The Great Homeschool Convention

We are excited to announce that Rea will be speaking at the Great Homeschool Convention in Ontario, California, June 12-14. Session topics will be announced soon, but this is a great opportunity to meet fellow homeschoolers, be inspired by great speakers, and thumb through curriculum. BFB will have a booth there so you'll can swing on by and say hi, ask questions, browse books, and talk to other BFB users. To attend, register here.

The GHC will also be Greenville, Cincinnati, and Texas. You can register for any of the locations by clicking here. For every registration processed through that link, $5.00 will be donated to the Patty Pollatos Fund for Brent Blickenstaff.

Back to the Beginning: OK, now I have a huge pile of books? What should I do with it?

Welcome back to our brief synopsis of BFB history. If you missed the first part, you can read it here. Inspired by the writings of Susan Schaeffer Macaulay and the ideas of Charlotte Mason, Rea set about building a library. As a child I remember boxes of books arriving regularly and I knew this was special. Each box held multiple worlds and ideas and new experiences. We also made regular trips to the library where caring librarians help us find dusty treasures that had been sitting for far too long in forgotten corners. Each time we left the library we all had checked out our limit and with four children, that was lot of books.
As my siblings and I got older our homeschooling adventure naturally shifted from lots of informal reading time to a more structured form. Frustrated by the dreariness that marked so many of the history textbooks available,  Mom began formulating our history and English curriculums around the books we were reading. We learned about American history through biographies on Abraham Lincoln, old collections of Pilgrim stories, first hand accounts of encounters with George Washington, and harrowing recollections of Revolutionary War soldiers. Living in California offered great opportunities to delve into the history of the Wild West and we read about gold miners seeking their fortunes, the doomed Donner Party expedition, the great San Francisco earthquake, Buffalo Bill and his traveling spectacular. It was exciting. History was the stories of real people just like us! By reading biographies, historical fiction, award-winning literature, and first-hand accounts, we were being given the gift of a legacy. History became personal and relevant. It was not just a collection of facts consisting of names and dates. It was "our" story, it told us why we were here. That is the beauty and importance of history. It is not necessarily the dates and facts that are of most importance. It's the reasons behind the stories that give our lives meaning and help us understand who we are. I have never heard of a child not wanting to hear stories of her parents and grandparents childhoods and that is simply because as humans we long for connection and placement. And yet, so many children's natural curiosity for what came before them is squelched when they're given a history textbook. It may provide all the facts but no matter how well-written, it cannot provide the narrative that we long for as human beings. Story does that.
So we were immersing ourselves in story and as anyone who knows my mom can attest, when Mom is excited about something, she's evangelical. Her friends rarely left our home without a book loan, she had a book recommendation for everything. As a child, I was sure that birthday party invitations would soon dry up because we were arrived with our tell-tale flat, square gifts!
Mom faced a couple of challenges in her pursuit of the best books. The first was that this was in the early 1980s so there was no access to the internet and finding some of the more obscure titles required hours of research and lots of phone calls to book finding services. Secondly, we lived in a tiny little gold-mining town and did not have access to vast libraries or other resources. Mom decided the best way to ensure that her friends all had access to these books, was to start selling them herself. She applied for a business license and soon the UPS man was making daily deliveries and boxes of books were taking over an entire room in our home.
Now all my mom's friends and fellow homeschoolers had easy access to the books that were making history come alive, but now what? It was great to have a wonderful library, but people craved a bit more structure. While she was teaching us, Mom had been putting together study notes, reading assignments, discussion topics and unwittingly creating a history curriculum entirely based on literature. As we got a bit older, Mom and her other homeschooling friends starting doing co-op classes and guess who always taught history? As their children became excited about history, these happy parents began asking for Mom's study notes. And so she typed them up on a typewriter and made photocopies. I distinctly remember this point in my childhood because we were making lots of trips to the little printing store around the corner from our house.
These hand-typed study notes became the basis for Beautiful Feet Books' History Through Literature curriculums. Soon enough there was a growing demand from parents seeking to switch from textbooks, or others who loved literature but wanted a guide for using these wonderful books as a history curriculum. The typewriter was traded in for one of those original Apple Macintosh computers and homeschooling time now included lessons in running a small business! Lessons like how to take inventory, how to collate the printed study note pages and bind them in a plastic binders, how to check in arriving shipments and politely take an order. And as the homeschooling movement grew from those early days, so did BFB. Conventions and speaking engagements soon followed as people latched on to this new approach that harkened back to a long storytelling tradition we had lost sight of in our educational approaches.

BFB now sells over a dozen history study guides covering everything from ancient to modern history, geography, literature, and more. Tomorrow, I will finish up this history by sharing the story of the first book we published.  If you have any questions relating to the history of BFB, please feel free to ask!

And don't forget, the special promotion expires tomorrow! FREE STUDY GUIDE DOWNLOAD with a $75.00 purchase. Simply enter "blogpro" at checkout and the cost of the study guide ($15.95) will be deducted from your purchase. 

Product Feature: The Revised and Expanded Early American History for Grades K-3

We are really excited about the changes in this study guide. A long-time best seller and many people's introduction to teaching history using literature, Early American History, A Literature Approach for grades K-3 was one of our very first study guides! In this new edition we have added two wonderful books, cut out a resource, expanded the lesson content, added helpful and fun links to websites, and more! The guide is also now in full-color with informational pictures, diagrams, poems, historic artwork and illustrations.

Three major changes were the elimination of America's Providential History, a costly resource that many parents did not use and of which only twenty pages were referred to in the study guide. By cutting this out, we simplified the program and ensured that all books were age-appropriate. We were able to add two titles, recently republished by BFB: Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin by Marguerite Henry and The Year of the Horseless Carriage 1801 by Genevieve Foster. We believe the addition of these two titles adds a further richness to the study as well as fills some gaps that existed in the previous version. 

Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin tells the inspiring story of America's first great artist, a young Quaker who comes of age with the young country. As a Quaker youth, Benjamin was prohibited from painting but his parents eventually saw that his talents were a gift. As a painter, West had a unique vantage point from which to record the history of his lifetime. The most powerful people in the world sat and had their portraits done by him. It is from his portraits that we know what Paul Revere, King George, and others looked like. We're sure your children will enjoy the story of West's childhood adventures with Grimalkin!

We have been Genevieve Foster fans for a long time and are thrilled to be able to bring back into print one of her lesser-known titles. The Year of the Horseless Carriage 1801 explores the dynamic events at the turn of the 19th century. Students will read about Napoleon's march across Europe, Jefferson's many pursuits, Dr. Livingston's explorations of Africa, Sacajawea and Lewis and Clark pushing past the known frontiers of the American West, Dolley Madison's feisty personality as she carved a place for herself in the White House. Complete with Foster's lovely illustrations, this book expands the historical and geographical reaches of the previous edition of the study guide. 

With 107 lessons, this guide may be completed in one year if three lessons are completed each week. This is usually appropriate for students in 2nd and 3rd grade but we recommend taking it a bit more slowly with younger students. Feel free to stretch it out and make it last for two years if you have a kindergartener or 1st grader, or are working with students at multiple levels. There are lessons with discussion topics, writing assignments, activity ideas, and much more. As with all of our guides, they're set up to be just that, guides! We know that each family has a different academic approach and each child learns at a different pace and in diverse ways. This information is there for your use, to best serve your students and family. The hardcopy version is available for $17.95 and the instant download is available for $15.95.

Please feel free to leave comments or questions. We'd love to hear from you if you've done the study. What are your thoughts? And if you're enjoying these entries, please share them with your friends. Thanks for reading!