What reference books should I buy for my elementary school student?
Every house should have a dictionary. And I think that's the one thing that we can say you should have, for sure. If you have the internet, it's amazing. You can get rid of, you don't need a whole lot of books. You don't need encyclopedias. You don't necessarily need a lot of things because all of that informatoin is at your fingertips on the internet so that's of way to a kind save shelf space and save some money. I like families to have an atlas. I think looking at maps and being able to place things is really helpful for kids and atlases aren't terribly expensive so that's a great thing to have. I also think almanacs are great things to have. There's lots of little facts and pieces of information in an almanac so when you're child asks you: How big is the United States? or Where do bananas come from? These are the sort of things you can actually look up in an almanac and tell someone pretty quickly and I think it is really nice, although the internet is great, I think it is nice to be able to model for kids that we get information from. Most of the information that we get from books is a little bit richer than we get from the internet, not because the information on the internet isn't rich, but when you search something on the internet it will pinpoint you to exactly the thing that you want to know. And when you read a book you often have to kind of skim through the whole thing and sometimes then you get more infomration that you weren't even looking for but that is really helpful. And so that's one of the bummers about internet searches is that it pulls up the exact paragraph that you're looking for and you don't have to kind of broaden your horizons and see more.
