She asked for the M volume and when hubby gave it to her he asked what she was looking up and she said maps. She then found the Maps article all by herself. She can’t read the article yet, but the pictures are fascinating to her. I reminder her that she could also find maps of Mississippi and other places in it and now she is looking up those other places. I am so proud.
This is the encyclopedia my dad bought me when I was born and people told him it would be useless. I have read it from cover to cover, and now my daughter is having a go at it.
She is obviously a child of superior lineage, with great powers of discernment! You have every right to be proud.
I lo-o-o-o-o-o-oved reading my family’s 1958 World Book. My favorite volume was F – it had flowers, fish, and first aid.
I had always hoped my kid would become a browser, but the only encyclopedia we have in the house is the 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica, which ain’t exactly kid-friendly.
I completely devoured my family’s encyclopaedias as a very small kid. Now I’m an art historian and I can remember going through the section on “art” way back when I was 4 or 5 and the pictures that stuck with me from then-- George Bellows, Eakins, Winslow Homer–all this other old American painting I have nothing to do with now but is the earliest I remember seeing and burned into my mind for some reason. That World Book edition also had these incredibly cool transparencies in the anatomy section, where you would see all the systems stacked and then just look at the page with circulation on it and such. I loved the flag pages, too, and all the states and all that. Nice memories of just sitting on the floor looking at state flowers and such. I’m glad your kid is enjoying that before the world tells her it’s all about the internet, which is such an anemic experience, somehow.
We just got rid of our World Book encyclopedias from the 60’s because they were stained, torn and out of date, but I loved reading them. It was an endless source of amusement for my classmates that I was actually enough of a nerd to read the encyclopedia, but who else knows anything about albumin, huh? Answer me that!
Seriously, reading of anything is a great thing to encourage. Although your daughter doesn’t seem like she’ll need much encouragement!
She sees all of us reading, and we do buy her books and read to her. She loves to look at books. The latest ones she is studying are The Good Houskeeping Illustrated Guide to Pregnancy and Child Care, The Get Fuzzy Experience and The Three Pigs. We are teaching her to read and write but relying on her to set the pace. She is three, so there is no hurry and play is very important too. She does read many words, more everyday, and the occasional sentence. I was so pleased at her looking something up though. I do use those to look up things she asks about.
I won’t knock the internet though. Google maps, Google Earth, and shepardsoftware.com, and weatherunderground are doing a marvelous job of both teaching her geograpy and getting her excited about it. Still she loves paper maps that she can hold.
At home we had a Diccionario Ilustrado, with some black and white pictures and a few sheets of color pictures.
When my parents found out I’d learned to read (Spanish is very easy), they went “ohmyGod, then when she’s looking at the dictionary she isn’t just looking at the pictures!”
and then…
“ohmyGOD, when she grabs the newspaper she isn’t just looking at the pictures! And the ‘for adults for political reasons comics’! And…”
and a hustle and bustle of Putting Things Out Of Nava’s Reach ensued. But the double page picture of “Flags of The World” still features in my dreams occasionally
This is absolutely heart-wrenching! I have a three-year-old girl, and I pride myself on her cleverness and ingenuity, but she’s nowhere near knowing how to use an excyclopedia. Dammit she’s going to learn how to use one before the end of the year. I’d take her out of her calculus class to make time for encyclopedias, but she’s getting such good grades.
Seriously, lee, that is awesome. I remember reading my parents’ World Book set when I was a kid, just for fun, but I think I was around 9 or 10 years old before I started.
I was going to say that I know enough about albumen to know how to spell the word correctly, only to discover upon searching for a cite that albumin also exists! :o
However, I also read encyclopedias when I was a kid. My family had the 1962 Book of Knowledge, which was outwardly almost identical to the 1960 set depicted on the linked page. In contrast to most encyclopedias, this one’s articles were arranged randomly, as opposed to alphabetically. We also had two other Grolier series: Lands and Peoples (seven volumes of geographical and historical info), along with The Book of Popular Science.
When my paternal grandmother underwent one of her periodic cleaning binges, we later added my Aunt Sharon’s 1959 Golden Book Encyclopedia and a World War II-vintage Britannica Junior that my dad and Aunt Karen had used when they were schoolchildren. I also looked at World Book and similar children’s reference works at school. We didn’t have a formal program for gifted kids when I was in fifth and sixth grade, but my friend John and I were advanced enough that we were allowed to skip some basic lessons to do projects like using the encyclopedias to make charts on such topics as “The World Adopts Railroads” and “British Colonies of the Caribbean”.
My mother-in-law brought us her old 1976 World Book Encyclopedia set a few weeks ago (not exactly brand new, but better than the 50’s era Book of Knowledge that I had growing up). Our son is 8, and was a bit skeptical at first:
What’s it for?
You can look stuff up in it.
What stuff?
Any stuff.
.
.
.
How about …dust?
Thankfully, there were three full pages on dust. He’s hooked now.
