how do you choose which extra books to purchase?

[caedmyn]

Not curriculum, just reading/supplemental books for your home library. We already have a wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling bookshelf that's stuffed but I have a hard time not buying living science-y books, biographies, and history books just to have around to feed DD's voracious book appetite. I get them at garage sales and thrift stores so they're cheap. How do you decide what supplemental books to buy and what to just get from the library?

[BugsMama]

If it's something I remember loving from my childhood, I buy it.

If I can find a nice, illustrated hardback of a "classic" I buy it.

If it comes highly recommended from HERE I buy it.

 

If it's cheap enough of the thrift store, I buy it, and then pass it on to someone else if I don't want to keep it.

 

And I keep an amazon wishlist of children's books, and any time someone wants to know what my kids want for birthdays or Christmas, I direct them there.

[nykatie]

We buy mostly history titles; I pick up a lot at our co-op book sale and from library sales. I try to get great literature, Sonlight curriculum titles and random historical fiction that fills in a gap in our library. I use them for book reports to coordinate with our history studies. We have three rooms with walls full of history books for the kids! I don't bother with most elementary science titles because our library has tons and I feel like they learn more science from field trips than books. Hope that helps.

[Lily_Grace]

I decide based on what would benefit us most. I don't buy one-time reads or things we can easily get at the library. I buy ones that we can circle back to time after time as they get older and are able to get more out of them.