Shelly is an avid reader who has been using Ambleside Online with her children for 10 years. When not homeschooling, Shelly raises chickens and guineas, travels as often as possible, and enjoys the tension of living between cultures.
As Shelly began her homeschooling journey, she cherished using the rich history, literature, and biographies from North American, British, and Western European authors. So many people had given their time and effort to weave together curricula and to freely share books!
Shelly was moved by Charlotte Mason’s quotation “To leave off or even to begin with the history of our own country is fatal. We can not live sanely unless we know that other peoples are as we are with a difference, that their history is as ours, with a difference, that they too have been represented by their poets and their artists, that they too have their literature and their national life.”
Yet, she found it more difficult to find living books about other peoples and cultures; books about the Philippines written by Filipinos, literature set in Kenya written by Kenyan authors, narratives of North American history shared by Haudenosaunee, Abenaki, or Lakota.
Since 2017, Shelly has worked with other like-minded readers to find these books and make them available to others. She is looking forward to sharing some things she has learned.