This week the news talk is all about protests against library closures. Some pompous individuals have been voicing their opinions that libraries are no longer needed as everything is on the internet now, and anyway books are so cheap people can just buy them.
I use the internet a lot, but if I do a search on a topic to find out information to help us with a project I mainly find two categories of sites. If I just put in the topic I get long academic style results, which are too detailed and written in language that is too complex for my children to use. If I enter the same search topic with "for kids" added, I get something bite-sized and superficial, which may do fine as an introduction but which doesn't offer more than that. (And Wikipedia, which is OK for certain quick fact finds but not good for everything.)Maybe its just me being inefficient at searching, but I don't seem to easily turn up material pitched correctly for our purpose.
As I'm currently reading " A Tale of Two Cities" to the boys I thought we'd do some history study on the French Revolution" at the same time. I also thought that I could use a little history study to start developing some new study skills with the boys, as history is a subject area they enjoy.
Of course, the first thing I need is a good supply of information that is accessible to their reading level. I could spend ages trawling the internet trying to find something, or I could just ask the librarian to order in everything in the county's junior non-fiction section on the French Revolution. The librarian finds 5 books. One is a Danger Zone book, which is a bit of fun, they read then we return. I'm left with four good, informative books. Plenty of text, but clearly explained.
Next step, I read to them the introductory sections and we talk about it. I make reference to the way Dickens illustrated some of this information in his novel. Dickens has painted some personalities for us, the boys can imagine the situation better, can imagine the nobility and the poor. It may not be 100% accurate, but it helps them get a feel for the period, which makes it easier to understand.
Next I ask them to write short paragraphs to describe each of the three estates, and another to summarise the nature of society in pre-revoluntionary France. I give them three of the 4 books to do this from. (The fourth book was the easiest one, which they read through the week before last as an overview and timeline). They need to look through the relevant bits of the three books to find where the information they need is best presented and take their notes from there. I could just tell them to look on page 6 of one particular book, but that wouldn't be the same thing at all. The point is to develop a basic level of research skills. So, I need more than one book.
If I didn't have the library I wouldn't be able to afford to buy more than one book on the topic, (even then it would be hard to know from just looking at Amazon which book would be most suitable) and as I said before my internet searches do not yield just what I'm after.
So, the library is invaluable to the way I home educate, and for so many more reasons than those I've used as examples above.