I am always looking for things to supplement my already full curriculum. It’s not that I need more things. . .it’s that I find that often my kids are so curious that they want to study something in depth. . .well, and then I need more things!
One resource that I’ve always used is Dover Publishing. My love affair with Dover started when I was trying to inspire my daughter to embrace the intricacies of Ancient history. Okay. . .really, I was just trying to inspire anything, having to do with anything in Ancient History. (Does that happen to you? You find something utterly fascinating and your child is less than enthused?)
Someone happened to give me a colonial paper doll book and voila! Not Ancient history, but definitely inspiration. So then we got the Ancient Egypt paper doll book and it has just continued from there. They also publish coloring books that are very intricate in detail and come with captions. So my son who is a big fan of turtles and tortoises and other things that live under the sea, got sea life coloring book complete with realistic detail and captions and again, we hit that magical inspiration.
So now I’m a big fan of Dover publishing and all of its books. Then I truly hit a gold mine and that’s what I’m writing about today: The Dover Free Sampler. To get your Dover Free Sampler, all you have to do is go to their website and click on the link at the top that says ‘free sample’.
Samples come every Wednesday. The samples include a few pages from several books. So far, we’ve gotten about 5 paper dolls (my girls are really, really into paper dolls), several pages of beautiful clip art to use in those lapbooks, poetry, recipes and reproducibles of famous paintings that my kids can color. . .along with the captions that explain about the artist. If you really, really love a book, they make purchasing it easy by providing a link at the top of the page.
All in all, this is a great ‘freebie’, especially for those who are lapbooking their way through their child’s education!