Managing Mondays: Beautiful Feet Books Review

When I was in school, one of my favorite things was when we would get to watch a historical movie. Movies and miniseries, like Blue and the Grey and Becket still rank among my favorites of all time. I loved historical fiction such as Killer Angels, and A Farewell to Arms, but when it came to actual history I would tune out. I hated all the momorization, I just couldn’t keep it all straight. I realize now as an adult that my problem wasn’t an inability to memorize fact but rather that the facts had no context. There was no meaning behind the places, people, and dates.

When we decided to homeschool I desperately wanted a history curriculum that told history more as the great story it was. I found that curriculum in Beautiful Feet Books. Each Study Guide gives projects, and assignments around living books. Real literature and stories that take place during the times and places that are being studied. When a people, such as Lewis and Clark are studied, children associate more than just places and dates to the names, but come to appreciate what they accomplished in spite of the hardships they endured. Ancient Egypt comes alive by reading fictional stories that highlight the daily lives of that civilization. And most of all, history is studied more as a flowing stream instead of a list of disjointed and unrelated events.

Beautiful Feet Books Study Guides are also fairly inexpensive and the majority of the books they use can be found in the public library. They do offer discounted bundles of all the materials needed if you want to go that route. Based on the Charlotte Mason Method of notebooking, the curriculum provides a flexible fairly inexpensive quality history education.