I’ve been on the road for the better part of two weeks now. I spent this last weekend teaching Clandestine Carry Pistol. I got home early this morning, and spent all of my free time today with my wife and kids. So, for this week, From the Library is all I’ve got for you for Mountain Guerrilla Monday. I know I also have a lot of emails to get caught up on, and will try to take care of that this week, as I get a chance. Bear with me, please. Drill Subscribers: I’ve got a smoker of a pistol drill for you guys this week. I REALLY want feedback on how it goes for you as well, please. I’ve yet to manage to shoot it clean, and in time standards…(if you’re not a subscriber, check it out here. (I did get to spend some time last week working on the new book. Completely outlined, and I’ve got the intro and the first draft of the first couple of chapters done, so there’s that. More on that next week though.) For this week’s From the Library installment, I got a query from a reader. He mentioned that he knew I was homeschooling, and since I had mentioned a couple of reading choices for my kids, in passing, in other articles, if I’d consider doing a From the Library post about some of the stuff our kids read, since so much of what is currently marketed as children’s books is so biased. 1) To start with, while it doesn’t occur every single night, on most nights, my wife or I read to the kids before bed. This is just something we do, and we both agree it is critical. I will admit, my wife does it far more often than I do, mostly because she has chosen to read the entire Harry Potter series to them, and they have become huge Potter fans as a result. I’m well aware of some of the reservations people have against the Harry Potter universe generally, and author Rowling specifically, but we’ve been happy with the lessons the kids have verbalized receiving from the stories, so it works for us. 2) I have several old editions of the Robin Hood tales that I read to them from. Basically, any telling of Robin Hood that predates about 1940, tends to be really well done. Interestingly, from an historical and mythological perspective, Robin Hood and his Merry Men are considered, by some mythologists, to be derived from the same historical source material as the “Green Man.” (For those unfamiliar, this is the green faced, bearded dude, with his hair and beard made of leaves….if it still doesn’t ring a bell, Google it or something). That source material is the Saxon and Bretonic/Celtic resistance to the Norman invasion by William the Bastard in 1066, and subsequently. The Green Man is seen as a euhemerization of those resistance fighters who, like Robin Hood, in the myths, took to the forest to continue the resistance against the invaders….so….sort of the proto-guerrilla in a euhemerized form. Additionally, we have the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder collection, which is also on my list for reading to them. In fact, that reminds me, we might take a break from Robin Hood and go back to that for a while. I’ve also read excerpts from Beowulf and a couple of the Norwegian and Icelandic sagas as well. 3) The kids have basically learned to read, beyond individual words and sentences, by reading Dr. Seuss compilations, and some of the old “Little Golden Books.” I’m not particularly a fan of bowdlerization of classic tales for children’s benefit, but I also know—experientially—that introducing a child to a bowdlerized form of a tale can lead to their own pursuit of the original, source story (my personal introduction to Last of the Mohicans for example, was in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version. As soon as I had read it, and figured out what “Condensed Books” meant, I wanted to read the WHOLE novel. It’s still one of my favorite, perennial re-reads). 4) I also have copies of what I—and many others—consider classics in youth literature, such as My Side of the Mountain, The Education of Little Tree, and Hatchet, among others (see much of a trend there?). While it has become de riguer in some circles, both left and right, to belittle the importance of the classics, because “they’re only classic because someone else said they were,” this is untrue. I choose classics that I consider to have good messages that I want my kids to internalize, because they are moral messages that reinforce the morals we—my wife and I and our family and friends—share. As an avid outdoorsman, and someone who values Nature for Nature’s sake, one of those critical core values happens to be that we are part of Nature, and Nature is part of us. As such, I tend to lean towards classic literature that encourages a love and appreciation of the outdoors and nature. Someone who views Nature as nothing more than an exploitable resource will not probably share my view on what constitutes a literary classic, and that’s alright….ish… 5) Additionally, I have a collection of original Boy Scout and Girl Scout handbooks, ranging from an original 1911 English printing of the Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, and every Boy Scout Handbook produced by BSA from the beginning through the 1950s, including