We start with the classic book, unabridged, and split it into smaller portions to create small wins! Especially for less confident readers.
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Classic Books Annotated to Teach Life Skills
How do the books work?
1. The Classic Story
2. The Life Skills
Every other story chapter, we insert a skills chapter that matches what the character is doing. For example: In the first chapter Marrilla is knitting, the next chapter includes instructions on how to knit for kids and beginners!
3. The Results
Children and Families who read our books experience a stronger connection with each other, reduced anxiety, and increased confidence and capability!
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What Parents Are Saying
Parents everywhere love using our books to teach their kids life skills, and enjoy classic literature together!
How to Use our Books for Homeschool
Here's an example step-by-step workflow of how we, and many of our readers, use our books to homeschool!
- Overview
- Step One
- Step Two
- Step Three
- Step Four
- Step Five
EXAMPLE WORKFLOW: The Nitty Gritty of Using the Books
Immediate Goal: To help kiddos train their brains to draw connections between stories, life, skills, and learning. To help children learn HOW to learn from books. To connect as a family. To develop old fashioned skills.
Main Goal: The goal with this particular style of learning is to retrain the brain from âschoolâ methods of learning back to how childrenâs brains naturally learn:
1. Curiosity
2. Connections
3. Implementation.
In real life learning, weâll often be talking to a friend, reading a book, watching a movie, going about an everyday task, or experiencing a problem, when we see something that sparks our interest that weâd like to learn more about. Then weâll often research and then try it ourselves.
Examples:
A. Talking to a friend and them mentioning they made bread from scratch, then researching recipes, or requesting hers, and finally trying the recipe yourself.
B. Seeing someone knit a project on TV, then finding videos and instructions on how to knit, and finally knitting your first project.
Now for the Step-by-Step Workflow
Click each tab to view!
Use the table of contents at the beginning of each book to see what is taught. Everything that starts with âHow toâ is a Skills chapter. Take a brief look at those chapters so youâll know whatâs ahead.
Read the book together (starting with a story chapter). As youâre reading, the kiddos can have a notebook in hand ready to jot down anything the characters do or say that sparks their interest that they might want to research later. They could also doodle or draw what is happening in the story.
After reading the story chapter, itâs time to ask questions! Not âtestâ style questions, but conversational questions likeâŠ.
- What was your favorite part about that chapter?
- Was there anything the characters did or say that you thought was interesting?
- Were there any objects or animals that you thought were cool?
- How did they solve the problem they were dealing with in this chapter?
Read the non-fiction/skills portion that corresponds, and voice connections + schedule the activity (opt.)
Example: in Chapter 3 of The Swiss Family Robinson the characters build a raft to get to shore after being shipwrecked. In chapter 4 is instructions from 1931 on different survival rafts and how to build them. Your little one can draw a design of a raft they would build as you discuss the different types, guess which ones would be most useful to the Robinson family etc. Together you can discuss and decide if this is the kind of project theyâd like to try in real life (whether as a miniature or as a full sized project) and if they would, schedule it for the/a weekend.
This gives you a chance to plan, and prepare supplies over the week. It also gives an opportunity to teach kiddos project planning skills as you involve them in the planning process. Sometimes other skills may be added in to that same weekend project as you read. Like having a campfire (Chapter 9) after youâre done building the raft. Or they can research & follow other interests that might have been sparked by the book.
Doing the activity can be exchanged for, or supplemented by, watching a video about it on youtube!
We have some pre-vetted youtube videos that we've watched for you in our Farmhouse Library Membership!