Another thing I love about homeschooling is the liberty to choose the books that we will read for the whole year. Ironically, this is the very same reason I am having a hard time choosing the books for the year. There is just too many choices. I just feel blessed that the homeschooling provider I selected for our homeschooling journey always assists us with everything we need every step of the day.
I have books that I bought in 2022 that we are still reading up till now. The living books recommended to us that are Charlotte Mason approved are mostly for Form I (Grades 1 thru 3). That buys me a lot of time before I would need to buy new books for some of our subjects. There are books that I found through our online resources.
I am not very fond of ebooks. If the reading won't be too long, I'm fine with it. But books that take a long time reading strains my eyes when it's on ebook form. I may be old school but I also love the feel of the paper rustling in my hands, the smell of the ink and the paper, especially on old books, sometimes on new books, actually on any books to be honest.
Since it's a lot cheaper to print out the book myself, I went ahead and had my husband buy us a better printer. Do not buy HP printers. Epson is the way to go. I have learned a lot about printing over the course of 2 years. Me. A total technophobe. I learned how to print back to back, I learned to print on small and big pages.
After printing the pages, the next step would be to bind the pages. I went to a trade school in high school where we study different trades. We had a subject, I forgot what it was called, but we did bookbinding as one of our projects. It was really cool. I made a small tiny hard bound book with onion skin paper pages. We even made some inscriptions on the book cover. I still remember the process we did there, though I couldn't recreate everything, I just made do with all the materials that I have in hand right now. All I had was glue, some clips, and folders.
The best part of it was once I'm done binding it, (it usually takes 24 hours for the glue to completely dry and for the cover to stick properly) the little one is waiting for her part in the book binding process. Her contribution in the book binding will be the illustrations in the cover.
We've been using the books we book bind since last year. I find it more inspiring to read and study the books that we both worked on. She is even more motivated to read the books during our study time. She loves looking and displaying her book covers. She would read a couple of pages first from the book that we printed, then out of the context she got from the stories, she would draw what she thinks and would expect to read in the book. Her cover illustrations make the book a lot more interesting to look at.
I may have gone a little overboard with printing out the books, I needed to put a stop with all the printing for a while. These books were downloaded from both the resources provided by our homeschooling provider and from websites that give free ebooks for download. They were printed for personal consumption only. I have a couple more ebooks I obtained but will only be printed once we have finished all the other books I printed out. My husband made me promise that. LOL.
