Dictionaries and Thesauruses in the Montessori Homeschool

It is important to NOT just have one resource - one dictionary, one thesaurus, one atlas, one encyclopedia set. No ONE resource is complete - no one resource will meet the needs of every child (or even every need of ONE child). There are different types, different focus for each one, different style that will appeal to different ages and personalities.

So don't be afraid to have a few on hand - thrift stores and library sales are great places to hunt down such materials; and utilize the library for its resources (and visit a few different libraries!). Explore what each one has; if you find a particular resource that is used a LOT in your home or school, that would be the one to invest in ;)

Thus, what follows is a(n incomplete) sampling of what is in our home for our family's purposes and our co-op/tutoring purposes.


This is not a definitive list.

In fact, this isn't even all that we have here - it is simply the ones I could find still on the bookshelves and not buried in the stacks of books that my son reads through on a *daily* basis. ;) But these are all used at least several times a year, if not weekly. When we moved, we culled some books; and last year I culled a LOT of books that we just weren't using. So this is what we have :)

2 sets of Science Encyclopedias - one is OLD but still pretty good.
The other is newer (ok, it's from my childhood, but my childhood isn't old ;) )
The newer set even came with a project book. 

Found in the basement when we moved in. Interesting stuff.
Taber's Cyclopedica Medical Dictionary

These are atlases and maybe need their own post???
The Kingfisher People's Book of Oceans
ChildCraft's Whole Wide World

More atlases
My World - Globe
Activity Atlas
Picture Atlas
Reader's Digest Children's World Atlas
(these were all Goodwill finds)

Webster's New Explorer Dictionary of Word Origins

Huh. More atlases. I was looking for dictionaries and thesauruses!
Where in the World is Geo?
HarperCollins Concise World Atlas (we LOVE this one!)

Scholastic Student Thesaurus
Encyclopedia of the Animal World
(the project book from above)
American Heritage Student Thesaurus

Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary

 Go here for a picture of my then-3-year-old reading the above BIG red dictionary. 

Legoboy's First Dictionary
NO dictionary is "too old" for a child! 

My First Encyclopedia
(we also have "My First Dictionary" around here somewhere)

The Lincoln Writing Dictionary for Children