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And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

—Shakespeare

Great homeschool teaching ideas, resources, and little lessons on books and libraries from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Add your name to our River Houses homeschool mailing list and get these posts delivered right to your mailbox every week! 😊

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Literary 800s

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-dewey-800 😊

Tuesday is our Homeschool Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your homescholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can “adopt” one major class each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.

The class for June is the 800s, which covers Literature. (The Dewey system is grouped into hundreds, so “the 800s” means the numbers running from 800 to 899.)

Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the Literary 800s:

  • CLASS 800 – LITERATURE
    • 800 – Literature, Rhetoric, & Criticism (General)
    • 810 – American Literature in English
    • 820 – English & Old English Literatures
    • 830 – German & Related Literatures
    • 840 – French & Related Literatures
    • 850 – Italian, Romanian, & Related Literatures
    • 860 – Spanish, Portuguese, & Galician Literatures
    • 870 – Latin & Italic Literatures
    • 880 – Classical & Modern Greek Literatures
    • 890 – Other Literatures

Each of these “tens” divisions is subdivided further of course. For example, in the 860s (Spanish Literature) you’ll find works on Spanish Drama (862), Spanish Essays (864), Spanish Speeches (865), Spanish Humor & Satire (867), and so on.

So this month if you’ve got a homeschool student in love with the monsters and heroes of Beowulf, the place to go is 829 (Anglo-Saxon Literature). A future Classical scholar? Head for 881 (Classical Greek Poetry). A future student of American Indian history? Try 897 (Literatures of North American Native Languages).

When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, Latin Literature, you’ll find it in the 870s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “820 … 840 … 860 … here it is, 870.”

Learning these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.

What delightful decimals have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 800s, one in the 810s, one in the 820s, one in the 830s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 800) and the very last book in the class (the highest 899). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your three favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this month-by-month over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb and how many skills they will develop without even realizing it. 📚

❡ Looking in the lexicon: The Dewey system attempts to encompass the whole of knowledge, so there’s a good chance it will introduce your students to subjects and terminology they haven’t encountered before. In the Literary 800s, for example, they may come across familiar language terms like “French” and “Spanish,” but what about “Anglo-Saxon,” “Occitan,” “Catalan,” “Corsican,” “Semitic,” and “Dravidian”? During or after your library visit, then, why not send your students to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) or to any dictionary sitting open in the library reference room and invite them to investigate some distinguished Dewey-inspired literary vocabulary. 📖

❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the first-Tuesday schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July). 🗓

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY Teaching Resources from the Library of Congress

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-lc-memorial-day 😊

Introduce your students to the music, art, history, and traditions of Memorial Day in the United States with some help from these teaching resources available at the Library of Congress:

What other holidays or anniversaries are you planning to mark in your homeschool this summer? 😊

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🗓 LIBRARY LESSONS: What Would a Perfect Calendar Look Like?

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-utopian-calendar 😊

We love calendars here at the River Houses, and we love books and libraries too, so what could be better than a proposal for a perfect calendar, courtesy of the Library of Congress?

People have been trying to “reform” the world’s many date-keeping systems ever since date-keeping began. Lunar calendars, solar calendars, Julian calendars, Gregorian calendars, local calendars, perpetual calendars, leap years, leap seconds, extra days — the quest seems endless.

Joseph Collins’ “Proposed Utopian Calendar,” 1939. (Image: Library of Congress.)

Here’s one person’s vision for a perfect calendar — Joseph Collins’ “Proposed Utopian Calendar” from 1939, now scanned and available from the Library of Congress, complete with notes for teachers (like you!) on how to use this primary source to get students thinking about calendars and history:

Collins was disturbed by the fact that the months didn’t all have the same number of days, and that the same date didn’t always fall on the same day of the week. So he devised a complex mathematical system to correct for these problems — and thanks to the Library’s educational programs you can read his proposal in his own words, explore his new calendar diagram, and use them to sharpen your students’ thinking skills. After your students have spent some time contemplating Collins’ calendar, challenge them to come up with one of their own. Can there ever be such a thing as a perfect calendar? If so, why don’t we use it? If not, why not?

What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone), and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🚂 LIBRARY LESSONS: Railroad History at the Library of Congress

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-railroad-history 😊

This month is the 150th anniversary of the completion of the North American Transcontinental Railroad — an event that had an enormous impact on the economic, geographical, and cultural development of the United States.

