Public Domain books are books that are no longer protected by copy rights, trade marks, or patents, due to their age, and/or the length of time their author has died. So they must be 70 to 120 years old or older.
The reasons I choose to use Public Domain books-
1) They will not have any correlation or association with Common Core. There's many reasons I do not want my children aligned with Common Core. So first and foremost that is one thing we can be sure of with Public Domain books.
2) I love the common sense way they choose to teach children. Instead of work books, and arbitrary questions, or stories, these are questions and stories based on life skills, and real life situations for a child to be able to transfer their skills from the page into real life. They are also morally clean stories. They rarely if ever deal with morals or values that we would disagree with.
3) Lastly, they are free. This is really just a bonus. I would most likely use them even if they were not free. For the above two reasons. But, it's for sure a huge benefit to us that they are free. Or can be bought, printed/bounded for very inexpensively. This leaves us with more money to spend on manipulatives, and real life experiences, like museums, zoos, gardens, and so on. Our family likes to be able to give our children real life experiences to round out their education. And being able to provide most of our books for free, or very inexpensively, affords us to be able to pay for more of those experiences.
Where to find Public Domain books? Many places. Libraries often still carry them. They can also be found on Kindle Books, Google Books and Archive.org for completely free. However, be sure to browse the samples first if you decide to purchase any. Some include the original illustrations and others do not. I prefer ones that include them. DollarHomeschool.com also sells them on CDs. They have taken the time to clean them up and make sure they print correctly and so on. I however, have not found problems finding the majority on Archive.org for completely free. I also have bought our Ray's Arithmetic and McGuffey Readers from Mott's as they still print and publish them, as well as have a teacher/parent guide written by Ruth Beechick, who had a lot of experience with teaching age and developmentally appropriate subject matter to children. Her Parent/Teacher guides are not essential to use Ray's or McGuffey Readers, but I find them nice for new ideas. and also really like Ruth's explanations of what is appropriate at what ages to expect a child to know or learn.
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