Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Sleeping Bear Press - A Teacher's Best Friend

Ticia over at Adventure's in Mommydom mentioned an alphabet book about Texas she picked up last week. She also mentioned there was an entire series of alphabet books, encompassing all 50 states. Needless to say, I popped over to my library's online catalogue to check it out.

Having some trouble locating the books by title, when I didn't know all of the titles, I plugged in the publisher's name - Sleeping Bear Press, and was very impressed with the list of books, that appeared. Not only were the states covered, though my library didn't have all of them, but there were also alphabet, and number books, covering quite a few other topics, from cowboys and princesses, to world geography and astronomy.

Of course, Sleeping Bear Press puts out more than alphabet books. They also have a number of very intriguing, historical fictions, and some titles, that seem to be just for fun, like Moose on the Loose by Kathy-jo Wargin. It wasn't long before I had reached the hold limit on my library account.

B is for Big Sky Country, A Montana Alphabet, by Sneed B. Collard III, arrived first. I previewed it last night, and read it to the children, this morning. It has a few short sentences about Montana, accompanying each letter of the alphabet, with more detail provided in a couple of paragraphs to the side of each page, making it appropriate for a wide age range of children. And, I found that in 26 letters, Collard captured the heart of Montana pretty well.

The very best part, and what I'm even more excited about, is that after a quick visit to the publisher's website, I discovered the free, printable, cross-curricular, teacher's guides that go along with many of their books, including all 50 of the state books in the alphabet series. Not only have they done my work for me, they've done it in an informative, imaginative, and entertaining fashion. So, a big thank you to Sleeping Bear Press from one Almost Unschooling Mom!

It's great to be a homeschooler.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I have their book about Tennessee (my home state)and Indiana (my husband's home state) - love them!

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

I saw these series in the bookstore and was very tempted with P is for Passport. I didn't know that they have one for each state and for other things - I will surely look it up when we do America.

Ticia said...

Yeah, I totally forgot to mention their teacher's guides when I posted about these last week. I LOVE this series, and if it was at all affordable I'd get the whole US series, but I know I don't have the budget for that, and my local library definitely doesn't have all of them....
I really need to look into what my hold limit is for books at the library. I usually make do with what I can get the night before I want to start the study....

Lisa @ Our Country Road said...

What a fantastic resource and cool book series! Thank you for sharing!!