the Explorer Handbooks. The kids have full access to those, and I encourage them to read them. Currently, the oldest is reading Wildwood Wisdom, by Ellsworth Jaeger, as I’ve previously mentioned in an article or two, and I found an old copy of Tracks and Trailcraft by the same author, at a local used book store (mine was loaned out and lost years and years ago). I’ve yet to see a kid as excited about a book as our oldest two were when they realized they now had an entire book dedicated to little more than identifying animal tracks. We regularly find that they’ve taken off into the woodlot to go exploring, and if I walk out there to find them, I’ll find them poring over a set of tracks in the mud, and the book, trying to determine what type of animal made the track. 6) Because oldest child is on a harcore Bushcraft/Survival trend right now (she spends every available moment she can, in the woods, with a Mora on her belt, and a haversack full of survival gear on her shoulder, and when she couldn’t go outside this past weekend, my wife informs me that she insisted on watching The Hunger Games on two separate occasions because she is excited to learn survival and archery like Katniss Everdeen), I’ve found her a few books on survival and bushcraft, written for modern kids as well, that seem, thus far, to be good ones. These include: Easy Wood Carving for Children: Fun Whittling Projects for Adventurous Kids. Absent some sort of major issues, my rule is, my kids get their first pocket knife on their fifth birthday, and their first fixed blade knife on their seventh birthday, along with a compass, firestarting kit, and other gear. They get a hammock, a pack, and a shelter fly, etc, at 7 also. My oldest, within a couple weeks of getting her first fixed blade knife, had proceeded to start whittling “spears” and “traps” out of any twigs she found, and if she needed to use her Bahco folding saw to “find” those twigs, she would do so without reservations. I decided, it might make more sense to guide her whittling endeavors into something more rewarding to her. This books is simply written and well-illustrated with bright, well-done photographs and instructions/guidance. The Stick Book: Loads of Things You Can Make or Do with a Stick Some of the projects in this are just fucking dumb, even by seven and eight year old standards, but some of them are pretty cool, and it too is a hands-on project book, aimed at the youth reader. I liked it because, while I’m all about “free play” for the kids while they are in the woods or the yard around the farm, if they do “get bored,” (good fucking luck…), it can serve as a catalyst for ideas on new, simple projects. Survivor Kid: A Practical Guide to Wilderness Survival This one is great. It serves as a reminder for the kids of the skills Dad has already taught them, when they are out in the woods practicing them on their own (which basically happens daily around this place, just as it did when I was a kid, on my folks’ place). It is written by a veteran of S-A-R, and is written for a child audience (although, it DOES say ages 9 and up, my seven year old reads it, loves it, and understands it, so….of course, she’s also not a public school educated 7 year old, so that could be part of it…). In addition to Wildwood Wisdom, which seems to have been relegated to backseat of my truck reading material, and Tracks and Trailcraft, which she packs around in her haversack, this one has become the seven year old’s other haversack book. She told me a few weeks ago, “Dad, I’ve been reading Survivor Kid before bed at night, and its really helping me with the lessons you teach.” She also, apparently, reads it on the shitter, so…it’s a hit with my youth reader sample size of one, anyway. While I am sure there are good, non-technical books for kids out there, in the form of both novels, and general non-fiction, that are being written and published these days, I’ve found that, given my view of the world, and the future, these seem to be the two tracks that our homeschool reading follow, more often than not. For fiction, while we have a couple of modern ones we like—The Hunger Games and Harry Potter—for the most part, we stick with older, mythological stories. Readers of my book, Forging the Hero (that’s the only book title in this article that is an active link) will, of course, find this somewhat less than shocking. For non-fiction, in addition to “classic” technical (by “technical,” I am referring to “technique” manuals, or “how-to”) books, like Wildwood Wisdom and Tracks and Trailcraft, we mostly hand them other technical books, like the above (I’m sure we have some other fields of endeavor on the shelf also, but I really don’t recall what, off-hand, and with their current interest, the others are irrelevant to them at the moment anyway). In addition to this, any time we go into a used book store, I let them choose up to 5-10 books of their own, and in the new books stores, like Barnes and Noble, they generally get to choose one. Their personal choices run the gamut from dinosaurs and unicorns and trolls to horses and farm animals/equipment. Continue reading...
