Encyclopedias? Or something similar?

[MissSJ]

Hi Everyone,
I am in school again for the first time in about 7 years. I have found it is VERY difficult to try to find good online sources for information. This has gotten me thinking about wanting my boys to know how to find accurate info online when they start using the internet and to understand not everything on the internet is factual.

To be honest, at this age I would like them to get information from books and not the internet. I've been wondering if we should invest in some type of encyclopedia or book set. Does anyone else use encyclopedias at home? Or does anyone do something similar that you would like to share?

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Just a short story about my school experience - in my cultural anthropology class we do not have a text book, one of the main resources our professor has us read is sites at wikibooks. When reading our assignments I have found that there are numerous spelling, grammar and questionable information and that is one of our MAIN resources for the class. I have since gotten two textbooks from the library to refer to but I still have to read on wikibooks. bah.

[Chicky2]

We have lots of reference books in our home. Some from when I was a kid, some bought at used book store, library sales, or garage sales. Some were gifts. We have an old set of encyclopedias (Funk and Wagnalls, even!), various Natl Geographic books, Readers Digest special books, etc....We also have tons of magazines. You can get whole sets of a particular one (like "Ranger Rick", "World", "Ask", various specific animal ones (like "Equis") on Ebay.

We don't look up alot of stuff on the internet. Really only if it's something they learned on brainpop and want to expand what they learned. My son was interested in sitars, so we looked that up.. My daughter wanted to look up info on her goat, so we went to a website we knew to be reliable. I'm with you that I want them to have the correct information and there is just so much garbage out there in cyberspace.

[moss]

We have the digital encyclopedia brittanica on the computer. It's okay for doing quick fact checks (it's really dry and to the point), but if there's a topic ds is interested in, we take out library books, books on tape, dvd's, software, etc.. on that topic.