We wrote earlier about the driving of the famous golden spike that marked the railroad’s completion — an icon of American history that every student should recognize. To continue this railroad theme, here’s an outline of some great primary resources at the Library of Congress that you can invite your history-oriented homeschool students to explore:

Hundreds of original maps, documents, reports, newspapers, and images of American railroad history are all available there — material enough for countless homeschool history lessons.

“‘Joining of the Tracks, Promontory, Utah’ from ‘How we built the Union Pacific railway, and other railway papers and addresses’ (image 82), www.loc.gov/item/10035482“

Railroads were to the nineteenth century what computers have been to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: creators of wealth, drivers of social and economic opportunity, focal points of innovation, and networks for communication. Why not adopt them as an educational theme this month in your homeschool.

What treasures have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a quick review of the importance of railroads in American and world history, turn to pages 293 and 310 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). It’s just the background you need for a wonderful homeschool history lesson.

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🔍 STUDENT RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES: The Whitman Bicentennial

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-whitman-bicentennial 😊

Here’s something that would probably look really good on a college application.

We often write here about opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real academic research projects — it’s the idea behind our “Lunar Society” plan to encourage homeschoolers to develop their skills in science and scholarship. Here’s a brand new opportunity of this kind that might be a perfect fit for your home academy.

This month (the 31st actually) is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). There are all sorts of Whitman bicentennial activities going on around the country, and one of them is a new crowdsourced project from the Library of Congress that invites readers to transcribe many of the library’s Whitman-related documents:

This is the Library’s latest “By the People” project. (Here’s our earlier notice about these projects.) The Library has scanned hundreds of original manuscripts and documents by and about Whitman, and your task, should you choose to accept it, is to transcribe (type out) these documents on the Library’s research platform. Scanned manuscripts and hand-annotated typescripts can be read by humans, but unless there is a modern digital transcript they can’t be easily searched and analyzed by computer — and that kind of searching and analysis is essential to modern scholarship.

Proof copy of “O Captain! My Captain!” with manuscript corrections by Whitman. (Image: Library of Congress.)

People who contribute to this project (your students, for example) will gain experience working with primary source materials of historical importance; they’ll get a much richer appreciation for “real history” as opposed to the simplified and synthetic history that appears in textbooks; and they’ll learn how a large research project operates, while they themselves make contributions to it.

If you have a high-school aged homeschooler with a liking for history or literature, and with good language skills and a strong attention to detail — very important for a project like this — take a look at “Whitman at 200” and sign up to participate if it strikes your interest. This is just the sort of work that might favorably impress a college admissions committee somewhere down the line.

What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Whether they work together or apart: The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects that your family can join. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 🌻 ⚗️ ✒️ 📖 🌲 😊

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Artistic 700s

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-dewey-700 😊

Tuesday is our Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your homescholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can “adopt” one major class each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.

The class for May is the 700s, which covers Arts & Recreation. (The Dewey system is grouped into hundreds, so “the 700s” means the numbers running from 700 to 799.)

Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the Artistic 700s:

  • CLASS 700 – ARTS & RECREATION
    • 700 – Arts (General)
    • 710 – Area Planning & Landscape Architecture
    • 720 – Architecture
    • 730 – Sculpture, Ceramics, & Metalwork
    • 740 – Graphic Arts & Decorative Arts
    • 750 – Painting
    • 760 – Printmaking & Prints
    • 770 – Photography, Computer Art, Film, Video
    • 780 – Music
    • 790 – Sports, Games, & Entertainment

Each of these “tens” divisions is subdivided further of course. For example, in the 750s (Painting) you’ll find works on Techniques (751), Color (752), Symbolism (753), History of Painting (759), and so on.

So if you’ve got a future architect in your homeschool, the 720s are the place to go this month. A future photographer? Head for the 770s. A future musician? Try the 780s. A future high-stakes gambler? Go and explore 795 (or maybe not). 🎲😊🎲

When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, sculpture, you’ll find it in the 730s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “710 … 720 … 725 … here it is, 730.”

Learning these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.

What delightful decimals have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 700s, one in the 710s, one in the 720s, one in the 730s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 700) and the very last book in the class (the highest 799). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your three favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this month-by-month over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb and how many skills they will develop without even realizing it. 📚

❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the first-Tuesday schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July). 🗓

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

📚 TUESDAY TEA: A Free Library of Classic Children’s Books

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-childrens-books 😊

Tuesday is our Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses when we write about book-related resources you can browse, save, and share with your students. Here’s a real treat: a new digital collection of classic children’s books, all online and free to read, from the Library of Congress:

“In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Children’s Book Week (April 29 to May 5),” the Library reports, they have released this “unique online collection of 67 historically significant children’s books published more than 100 years ago. Drawn from the Library’s collection, Children’s Book Selections are digital versions both of classic works still read by children today and of lesser-known treasures.”

