookoholic friends who kept giving me recommendations, and as a new homeschooler, I was listening.
My bookcases started growing. My taste for books changed. I began to exercise some discernment in the type of books I bought. Glossed up textbooks were less tempting. I saw through the eye-catching graphics and bite sized information compiled by a team of experts. I was looking for more quality in the content that I read to my children. I wanted them to learn and love their books, to thirst for good books. I wanted their books to be delicious, captivating, brain and soul food, pure pleasure!
To strictly classify a living book is difficult for what excites you may be very boring for me. I am sure you can remember a time someone handed you a ‘must read’ book and as you struggled through each page you wondered what was all the fuss about.
Living books have something special about them. They flow, they capture the imagination, they tell us the facts while they give us the story. A living book is written by a passionate author (not a committee) who communicates this passion to the reader in a literary language.
In Australia we have some fine living literature. And one of the core values of Downunder Literature, is to help homeschoolers find Australian and New Zealand living books. So we have poured our energy into this. Three living books that we have just republished and had updated are The Wonderland of Nature , Our Sunburnt Country and Crowns of Fire.
Living books can be used as living textbooks. They are perfect starters for unit studies. We also have a literature based unit study based on living picture books called Australian Book Traveller
Our Downunder Copywork is full of quotes from living books with content about and from Australia. Our Australia literature links will show you even more living books.
We didn’t choose these books from Australia just because they were something new, but rather they were already highly sought after in the homeschooling community of Australia.
Why not check out our Booklist Index.