Erich Kaestner wrote wonderfully funny and witty, heartwarming stories about kids who find themselves confronted with adult sized problems and solve them with courage and dignity. Kaestner was a man who had not forgotten what it is like to be a child and who took children seriously. Have you ever read C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Children? Kaestner writes in a similar voice, unpatronizing and honest, speaking to children as equals. Most of Kaestner's books take place in Berlin in

Here is what you can do with the books and souvenirs: Unit Study: Lewis and Clark, Pompey’s Pillar You can find the link to the State Park i

Our family owns many picture books but there are some all our eight kids wanted to read over and over again. Strangely all of us, including Mama, agree on which are our favorites. Honestly, I never got tired of reading these to my kids. There must be some magic about them. To my surprise, I just now notice that the books are from five very different cultures. It just so happened. I was not trying for ‘diversity’ which is my pet peeve. We just seem to love legends and folk t

After criticizing FairyTails and other bad graphic novels in a recent post, I have now dug up some good quality books for you - as promised. I will keep looking for more. My favorite first: The Shadow of His Wings: A Graphic Biography by Max Temesou. I was elated to find a graphic novel version of one of our family’s favorite autobiographies. Father Gereon Goldman was a Franciscan seminarian in Germany, when the Nazis drafted him and his fellow students into the SS. His adve

C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the two series I would take with me to a desert island. So would my husband and all of my kids. The two authors, who were friends, have succeeded in writing fantasy books that recreate the story of God’s creation in their own fantasy worlds, Narnia and Middle Earth. These subcreations, as Tolkien calls them, are every bit as beautiful and terrifying as our own world and as complex.