“William Wallace Denslow’s Humpty Dumpty is now one of the classic works of children’s literature from the Library of Congress online collections.”

There should be something for everyone in this wide-ranging collection:

“From Humpty Dumpty to Little Red Riding Hood, the books in this collection were published in the United States and England before 1924, are no longer under copyright, and are free to read and share. Highlights of the collection include examples of the work of American illustrators such as W.W. Denslow, Peter Newell and Howard Pyle, as well as works by renowned English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway….

“The selections span many generations and topics, and reflect three central themes: Learning to Read: Materials produced to teach American children to read: ABC books, primers and a wooden hornbook. Reading to Learn: Materials that support classroom instruction in subjects such as mathematics, classical mythology, natural science and the structure and function of the Unites States government. Reading for Fun: Materials to nourish the imagination: fiction, poetry, fairy tales and toy books.“ (Library of Congress)

Why not browse this wonderful new (old) collection on a tablet, laptop, or large screen, and see if you can find some new (old) titles for your next homeschool read-aloud hour.

What treasures have you discovered in your library this week? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you visited all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries) will help you locate all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself (worldcat.org) will help you find the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone), and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great teaching ideas and learning resources like these sent right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🎭 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL! (Shakespeare, That Is)

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-shakespeare 😊

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday! 🎉 Well, more or less.† And that’s good enough for us!

† The thing is, we don’t really know the exact date of Shakespeare’s birth. We do know that he was baptized on the 26th of April in 1564, and so was probably born just a few days earlier. The 23rd has become the customary date of celebration, and who are we to argue with that happy tradition? 😊

We love books and libraries and literature in the River Houses, and if you’re planning to study Shakespeare in your home academy — today, tomorrow, or any day in the future — you should definitely bookmark and explore the free teaching materials available online from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., one of the world’s leading centers for Shakespeare research:

The Folger is located on Capitol Hill, right next to the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court — a place of high honor indeed — and you can visit and tour the library the next time you make a homeschool trip to the nation’s capital.

At the Folger’s website you’ll find the full texts of all the plays and sonnets, lesson plans for many of them (with more on the way), and helpful summaries of each plot (Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and more).

Here’s a properly reverential reading from Macbeth that you can use to inspire your students this week — I didn’t learn this soliloquy until I was in high school, so this kid’s definitely got the jump on me:

➔

And if any of your students are aiming for a scholarly career, it’s never too early to start exposing them to an occasional reading from Shakespeare in the original language:

➔

What literary treasures have you laughed over in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: Your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) has a beautifully illustrated overview of the Elizabethan period, within which Shakespeare lived and worked, on pages 260–261. It’s just the background you need to do a wonderful homeschool history-and-literature lesson.

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you visited all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries) will help you locate all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself (worldcat.org) will help you find the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone), and give them a browse. 😊

📚 TUESDAY TEA: Wonderful Libraries on Google Earth

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(Sign up for our free River Houses Newsletter! Get great homeschool teaching ideas in your mailbox each week: riverhouses.org/newsletter.) 😊

You may not think of the geography website Google Earth as a place for you and your students to learn about libraries, but this week Google Earth has a special tour available of some of the world’s most wonderful libraries — you won’t want to miss it.

You’ll want to be at a large screen to explore these many wonderful book places: the Library of Saint Gall in Switzerland and of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Spain, the State Library of New South Wales in Australia, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, our own Library of Congress, and more. (Is it wrong that I want to live in all of them?) 😊

Some of the views shown are exterior, some are interior, some are 2D and some are interactive 3D, and all will introduce your students to wonderful places of learning around the world — places they might even visit someday.

What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: Have you visited all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries) will help you locate all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself (worldcat.org) will help you find the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone), and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

📚 LIBRARY TUESDAY: A Lesson Plan on Thomas Jefferson’s Library

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-jefferson-library 😊

Tuesday is Books & Libraries Day here at the River Houses, and since this Saturday (13 April) is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, why not spend some time with your students this week on a ready-made lesson plan from the Library of Congress that asks you to evaluate the case for purchasing Thomas Jefferson’s personal library as a resource for the nation:

In the lesson, which uses original sources, students are asked to “examine a letter written by Thomas Jefferson and identify techniques he used to persuade Congress to purchase his personal library. Students consider a selection of Jefferson’s books and then write their own persuasive letters urging the books’ purchase, while considering the question: ‘Why would Congress need this book to shape or govern the nation?’”

