Usborne Books at Home - Usborne Activities

This is not an ordinary book club! I was looking for a book club to get good quality educational and reading books for my children, as well as for some sort of work I could do from home. Guess what? I found both!

I answered an ad pointing out that one could receive 36 children's books for £36 in January 2003, with no pressure to buy anything after that. I could not resist an offer like that, so I sent for more details, and discovered that I could buy those 36 books, and also get a 24% discount on any future orders.

The postage charge for orders of less than £75 is £4.95, but by putting in larger orders the postage charge drops to £2.95. So I thought I would get a few friends to look and order with me.

(I have since decided to do this further afield, which has paid off well)

The educational books are absolutely top notch, they are really good quality, well researched and full of features (such as illustrations, diagrams, pictures, internet linking) which encourages children (well, mine anyway) to pull them off the shelf and dig into them.

The reading books are of good quality and do not follow every fad like some children's publishers (a personal gripe I have!). My only criticism of some of the reading books is that the 'classic series has some dark titles like 'Frankenstein', and 'Victorian Horror Stories' which I would not want an 8 yr old child reading! But hey! no-one is forcing me to buy those titles, and this small negative is outweighed by the other excellent reading books on desert, polar, Everest and escape adventures, various horse and pony tales, Tales of King Arthur, Adventures of Ulysses, and a whole host of others.

They do an excellent series of language books, (on various languages from French to Hebrew) and the science and history books and encyclopedias are outstanding.

We are home educating and this is such a timely find: I could probably find an Usborne title for almost everything we want to do.

The only negative really is that it is not a standard book club, so there is the £2 surcharge for small orders. Also, there is absolutely no obligation to buy a certain number of books during the year, but if you want to stay a member in the New Year one has to put in an order of £100 or more during the preceding autumn - but this is not a difficult task with the Christmas season coming up and friends, colleagues and neighbours looking for presents to buy. That is it - the only disadvantage I have found.

Actually, there is one more disadvantage - you will probably find you need to buy an extra bookcase or 6!!