Chapter Study: Ideas?

Chari and I had an idea for this blog.  Actually, we have many, but here is one I wanted to bring up now that we are in ordinary time and getting into the swing of blogging regularly.

Liking the idea of book studies, but hesitant to jump into a full book discussion since those take quite a lot of commitment, we thought of the idea of a "Chapter Study".  For this we would take a chapter of a book, either public domain or one that we thought a lot of our readers might have on their book shelves, and just post on that chapter.


This is something we've done by ourselves several times.  Once we studied the high school chapter of Laura Berquist's book Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum.   Once we studied the first couple of chapters of Charlotte Mason's book Formation of Character.

Chari has even taken the idea and with another dear friend of hers, much to my jealousy : )  studied a chapter of Francis de Sales' great book Thy Will Be Done:  Letters to People in the World.  Not to be completely left out, I reread a few chapters of this book on my own. 

It works great!  Often we end up rabbit-trailing all over the place, but having a sort of "spine" for the discussion helps us to keep it from just being simple chattering or venting.    And probably Chari, who is an extrovert, knows that for me, an introvert, it is easier to talk and remember when there's some sort of continuous topic to keep all the ideas connected.

Here is a variation also suggested by what we do on our occasional visits.

The variation is one-time book study.    In other words, instead of going through a book chapter by chapter, sometimes we look at a book together (or, often, a curriculum resource) and talk about how we like it, what we get out of it, and how we think we could adapt it to our kids.

This is probably a glorified version of what many homeschoolers do when we visit other homeschoolers -- scan through their curriculum shelves and ask how they like X or Y resource, and sometimes borrow it for a week or a year! 

Maybe we can help each other through the February blues and gain some inspiration to take us through the rest of the homeschooling year!

My question right now is:

Do you have any ideas for chapters, books, resources, that you think would be fun/rewarding to study this way?  We'd love to hear any suggestions.

If you don't have any ideas, that's all right too.  I am sure Chari and I both have a whole list of things we'd love to discuss together and having a blog to share on just makes it better : ).