I spent forty minutes in the Beautiful Feet Books booth at our convention last year. Everything about their books and curriculum called out to me. I love reading, its my absolute favorite thing ever, and every book in that stand beckoned to my book crazed heart. Beautiful words, engaging illustrations, they are precisely what comes to mind when I think of Charlotte’s urging to read “many worthy books.”

If you are planning out your Adventures year, you will find a list of recommended read alouds in the back of your MFW Adventures manual.  Several of the books listed there are part of various curriculums created by Beautiful Feet Books. You can read more about this delightful company here.

**Before I go any further let me state from the get go that the history portion of My Fathers World is complete as is. You do not need to spend another dime to “beef” anything up!** 

While planning Adventures, I kept returning to Beautiful Feet Books (BFB). My boys love reading and they are obsessed with American history. I knew they would be game for more and that it would not overwhelm them to add in a bit more. We do a lot of journal style notebooking in our home and I loved what I found in BFB’s Early American History Guide (EAH).  Short, meaningful lessons with great heart and ripe with curiosity seed.  I ended up purchasing the EAH guide and the Geography Guide for $3 each when Mardel had their clearance sale last summer. I managed to glean the rest of the books from the list via online thrift sales. I had already collected several BFB books from other studies and we had received a few other BFB books from other homeschool families. I laid everything out and came up with a little plan to weave these books in with our MFW study.

The first 1-11 weeks of Adventures had a BFB from the EAH guide directly corresponding with it, then there were many long breaks with only weeks 13, 20, 27, 28 and 30 fitting in with the EAH guide. We filled the odd weeks out with BFB from other studies.

We would finish MFW in the mornings and in the late afternoons the boys would come back to the classroom and we would read from our EAH along with the assigned book and then we would do the lesson. It would take around 20 minutes of time once the reading was completed. The boys looked forward to these lessons. They even remarked that it felt like a fun hobby, something extra that they enjoyed doing on the side.

During weeks 14-16 we read through books from a few of the other studies. The character study books were so much fun we ended up deciding to use the character guide this summer!

Weeks 21, 23, 26 and 34 correspond with the Geography study which I can not say enough good things about. If I had to pick one study to do, it would be this one. You can really do it at any point in the year but I chose to fit them in with their corresponding states. I can not believe how much my children learned from this study.  In “Minn of the Mississippi”  we engaged in biology, ecology, geology, hydrology, art, geography, language arts, math, dictation, narration, cartography and anthropology. When we studied “Tree in the Trail” we experienced history, cartography, geography, sociology, anthropology, botany, meteorology, arithmetic and biology. “Paddle to the Sea” and “Seabird” were phenomenal as well. Again, short lessons packed with such richness!

Most libraries carry the majority of BFB, especially the d’Aulaire books. Be sure to check with your local library to see if any of these books are carried!

Beautiful Feet Books has a special offers page which lists discounts for lowest price finds, military and missionary families.

Beautiful Feet also has free printable note booking sheets to correspond with the EAH that you can use too!

You can also take a closer look at any of the study guides by downloading sample pages here.

Lastly, here is the link to the pdf BFB reading list I created: MFW Adventures Beautiful Feet Book List