I recently had the pleasure of sitting down to chat about books as mirrors and windows with Sonya Shafer from Simply Charlotte Mason. We had a great time discussing how books can be used to help children learn to love themselves and others, and why a mixture of different books makes for a beautiful bookshelf. If you’re interested, I’ll be digging into this topic much further at the Charlotte Mason Together Retreat on July 22nd – 24th, 2021 in beautiful Stone Mountain, Georgia.

The transcripts and audio of our conversations can be found on the Simply Charlotte Mason website: Books as Mirrors (part 1) and Books as Windows (part 2). You can also listen on the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast or watch the videos below. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed sharing!

I wasn’t raised with any mirror books, or very few, so it wasn’t something that I was interested in. Or I didn’t know to be interested in, let’s put it like that. I didn’t know that was a way of explaining the world or meeting people through these books. So I started out our homeschooling adventure just following along with what everyone else was doing. I was reading the books to my children that I saw everyone else in the Charlotte Mason world reading, and they were great books. So there were no alarms going off in my head, because I was enjoying them...but through my daughter I learned to expand my narrow view of our schoolbooks.

Windows allow our children to say, “People like me are not the only people in the world. There are people in my town, in my state, in my country, and in other parts of the world who are also contributing members of God’s family, who are doing things differently, who live differently, who speak differently, and who have a different lens on the world.”

You can see several examples of some of the books that I’ve used in my home on the Heritage Mom Book Recommendations page, and you can catch up with us on Instagram @heritagemomblog and @simplycharlottemason.