In reference to may last post I read more of the recommendations for choosing books on Ambleside online. I am still learning but this is what I understand so far:
- Text should be literary to prepare for the classics later on
- Books should cultivate a delight for beautiful names
- Books should be selected with the goal to decreasing dependance on pictures and relying more on the imagination to envision pictures in the mind from the text
- Illustrations should have a"have a refining, elevating effect upon our coarser nature" and bring us into the world of beauty
- The pictures should develop a affinity for and an attraction to the beautiful, the lovely, the pure, the refining, because "education is concerned to teach him what pictures to delight in."
- Stories should have the noble, beautiful, inspiring kind of living ideas that CM espoused including "the great human relationships, relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and friend and neighbour, to 'cause' and country and kind, to the past and the present."
Taken from http://www.amblesideonline.org/00.shtml
This is certainly food for thought....... I think the idea is to nurture the ability of the child to create illustrations in his own mind based upon what he hears. For example James laughed today at the phrase "eyes as big as lollipops" - I wonder what he saw in his mind? I think having picture books around has given James a real interest in books - now it is time to stretch him a little and allow his mind some space to imagine...
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