The lesson is recommended for grades 6–12, and it includes all the background material needed. I have a feeling it’s just the kind of project that some clever homeschoolers could dive right into. 😊

Jefferson did succeed in persuading Congress to purchase his library, and his books became the core collection of the Library of Congress, our national library. Every American should know the story:

“On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved an appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of “such books as may be necessary for the use of [C]ongress.”

“The first books purchased were ordered from London and arrived in 1801. The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library’s first home. At the time, it was not yet much of a building — only its north wing had been completed.

“From 1802 to 1805, the small collection was located in a room previously occupied by the House of Representatives. It was later moved to various places in the Capitol until August 24, 1814, when the British burned and destroyed the Capitol, including the Library.

“To replace the loss, Thomas Jefferson in 1815 sold his personal library of 6,487 volumes — which was then unrivaled in America — to Congress. Sadly, a second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851 destroyed two-thirds of those volumes. But the Jefferson books nonetheless remain the core from which the Library’s present collections grew.“ (Library of Congress Blog)

What treasures have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: Have you visited all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries) will help you locate all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself (worldcat.org) will help you find the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Technological 600s

by

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-dewey-600 😊

Tuesday is our Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your homescholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can “adopt” one major class each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.

The class for April is the 600s, which covers Technology. (The Dewey system is grouped into hundreds, so “the 600s” means the numbers running from 600 to 699.)

Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the 600s:

  • CLASS 600 – TECHNOLOGY
    • 600 – Technology (General)
    • 610 – Medicine & Health
    • 620 – Engineering
    • 630 – Agriculture
    • 640 – Home & Family Management
    • 650 – Management & Public Relations
    • 660 – Chemical Engineering
    • 670 – Manufacturing
    • 680 – Manufacture for Specific Purposes
    • 690 – Construction of Buildings

Each of these divisions is subdivided further of course: in the 630s (Agriculture), for example, you’ll find works on Field Crops (633), Orchards & Forestry (634), Horticulture (635), Animal Husbandry (636), and so on.

If you’ve got a future farmer in your homeschool, then, the 630s is the place to go. A future civil engineer? Head for 624. A future blacksmith? Try 682. A future HVAC technician? Explore 697. (You may want to skip over 662, however, unless your child is really determined to study the manufacture of explosives.) 😮

When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, astronomy, you’ll find it in the 520s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “505 … 510 … 515 … here it is, 520.”

Learning these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.

What delightful decimals have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 600s, one in the 610s, one in the 620s, one in the 630s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 600) and the very last book in the class (the highest 699). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your three favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb and how many skills they will develop without even realizing it. 📚

❡ Looking in the lexicon: The Dewey system attempts to encompass the whole of knowledge, so there’s a good chance it will introduce your students to subjects and terminology they haven’t encountered before. In the 600s, for example, they may come across hydraulics, horticulture, metallurgy, and more (to name just a few). During or after your library visit, then, why not send your students to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) or to any dictionary sitting open in the library reference room and invite them to learn some new Dewey-inspired vocabulary! 📖

❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July).

❡ Explore more: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

📜 LIBRARY LESSONS: A Free Course on the Book of Kells

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Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and what better opportunity could present itself on such a day than a free course on one of the most famous books in the world, the Book of Kells.

Illuminated page from the Book of Kells. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Book of Kells is a medieval Irish manuscript of the New Testament Gospels, created around the year 800 and kept for centuries in the Abbey of Kells, north of Dublin. Now housed and exhibited at the Trinity College Library, it is one of the great artistic treasures of the European middle ages.

For the next few weeks, Trinity College is offering a free online course on the Book of Kells, and I know there are some talented homeschool history and art students out there who would be delighted by this opportunity. (And maybe some moms and dads, too.) You can read more about the course here:

And here’s a short video introduction to the course:

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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the entire Book of Kells has been digitized at high resolution and made available online by the Trinity College Library. Why not spend some time with your students this week at a large screen and explore its intricate designs:

Fantastical beasts, pious saints, glowing letters, woven knots, and so much more.

What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a quick review of medieval European history, turn to page 188 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). It’s just the background you need for a wonderful homeschool history lesson.

❡ Explore more: Have you visited all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you locate all the libraries near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you find the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