Support our Literature site by Shopping Online

This is a little off topic, but it has some benefits that extend beyond our little place on the web and you might find it useful.

As you know, Kids4Classics is a homeschool project that we started with our children in 2006. To keep the website up and running, there are is a nominal amount of maintenance work and cost involved. To help defray the costs of running the website, we have placed some advertising on the pages, mostly from Amazon.com. But now we have a new way you can support us, and it doesn't cost you anything!

If you have ever purchased anything online, or made airline or motel reservations or if you buy inkjet cartridges for your computer, you can help support our Kids4Classics literature site just by shopping online. Every time you shop online, start at the Shopperosity.com site and any purchase you make will earn us a rebate to help keep our site operating.

Here's the neat thing. With Shopperosity, you can select other charities to support too, including your local church or school or your other favorite cause. Shopperosity has partnered with over 400 online stores, including well-known brand stores like Walmart, Target, Sears and other major chains, plus lots of specialty shops. You can find almost anything you want in the Shopperosity network of stores.

The next post will be more on topic, but in the meantime, please give the Shopperosity site a look and help us raise money for our site each time you shop online.

Summer Reading

Summertime is a great time for getting outdoors and having fun in the sun. But summertimes also has plenty of downtime. When the weather is stormy, when you're tired out from too much fun, curling up with a good book is a great way to pass the time.

For Homeschoolers, summer is also a great time to read up on some classical literature that you might want to expose your children to during the next school year. The more leisurely pace of summer can make it a great time to actually enjoy your reading without feeling pressured by the demands of curriculum preparation.

While there is plenty of good new reading material out there, going back to the great classical literature is always rewarding. There are many titles that you may be familiar with but have never read. Check out a few chapters on our Kids4Classics website first before buying the book. That way you can determine if the book is going to be something you will enjoy before spending any money.

If you have children, summer is a great time to promote free-time reading aside from what is assigned for school. Too many kids associate reading with school and then think that they have "graduated" from reading after they finish school. By cultivating reading skills during the summer months, you will also instill reading as a lifetime activity. With our kids, we use an incentive program to help motivate them. (20 hours of reading = trip to DQ, 40 hours = trip to Breakers, etc.) Be creative and use incentives that your children help develop. That will certainly keep them motivated.

Have a fun summer and keep on reading!

New Titles Added

Okay, it has been exactly a month since the initial post to this blog, so I guess it is time to make an update.

New book titles and author biographies have been added to the Kids4Classics website. There are still several authors listed who do not have their biographical information or any books posted yet. As mentioned earlier, this is a huge project for anyone, much less a few young kids. But we are dedicated to continue adding authors and books on a regular basis.

In the last month we have added about a dozen new books and provided biographies for 5 new authors. The five most recently added books are:

1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

If you have any suggestions for books you would like to see added, please let us know by using our contact form page. We now have 40 books available to read online or to download in pdf format. Here is a full listing of free online books we now have available on our site.

We have also fixed a few problems with the web pages, most specifically where the individual chapters of each book were not properly showing the page title. Kind of minor stuff. But plese let us know if you find any other problems.

Till next time, happy reading.

Introducing Kids4Classics

My name is Tom and my wife and I homeschool our 6 children. Actually my wife does the homeschooling, but I help out sometimes with special projects.

One of the special projects that I helped out with this school year (2006) was to have the kids design and build a website. We decided we wanted to do something useful and something that would fit in with education, so we came up with Kids4Classics. As the name indicates, we are interested in studying the "classics" as part of our educational philosophy and our kids are all "for" it.

Kids4Classics.com currently focuses on making available classic literature to read online or to download. All the works offered are in the Public Domain, so there is nothing illegal going on.

In the future we may add classical art and classical music to our site, but the literature is a huge project in itself. We are still working at populating the site with authors and books. The site is still technically under construction as of this posting, but it is functional enough to let others take a peek at what we are up to. We hope to get some feedback so that we can make any necessary changes before we debut it to the world. ;)

More to come.