In my last post I recommended my favorite book. I have another book that I love. It’s called Tending to the Heart of Virture. This book recommends reading lots of fairy tales to children. There are several reasons for this. In fairy tales you call always tell who is good and who is not, and good always wins. Second, fairy tales feed the imagination. Third, fairy tales use symbolism, allegories, and metaphors.
We are living in a culture in which metaphor is discarded for these so-called facts. We train minds to detect these facts much as one breaks in a baseball glove. Meanwhile, the imagination is neglected and is left unguarded and untrained.
From Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian
So if you want your children to learn good, bad, true, false, right and wrong, read lots of fairy tales.
Here are some of my favorite fairy tale books:
Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
I read some where that this edition was more true to the original Dutch. I don’t know Dutch, so I can’t tell you if that is true. I can tell you that the language is beautiful and deep. I love the pictures, also. They are black and white drawings. (Word of warning: save the Red Shoes for an older, 12 or above, child!)
I bought some of the fairy tale books recommended in Tending to the Heart of Virture. Here they are:
I love this book so far. It has The Golden Key by George MacDonald, which is a really interesting read.
This is a fun book because it traces the story back to the oldest known version and tells a little of the history of the story. My copies don’t match the links because I went for the hardbound editions.
I also really like:
- The Blue Fairy Book
- The Green Fairy Book both, by Andrew Lang.
- Perrault’s Fairy Tales (I have a friend that is reading the original french version to her children. How cool is that!)
- The Brother’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Back of the North Wind
- The Princess and the Goblin both by George MacDonald
As you can see this is a subject that I could go on and on about, but I’ll save some of my thoughts for another day.
And in case you were wondering, I have in the large stack of books I’m going to read, this book:
But it may take my awhile because tomorrow I am doing this:
Click on the EXPO tab at the top, click on the schedule and scroll down. It’s all free and the information so far has been wonderful!
I loved hearing you tonight. It was helpful. I will be looking at your blog in the future. I have four children and more to come (God willing) and I have a similar homeschooling philosophy as you do : I found Charlotte Mason, then Waldorf and I am doing a mixture of things. I will find out more about Jefferson.
Thanks so much for your kind words. I really enjoyed talking about one of my favorite subjects. I wish I was a better blogger. I do have good intentions! But not enough follow through. I recommend having a large family. It is a lot of fun and a lot of joy.
I would like to ask you two questions if you don’t mind:
1. Do you have a written daily or weekly routine that you could share with me (including chores, bedtimes, individual time you spend with each of your children, meal preparation, etc…)?
2. How do you train your children to remember doing their chores? My 8 year old is perfect in this area, but my 5 year old and my 3 year old still need to be reminded to brush their teeth! I feel I should probably don’t need to wait until they turn 7 for them to remember on their own. How can I enforce chores without having to remind them? I tried chore cards, but I had to remind them to do their chore cards, so that was useless!
That is a good topic for a post. I will see what I can do to put one together for you
.