Classic Children's Books

Lucy has a couple of science books for kids that she particularly loves to read, because they present facts about science and nature in story form. One is called The Meadow People, by Clara Dillingham Pierson, and the other is The Story Book of Science, by Jean Henri Fabre. Both of these books were originally published about 100 years ago, and have recently been put back in print by a publisher named Yesterday's Classics. Not only are these fun to read, because of the story form, but they are also well written, they don't talk down to children, and they're not afraid to use big vocabulary words that most modern publishers would deem "too difficult." The high literary quality of these books make them perfect "living books" to use in a Charlotte Mason course of study. I bought the ones I have on Amazon.com, but the other day I discovered that The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project has many of them available online for free. There are many other great children's texts on this website as well! I've found that it's often just as cheap to just buy the book, rather than print them out (Lucy and I aren't big fans of reading on the computer). But I'm using this site to print out a chapter in order to decide whether we really want a book before we buy it.