The Baldwin Project is a fantastic site that offers a whole wealth of free literature. The focus is on children’s literature - but the books are well worth reading by adults too! You will find history, descriptive science, biography, and a very large collection of fairy tales, mythology and fiction. Browse by genre, by author or by title. If you are following a Waldorf or Ambleside curriculum, you will find a list of books for years 1-6 that are available on the site. There are also a number of articles and lists that will assist you in selecting books for unit studies. This is a site that offers some books that cannot be found elsewhere - for example a good selection of H.E. Marshall’s histories that are not even at Project Gutenberg at the moment.

Books are displayed one chapter at a time, with the original front matter and illustrations included. Visitors can customize displays (font & font size, background colours, etc.) Some folks have had great success printing texts straight from the site, while others prefer to read them on-screen. I often like to follow along while we listen to audio provided by Librivox.

The Baldwin Project is named for James Baldwin, an American teacher and school administrator who later went on to publish a large number of school texts and books on history, folk tale and mythology. Among his better known offerings is Fifty Famous Stories Retold, which many home-schoolers use to introduce their children to history in the earlier years.

Site owner Lisa Ripperton also publishes hard copies of the texts available online. Her publishing house is Yesterday’s Classics. You will see her offerings at Amazon (in Canada and the US) as well as through Barnes & Noble. Those who wish may purchase books directly through the site. The volumes are both affordable, and attractive. If you prefer a print copy, especially of a larger book, it doesn’t hurt to support an endeavour that gives so much to the world free of charge!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

If you are using the Burgess Bird Book for Children (Canada | USA) you might want some follow-up activities to help your kids “digest” all the information they are hearing. Try out the free North American birds notebooking pages from NotebookingPages.com. Each set contains images to colour in, plus several page templates that allow kids to record information about the birds’ appearance, habitat and range, diet, young, and more.

If you like them there is a complete set on sale through HomeSchool eStore. The e-text is in PDF format and contains 684 pages, covering 97 North American birds. Most, but not all, the birds in the Burgess Book can be found in the file. You can print with regular or primary lines, depending on your children’s needs. Download once and print as many copies as you need for your family.

Samples can be found here, but do download the free pages and try them out. Cost of the full package is under $10, and you can save almost 25% if you buy the combined package (includes the nature notebooking pages.)

For an idea of what your kids could do with these pages take a look at Becky’s blog entry, “Jenny Wren Arrives” (this is the first chapter of the book, and it introduces the house wren - Troglodytes aedon.)

For my review of the Burgess Bird Book look here.