I have instilled a love of reading in all three of our boys as I spent hours reading aloud to them, complete with different voices for each character, while homeschooling. There is nothing I enjoy more than seeing one of our boys excited about a book series and meeting an author.

Therefore, when our youngest son and I attended our local homeschool convention the first Friday and Saturday of  this month, one of the first booths we visited in the vendor hall was the booth of one of our youngest son’s favorite author, Chuck Black — author of “The Kingdom Series” and “The Knights of Arrethtrae Series”. Our son had already read the entire “Kingdom Series”, although he didn’t own all of the books.

He had taken the four books, two from each series, that he does own along to the conference with him to ask Mr. Black to sign them. Well, as a mom who loves to feed our sons’ love of reading, I love to buy them books. Therefore, we bought ALL of the books in both series that our son didn’t have, as well as the “Wars of the Realm” trilogy also written by Chuck Black (in other words, every book Chuck Black has written that our son didn’t have). I also purchased several other items related to the books, including the Arrethtrae Game.

It’s a lot of fun to take our son along to the homeschool conventions now that he’s old enough to take a real interest in what he likes to learn. I took him to hear one of the speakers talk about a history curriculum that she created; that I want our youngest son to do, and before she was finished speaking, he leaned over and whispered to me, “I can’t wait to study this stuff!”

We also went to a couple of talks by Mike Snavely of Mission Imperative. These talks captured and held our attention from start to finish. Mike is very personable and includes some humor and personal stories in his talks. We had visited his booth in the vendor hall and I had purchased five DVDs and a book about Dragons for our son. Then after hearing another of Mike’s talks, I returned to his booth and purchased his curriculum on Creation for our youngest, who LOVES Creation science.

We also saw a booth in the vendor hall that was selling a physical science curriculum that had some really cool projects for the student to build and supply a type of power to. Our youngest LOVES to build things — he’s obsessed with Legos, so we stopped to check out this stand. It turned out to be a great science curriculum that allows him to build some fun things and also, fill out paperwork and learn the scientific method. So, yes, we bought this too!

Now we can’t wait to start our new school year!