No matter how long you’ve been educating your children at home, there are 5 Types of Books (I think) EVERY Homeschooling Family Should Have in Their Home Library! As a homeschooling family of 10+ years, there are several books we’ve relied on since day 1 that I highly recommend you add to your teaching/learning arsenal too.
Is a home library even necessary?
Short answer, no. Long answer… Having a home library is super beneficial throughout your homeschooling journey. There are books that you may acquire through purchasing boxed curriculum, hitting up books sales, or even checking out from the library. However, building your own home learning library ensures you have what you need when you need it.
Having a home library also comes in handy when you’re homeschooling multiple children. We’re a family of 6, four of whom are at the “intentional” learning stage. This simply means they are at the age and developmental level of wanting to actually learn and enjoy it (for the most part). It also means they are at different stages of learning, so having book resources to help with that is a plus.
So what books do I recommend every homeschool library have? Keep reading to find out my top favorites and where I get them from.
5 Types of Books EVERY Homeschooling Family Should Have in Their Home Library
Dictionaries
I grew up with a variety of dictionaries because it was the one type of book my mom was adamant about us having on hand. Didn’t know how to spell something? Look it up. Didn’t know what a word meant? Look it up. Although we can hop online and use a virtual dictionary or even download an app, nothing beats having a paperback dictionary on the bookshelf.
We just so happen to have a dictionary for more than English and Language Arts. We also have:
- Illustrated Dictionary & Illustrated Thesaurus
- Illustrated Elementary Math Dictionary
- Illustrated Dictionary of Science
- Dictionary of Biology (also illustrated)
- Dictionary of Chemistry (illustrated, too)
- Dictionary of Physics (this one is illustrated too)
These all help with explaining and describing terms that (1) I never learned in school, (2) I don’t remember learning, and/or (3) I didn’t care to remember learning. LOL!
Encyclopedias
Another pack of books I grew up with were encyclopedias, so it was only natural to provide these for my children. If you can land some of the old ones, I’d say go for it. I honestly believe some of the newer ones have information left out intentionally and that’s not cool. In addition to the good old fashioned encyclopedias, we have the following in our home library stash:
- Science Encyclopedia
- Geography Encyclopedia (with a World Atlas)
- First Encyclopedia of the Human Body
These have been amazing assets when we’re doing anything human body, geography, and science-related.
Activity Books
I’m a huge advocate of hands-on, interactive learning. Before becoming a homeschooling mom, I was an early childhood (Preschool) teacher and 90% of our day consisted of using our hands. Play unleashes so much in a child, including being creative, innovative, and learning information in a fun way.
Some of our favorite home library activity books are:
- 1001 Bugs to Spot
- Wipe-Clean Books (for alphabet, numbers, sight words, etc.)
- Easy Origami
- Complete Book of Art Ideas
- Science in the Kitchen
- Color by Number
We have a lot more, but these are my children’s top favorites.
Chapter Books
As my first homeschooler got older, he started taking a liking to reading and wanted to read, read, and read some more. We started on chapter books like King Arthur that I’d read to him. Then, he wanted to start reading chapter book series. Finding some that were age-appropriate was always easy (thanks to the store we always purchase our books from, detailed below).
Over the years, we’ve started adding to our chapter book collection to cater to the various topics our different children enjoy reading about.
- Billie B Brown is an amazing series for little girls.
- Hey Jack is the perfect starter series for little boys.
- Impossible Quest is ideal for pre-teens and teens.
- Bear Grylls Adventures brings his adventurous TV show to book form for older readers.
- Extreme Adventures is another awesome series for teens.
Nonfiction Beginners
These types of books are usually topic-specific and go into just enough detail for children to understand. I like to use these books for unit studies because they have the perfect amount of information, colorful pictures, and can be read by the older children to the younger ones. We have TONS of these, but here are our favorites:
- Ants
- Cats
- How Flowers Grow
- Trains
- Caterpillars and Butterflies
- Farm Animals (I created a full curriculum based on this book!)
- Under the Sea
There are sooooo many more in this series, and I recommend every single one of them! They’re also good for older children to use for writing reports.
How to Start Your Home Library
Find a reliable source for educational books.
For me, that’s PaperPie (formerly known as Usborne Books & More). This company is what helped start my home education journey and they continue to be my go-to source for quality books. Back when I first signed up, I was a hardworking Consultant and even worked with schools and libraries.
Fast forward to today and I’m simply a Brand Partner for the discount. This means I can hook you up with these quality books (and your purchases will, of course, help my family) and/or help you become a Brand Partner, too, should you want a discount or earn money on the side.
Have a starting point.
What I mean by this is have an idea of what types of books you want to start filling your homeschool library with. Nonfiction? Dictionaries? Encyclopedias? Chapter books? Activity books?
You get to choose the types of books you want in your homeschool library. I always tell mamas to start with the types of books that will be used the most frequently and by all of your homeschoolers (whether it’s you teaching from them or your children being able to independently work and read from them).
Set a budget.
Purchasing anything homeschooling related can be fun… and if you’re like me, I can become quite a shopaholic. It’s hard to just buy 1 spiral notebook. I want to buy 5 of them, for each child, accompanied by new packs of pens, crayons, and a few other new books. 🙂
In this case, set a budget that would allow you to build slowly over time. A good budget that has worked for me in the past is to budget and shop by season. Each new season, we allot a couple of hundred dollars for new books. $200 can go a long way when purchasing from PaperPie because their prices are reasonable, the books are high quality, and they offer series discounts.
Just to give you an example… You can purchase the individual nonfiction subject books at $4.99 each or get the Animal Box Set of 10 books for $44.99. That’s basically like buying 9 books and getting 1 free.
Get started!
Now that we’ve done all this talking about having a homeschool library, the only thing left to do is get started! Check out PaperPie and start creating your home library today! You can make wish lists, get Customer specials when you purchase a certain amount of books, and/or host a (virtual) party to get free and discounted books.
Click here to shop with me!
Got questions?
If you want help putting together your homeschool library, I’m your girl!!! Drop a comment below, send me an email, or hit me up on Instagram or Facebook!